By M.C. Childs
In this week’s blog post, M.C. Childs discusses some of the reasoning behind the article “Seeds of Cities: Science Fiction Novums” in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]
As an architect, urban designer and writer, I have long been fascinated by the interactions between built and literary cities—between New York and Gotham, between London and Dickens’s, or China Mieville’s, London. The practices of science fiction and foresight, and particularly their overlap, provide helpful ways to understand, and possibly to shape and improve, the conversations between literary and built places. Because humans have built and imagined many types of settlements, the word ‘city’ is difficult to define with precision, but to avoid a long and thorny discussion, here I will use the term ‘city’ loosely to cover all assemblages of inhabited buildings from hamlet to megalopolis.
As I wrote “Seeds of Cities,” I reread many of the SF books of my childhood, including Arthur C. Clark’s 1956 The City and the Stars. (I highly recommend rereading your childhood books.) One thing that struck me was the conceptual insularity of many of the cities in these mid to late 20th century works. They are city-states without much need of lands to feed or supply them. They do not acknowledge Kim Stanley Robinson’s observation that cities rely on, support, and are intertwined with vast landscapes. Clark’s twin settlements—the City of Diaspar and the oasis of Lys—serve as a didactic pair of scenarios regarding the use of technology, but both remain insular. They are sealed realms that the hero seeks to escape. Fictional autonomous cities have appeared often since The City and the Stars.
Our species has engaged in at least 10,000 years of exercises in composing cities. Our built cities have been less like independent spaceships and more akin to bundles of neurons with agricultural, economic, political, cultural, military, and narrative dendrites spreading across the planet. The degree and form of city autonomy has varied across eras and places, but even the classic city-states were thoroughly embedded in larger landscapes. So, what drives the trope of the autonomous city?
The practices of science fiction and foresight, and particularly their overlap, provide helpful ways to understand, and possibly to shape and improve, the conversations between literary and built places.
How to compose good cities is one of our great questions. The autonomous city trope simplifies the question. Diaspar and Lys are paper towns, not only because they exist only in literature but also in the sense of presenting strawman arguments—they present a false dichotomy of stage sets. They are technological glosses on the generic places in Aesop’s Town Mouse and County Mouse, but, seven decades since their publication, in their simplification they lose verisimilitude, nuance, and rhetorical power.
I wrote “Seeds of Cities” to illustrate a possible source of urban foresight and in hopes of prompting more compelling literary cities. Stories that explore the complexities of cities and landscapes may both be more interesting literature and illustrate possibilities for reducing the harms of, and appreciating the benefits of, having a variety of communities.
The word good, in English, enfolds the concepts of excellence in quality, being responsible, and providing satisfaction.[i] Dreams, stories, scenarios of the future shape the futures we seek to create. I hope to read more good stories.
Coincidentally, a topically-related and similarly production-delayed chapter of mine, “Narrative Landscapes and Urban Design,” was just published as part of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Practice. My poems can be found in multiple venues including the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s annual competition archive under the byline M.C. Childs.
[i] See Anna Craft, Howard Gardner, and Guy Claxton, eds., Creativity, Wisdom, and Trusteeship (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008), 127–28.
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