Cities have become an integral part of human evolution. With over 50 percent of humans now living in cities, while the respective land area is only 2-3 percent of the land extent of the whole world, undeniably cities have become a crucial part of our culture. A species that has lived nearly 200,000 years in forests and grasslands with natural setting being the primary sensory and physical experience, alternative experiences of traffic, concrete, glass, lights, and right angles dominate our daily life. Even further, some films have envisioned what our futuristic cities would be like, and this article explores how dystopian those narratives could be.
Tall and Dark Towers
Dark and tall high-rises could often be seen in the background of the scenes in futuristic cities. Akira (1988), a genre-defining anime is set in Neo-Tokyo, a city built aftermath of colossal damage to the old Tokyo, is filled with high-rises with vivid lights and platforms connecting levels of buildings. The city image is characterized by the uneasiness of dwellers, authoritative rule, and crime. A similar setting could be seen in the anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), but with more Asian cultural cues such as plenty of vivid signs in every possible view and narrow streetscapes made by tall housing towers facing each other.
Most transportation systems shown in Futuristic Cities have flying cars or autonomous vehicles. In Minority Report (2002), cars are autonomous, and most models are of one kind, showing the high-tech advancement but reduced personal touch in the aesthetic. On the other hand, Metropolis (1927) depicts the verticality of the city with brutalist buildings as well as layers of elevated roads connecting and going in and around those buildings while the roads are most of the time filled with variants of one actual model of a car, the Rumpler Tropfenwagen (Roarington, 2020).
Spatial segregation
A city in the present day is often segregated with groups of inhabitants residing in only certain parts of the city, with limited access to public amenities, good quality of life, and social well-being. In some dystopian narratives, this segregation is forecasted into the future, depicting highly segregated communities within the city marginalized by ethnicity, age, or wealth. In the movie Elysium (2013), elites have left Earth and live in a space station while the poverty-driven people are left on neglected Earth. The elites have a utopian high-tech eco-city, while the poor have the earth with dilapidated high-rises, plant-covered ruined buildings, dirty streets, and a marginalized community.
Underground Skyscraper
Zion in the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) is an underground city, the last hope for humankind against machines, and is a different kind of vertical city. The city inhabits thousands of people in a complex of tree-houses-like structures going deep into the earth connected by multiple levels and a central core for vertical circulation signifying an underground skyscraper. One interesting aspect of the city is the large earth-carved space people use to gather and celebrate. Where most futuristic cities in dystopian settings neglect public space from their narratives, Zion made by the last group of humans has a soulful place for themselves amidst the world ending on the surface of the earth.
Traction Cities
Traction Cities in Mortal Engine (2018) are gigantic cities on wheels, hunting for resources with their own social hierarchy inside. Based on the novel by Philip Reeve of the same name, dystopian cities mentioned here also have spatial segregation where lower-class citizens who are workers living in lower tiers and elites on mansions on the top tiers (Mortal Engines Wiki, n.d.). While nowadays cities are high fuel and energy consumption entities, traction cities literary hunt smaller cities or settlements for resources and fuel.
Non-human
Alphaville (1965), has been shot largely at nighttime in and around the city of Paris using modern and monotonous buildings to support the plot of a futuristic city under a totalitarian rule surrounding an eerie, bleak, and uneasy environment. The emotionless development of the city and continuous surveillance with screens and cameras show a vision of a city that has developed without human touch. Tech advancement guiding and helping the totalitarian rule has resulted in a soulless city that forgets its people.
Bladerunner (1982) shows a futuristic dystopian Los Angeles, with a dark gloomy built environment focused on a single mega building. The film noir influenced vision of this movie showcases the polluted, foggy, and decaying city that supports the plot of a revolving mystery and ambiguity. As Children of Men (2006), Blade Runner (1982) also depicts the unruly streets, crime, and poverty of the common people supported by the grim city environment, creating a less and less humane atmosphere.
Conclusion
Often themed with the Cyberpunk visual style, futuristic cities in dystopia are crowded with grim, tall, and emotionless skyscrapers, dark and polluted narrow streetscapes, and extreme social inequalities signified by spatial segregation, with almost no public space. Cement and glass replace every patch of green and ground where the skies are gloomy with fog. The increasing complexity of the building and road network, layering vertically and compacting the space for higher efficiency and machine-like atmosphere is non-human. Understanding these narratives could drive us to be careful and sensible urban practitioners, designers, planners, and architects in our urban realms.
Reference
Mortal Engines Wiki (n.d.). Traction City. [online] Mortal Engines Wiki. Available at: https://mortalengines.fandom.com/wiki/Traction_City#:~:text=Traction%20Cities%20are%20vast%20metropolises [Accessed 22 Jan. 2024].
Preston, C. (2019). How Cities and Lights Drive the Evolution of Life. [online] Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cities-and-lights-drive-evolution-life-180973638/.
Roarington (2020). Metropolis Cars: The Rise & Fall of Tropfenwagen. [online] Roarington. Available at: https://roarington.com/media-house/stories/metropolis-cars-nipped-in-the-bud-in-the-film-by-fritz-lang-the-last-two-tropfenwagen [Accessed 22 Jan. 2024].
