I had a lousy experience in a futuristic city – Milton
Keynes to be exact – though legally it’s an “area” and not a city. The houses
were built on high embankments, so you couldn’t see the homes from your car,
and because they were all identical, we soon got lost. Luckily, we found a
public kiosk with a large map of the community, but still we couldn’t locate
Woughton Town Hall, which was to be our destination. As for the kiosk, it was
in a massive plaza, devoid of any use, and the kind of plaza that symbolizes
British modernism. Just when we were about to give up, a voice behind us said
“it’s pronounced woof-ton.” It was hilarious to me, because one minute this
huge expanse of gray concrete paving was lifeless, and all of a sudden there’s
a typical English kid on an old BMX. It was almost like a Dr. Who episode, where you find yourself on a strange planet, and out
of nowhere you see a stereotypical Englishman whose presence isn’t quite
explained. All the better in the end, because Milton Keynes belongs in a
science fiction movie.
“Milton Keynes is a planned community,” my father explained,
“a big thing for left-wing governments.” But this was the UK, and back home in
the USA, our planned communities – Levittown, Foster City, and Florida’s gated
communities – were the brainchild of right-wing tycoons. New York’s planned
communities – NYCHA and the Mitchell-Lama program – were either well meaning
socialism or a devious way to Gerrymander the votes of the poor. Regardless,
most planned communities are, in my biased opinion, likely to generate bored
kids, reminiscent of the Mouse Utopia experiment.
We’ve seen futuristic cities in The Jetsons, Star Trek, and
Futurama, and they all have mile-high apartment buildings and flying cars. The
author Carl Abbott finds them in all of the old Popular Mechanics magazines, and I wonder what keeps the flying
cars from crashing into windows. He points out that in old sci-fi films, new
modern buildings are often used to portray the futuristic city. Alphaville used La Defense in Paris as
the set for the future, and Total Recall
used Mexico City (he doesn’t mention
that Century City in LA was used for Conquest
of the Planet of the Apes, or that Thamesmead in London was used for A Clockwork Orange.) They all look boxy,
geometric, and a bit lonely. He also points out how the old parts of London,
Paris, and New York look great with a few additions. He credits the skyline as
a distinctly American invention, yet he leaves out the reason why; the USA had
lots of tycoons – Ford, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Chryster, Morgan, and Astor –
with plenty of money to finance the building of skyscrapers. Britain and Europe
did not.
Abbott devotes a chapter to the cities in space, like
Babylon Five, Deep Space Nine, and Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet, and points out
that few of them take work, living, air, and pressure into account. I recall an
old science fiction story called Goodbye
to the Moon, where a boy from the Moon Colony says “look how much water
there is on Earth, and they charge us for every drop!” I don’t mean to spoil a
fan’s experience, but I’m sure some people have said that if Deep Space Nine
developed a bean-size hole, everyone would die from the pressure drop. Then you
wonder what would happen if there were a carbon monoxide leak. As for a fire
from an oxygen generator, well we all know what happened on Space Station Mir!
Abbott pretty much covers every possible fantasy city every
invented by a science fiction writer. We have the model city, the city in
space, the mobile city, the walled utopia (he calls it the Carceral City) and
the decaying suburb that’s a no-go zone (B13,
Escape From New York, and 1990: The Bronx Warriors.) They provide
gritty material to countless filmmakers, and plenty of settings for Italian schlockmeisters
to make cheeseball epics. I can recall a whole genre of apocalyptic movies, set
in the Bronx, by Italian directors who used no-talent actors. While few
American cared to watch (we already had Escape
From New York) there were plenty of Arabs, Europeans, and South Americans
who would gladly watch a low-budget (what I like to call) ‘spaghetti
apocalypse.’ The third-world’s middle
class – if they had the money for a VCR – must’ve enjoyed watching an Italian
beefcake try to outrun a colorful, chain-waving gang, on his noisy motorbike.
Carl Abbott doesn’t completely trash the futuristic city, as
we can see with his praise of Montreal’s Place Ville Marie. He seems to enjoy
the idea of Montreal’s underground shopping malls, which are great in the nasty
Canadian winters. One of the main issues of his book is that if the futuristic
cities are inhabited by choice, then there’s a chance they could be settled by
force. In the chapter “Spunky Kids,” he collects all the “carceral city”
stories, where headstrong teens try to escape and see what’s out there. Most of
these tales are teen-oriented, like The Hunger Games, The Giver, and
Homecoming. But in some ways, I find New York City to be a bit of a carceral community
with absolutely no spunky kids; here in New York, the kids rarely feel any
incentive to venture out of the city, and they don’t even seem interested in
exploring outside of their own neighborhood.
Carl Abbott has written a book about planned cities, and how
they relate to the fantasies of science fiction. He discusses the question of
whether the modern city could be the norm in the future, both in the benefits
and the fallacies. Will New York City be made of glass? Will the whole world be
a tower block? Will neighborhoods be underground? It’s al discussed in this
book, and there’s always an architect with a dream, be it glorious to him or a
nightmare to potential residents.
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