Concentration City: How Urban Visions Shape Our Future

Photo By Alexandre .L On Unsplash

Cities play a key role in dystopian science fiction. Consider Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, dominated by Moloch, Jean-Luc Godard’s modernist Parisian future-scape in Alphaville or Ridley Scott’s oppressive, neon-lit Los Angeles in Blade Runner. This is hardly surprising. Projected as chaotic centres of over-crowding, pollution and crime, they are fertile grounds for dark narratives about our possible futures.

One of the strangest excursions into these disturbing realms is J G Ballard’s short story, The Concentration City. Published in 1957, the story is set in an endless ‘city’ that encompasses all known reality.

Everywhere you turn, you are faced with a cramped, dense urban environment. Street-level piled upon street-level in their thousands, apparently without end.

The story traces the fortunes of science student Franz M. who has been arrested on a vagrancy charge.

In this urban nightmare, there is no longer any concept of ‘free space’. It is considered not just a physical impossibility but a contradiction in terms as all space is simply a reflection of economic value. Science is no longer a means of understanding the natural world and of shaping future society. It has become a mechanism for consolidating the prevailing, authoritarian political system.

Dead zones

Wildlife has been squeezed out of existence. People live in constant fear of cave-ins and fire. Desperate inhabitants resort to pyromania as a means of resistance.  

But Franz is determined to challenge this bleak reality and explore the possibility of constructing a flying machine. After the partial success of this experiment, he decides to take the westbound SuperSleeper express train as far as he can. His aim is to find the City’s end.

As his journey continues, he discovers whole areas are being blocked off by the authorities and the inhabitants left for dead. One traveller remarks, “Eventually there’ll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one huge cemetery.”

Suddenly, after travelling for ten days, he finds himself heading eastbound. After interrogation by the police, the vagrancy charge is dropped. The police surgeon attempts to explain that the City has always existed and is synonymous with time itself. At this point, Franz spots a desk calendar set on the date he had set off on his quest, three weeks previously.  

He finally realises that the City permits no escape. It is infinite. He is a prisoner of both space and time. Inhabiting an oppressive world which brooks no alternative.

This endless city could be a metaphor for Mumbai, Lagos or New York. And what they might become. For any of the megacities that have emerged in recent decades and which continue to grow at breakneck speed as global population rises and urbanisation continues unchecked.

Covid-19 has generated a good deal of commentary about the future of the city. Some pessimistic. Some optimistic. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Cities are places of contradiction. They can generate economic growth and take people out of poverty. They can develop in a sustainable direction which enhances the quality of life and offers a green, people-centred future. Or, poorly planned and badly managed, massive urbanisation can cause an ecological disaster, creating sprawling, over-crowded slums, scarred by poverty and shortages of food and water.

Creating sustainable cities and communities

Clearly, notwithstanding the fantasies of some commentators, we’re not all going to move to the suburbs or escape to the country. The economic and social forces driving urbanisation are too powerful. Cities are centres of innovation, culture and creativity. While working from home is an option generally only open to professionals and white-collar workers, not those required to make, distribute and retail goods or provide the multiple services required by modern society.

But what we might see is a change in urban living patterns, an acceleration of the shift towards remote working and automation, and increased urban sprawl. And a widening of the gap between the haves and the have nots.     

“The advanced societies of the future,” Ballard wrote in another context, “will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.”

City councils worldwide were taken unawares by the coronavirus pandemic. Some handled it well. Others less so.

Tackling the climate and ecological emergencies which present humanity with an existential threat takes things to a whole new level. Urban planning needs to prepare for an unpredictable and potentially terrifying future, develop resilience and take an active role in re-imagining our urban environments.

We are all connected

This will require significantly more local democracy and grassroots engagement than we see in Britain’s towns and cities today, undermined by the erosion of local democracy, privatisation and the return of the patronage and cronyism of the Victorian era.

To avoid the dystopian nightmares of science fiction writers, we need to future-proof our cities. This means planning and investing in sustainable infrastructure, clean transport, renewable energy, water supplies, good housing, culture for all and our physical and mental wellbeing.

As the radical geographer David Harvey noted: “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”