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By Bruce Sterling
In 2050, the Earth s population is expected to hit 10 billion, and 75% of those
people will live in cities. As our urban environments grow and grow, how do we
make sure that growth is sustainable? In the coming weeks, seven experts will
looks at ways cities may be able to cut lessen their impact and build a more
sustainable future. To begin with, award-winning Canadian science-fiction
author Bruce Sterling presents a cautionary view of what the sprawling cities
of 2050 may look like.
How does it look-and-feel, the big, grand city of the mid-century? If you're
seven years old, everything in it feels equally wondrous. The big city is a
riot of sight, sound and smells as vivid, exciting and scary for you as any
big town has ever been for anybody.
No one can overlook buildings of that colossal size but why do they exist? A
city's showplaces are always built by people anxious about their own status. In
2050, the nouveau-riche arrivistes stake their big skyline claims on the public
eye. That glassy, twisting spire, as gaudy as any Christmas ornament, is owned
by offshore Chinese. The gloomy tower with 85 stories of modestly greyed-out
windows is an all-female enclave of Islamic business feminists. The scary heap
that resembles a patchwork quilt of iron was entirely crowd-sourced.
Cars piloted by human beings were a passing thing in the ageless urban story.
The urban highways are still there far too many of them, all old but it's
network-driven robot cars, like smartphones with wheels, that deliver the
payloads now. The traffic signs and signals are long gone, since machines don't
need them. This city never stops the wheeled machines flow night and day
through every intersection, busy as ants, silent as eels.
There's no urban smog, but the city reeks. This dense, greenhouse stink is
composed of the rot from flood damage, the decay of dead lawn and parks, and
bursting, sneezy clouds of weedy pollen from invasive species. At the
seashores, the great, flood-stricken port cities of the past smell like dead
fish and invasive brine. This fetid greenhouse fever doesn't smell much worse
than the urban smog that brought it into being. People are used to it.
Urban cats are everywhere, since people much prefer pets to children. The
"human bubble" has reached its downslope. The old Population Bomb is now a
rubble-clearance project. The cats are meticulously tracked by surveillance
collars, and they never stray.
The same goes for the elderly. The old have become mankind's majority, for now
and apparently forever, the avant-garde of the urban machine-for-living. The
old pay well for their dignity, for the always-on augmentation and the
ubiquitous computing. They pass their endless twilight days in padded
penthouses, half spa and half life-support module, urban spaces so intensely
surveilled that one will never lose a button or drop a lit match.
Modern cities are elderly, too. Brick and stone are mortal, and entropy
requires no maintenance. Every major urban industry leaves its silent retinue
of dead smokestacks. The early 21st Century left a rich heritage of quaint,
gentlemanly rubbish: the archaic cellphone towers, the poisonous and horrifying
fossil-fuel plants, the squalid paper-shuffling headquarters of extinct
government bureaus. Commonly, this is where the cities stuff the climate
refugees.
The poor we always have with us, because somebody is always in the business of
keeping the poor that way, and the poor can always be relied upon to rob and
oppress each other. The great city of the future has slums. It has red-light
districts. It has pawnshops and sweatshops, and parlours for the various
illicit substances that used to be called narcotics. The big city is the wicked
city. No big city has ever lacked for wickedness since the time of Ur of the
Chaldees. A city that failed to generate some enticing crimes would have to
invent brand-new ones.
With all its timeless continuities, the mid-century metropolis does have novel
and startling aspects. Ever since their invention, cities were elite barns for
the sturdy peasantry of some fertile countryside. The mid-century city has
created means of food production that are post-agricultural. With swordfish
extinct and cattle way beyond the budget, the people eat well, to put it
bluntly, they mostly eat algae, insects and microbes. Of course this tasty goop
has been effectively refined, rebranded, and skeuomorphically re-packaged as
noodles, tofu, and hamburger substitute. Soylent Green is crickets.
Every urbanite loves to fuss about fine dining. The upside of a major climate
crisis is the prospect it offers to entirely liberate cities from their sordid
heritage in the planet's soil. A space colony is just a Dubai-style super-tall
desert skyscraper plus some zero-gravity bone depletion. A lunar colony is
just a London mogul's subterranean basement, without the crusties or the labour
strikes.
The urbanites in the mid-century city know that they are not the culmination of
the city. No one's idea of utopia, they're not even "modern". Everybody under
30 years of age is instinctively convinced that they are the cultural radicals,
the cool and daring pioneers, the youthful froth of a tsunami of some radically
different way of being and indeed, they are. Not "better" mind you just
different.
There is fear in this mid-century city. Life is frail. A vengeful
super-hurricane might cross the simmering Gulf Stream and fall like an avenging
angel on the coasts of Europe but people can get used to that. Megastorms
aren't that much worse than Los Angeles on a fault line, Naples on a volcano.
The scary part is what people find within themselves, when their city is
gravely harmed. People can flee with relative ease, but cities are tender and
sessile beings. When the survivors return to their beloved rubble, they find
themselves forced to create another city one that makes genuine technical
sense under their circumstances.
Only engineers and architects will ever rub their hand at this dreadful
prospect. These modernists are in secret collusion with the feral urban crows
and hungry pigeons picking over the blast zone. For years, while a sentimental
mankind clung to a museum economy, they have rehearsed another city, some
angular, rational monster with an urban fabric that's a whole lot more nano-,
robo-, and geno; buildings they can shape, and that will henceforth shape the
rest of us.
To tell the truth, we never liked that city. But it just keeps happening.