Future Cities

Architecture and the Imagination

Paul Dobraszczyk

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789141047
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today's cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come.Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged— Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai's recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.

REFERENCES

Introduction: Real and Imagined Future Cities

1 For the Beijing image, see Dina Spector, ‘ Blade Runner or Beijing’, Business Insider, 23 January 2013, www.businessinsider.com.

2 See Stephen Graham, ‘Vertical Noir: Histories of the Future in Urban Science Fiction’, CITY, XX/3 (2016), p. 394.

3 See Brian Merchant, ‘Dubai’s First Sci-fi Film is a Reminder that Dubai Itself is Not Actually Science Fiction’, Vice, 30 April 2013, https://motherboard.vice.com.

4 See Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (Edinburgh, 1998).

5 Quoted in Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 126.

6 See Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Gaudin (Putnam, CT, 2005).

7 See David L. Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Ithaca, NY, 2007), p. 36.

8 James Donald, ‘This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City’, in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (London, 1997), p. 184.

9 See Blair Kamin, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright Influenced the Burj Khalifa? Here’s What the Tower’s Designers Say: That’s a Tall Tale’, Chicago Tribune, 14 January 2010, http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com.

10 See Witold Rybczynski, ‘Dubai Debt: What the Burj Khalifa – the Tallest Building in the World – Owes to Frank Lloyd Wright’, Slate, 13 January 2010, www.slate.com.

11 The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first coined by Paul Crutzen in his 2000 article in the Global Change Newsletter, 41 (May 2000), p. 17. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have provided a longer historical context for the emergence of this awareness in The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London, 2017).

12 See Bruno Latour, ‘Agency in the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, XLV/1 (2014), p. 1.

13 World Health Organization, ‘Global Health Observatory (GHO): Urban Population Growth’, 2014, www.who.int, accessed 20 August 2018.

14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Enquiry, 35 (2009), pp. 197–223.

15 Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys, ‘Climate Change and the Imagination’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, II/4 (2011), pp. 516–34.

16 Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown, CT, 2016).

17 Graham, ‘Vertical Noir’, p. 388.

18 Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, College English (1972), pp. 372–82.

19 Graham, ‘Vertical Noir’, p. 395.

20 See, for example, Etienne Turpin, ed., Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013).

21 See Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London, 2011), p. 18.

22 Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, 21 (2003), p. 73.

23 Donald, ‘This, Here, Now’, p. 185.

24 See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton [1989] (London and New Brunswick, NJ, 2000).

1 Drowned: Postcards from the Future

1 Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (London, 2017).

2 See the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers (2014), www.ipcc.ch, accessed 20 August 2018.

3 See Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (2006), http://mudancasclimaticas.cptec.inpe.br/~rmclima/pdfs.

4 Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys, ‘Climate Change and the Imagination’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, II/4 (2011), pp. 516–34.

5 See Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inactivity and Opportunity (Cambridge, 2009); and Amanda Machin, Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (London and New York, 2013).

6 Harriet Bulkeley, Cities and Climate Change (London and New York, 2013), p. 143.

7 See Mark Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (London and New York, 2011).

8 On the variety of ancient mythic floods, see John Withington, Flood: Nature and Culture (London, 2013), pp. 9–32.

9 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

10 The sunken cities off the coast of Alexandria were the subject of the exhibition Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds, held at the British Museum, London, 19 May–27 November 2016.

11 See Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities (London, 2015), pp. 198–205, on sunken cities in history.

12 Hannah Osborne, ‘Sunken City of Igarata Begins to Emerge as Brazil’s Drought Sees Water Levels Plummet’, International Business Times, 6 February 2015, www.ibtimes.co.uk.

13 On the evolution and proliferation of climate change fiction, see Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville, VA, 2015). I am grateful to Adam for directing me to a wealth of city-based climate change novels.

14 Ibid., pp. 83–4. See also Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in...