Prophecies about the (Urban) Future of Our Planet, and why I Hope They Won’t Come True
The plot of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Hollywood blockbuster Minority Report takes place in the not-so-far-in-the-future city of Washington D.C. The United States capital in 2050-ish is, in Spielberg’s imagination, a direct descendant of dystopian narratives such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The city is a combination of skyscrapers and phenomenally intricate networks of highways, where hover cars travel at unimaginable speed. Said cars travel vertically as well using the building walls as roads.
In yet another iconic Sci-Fi location, the city planet of Coruscant, the administrative center of the world in George Lucas’s hexalogy Star Wars, urbanization has taken over the entire planet. The landscape is crowded with exceedingly tall buildings, transportation takes place on several layers above the ground, again, at extremely high speed that most humans might not even be able to withstand physically, and living quarters float literally above the clouds.
As a major fan of Sci-Fi narratives, I am fascinated by these tales of the future (or uncertain past, like in Star Wars). I want to know how others imagine that future because I would like to believe that it may come to be some day, either during my lifetime or after. We have, in fact, began to look back at the “prophets of science fiction” (a television show by that title is currently being produced and running on the Science channel), at the imagination of Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and even George Lucas and marvel at their extraordinary intuition.
There is, however, one unsettling thought that has been bothering me for some time now. Recent series of narratives about the future have been rather dominated by dystopian elements. It’s almost like we cannot believe that the future can bring anything truly good. And that would not even be that problematic, if it weren’t for the “prophets” listed above, who actually predicted fairly accurately the reality of things to happen. So, is it true that we are marching inevitably toward a city planet of darkish-grey enormously tall building, an urban jungle of sorts that would completely separate us from nature once and forever?
I will invoke here one other very recent TV show now in its second season in the United States, producer J.J. Abrams’s Revolution. The premise of the show is frightening indeed: some conspiracy group suddenly deprives humanity of electricity, which leads to the collapse of human society as we know it. In Abrams’s dystopian narrative, the shortage affects transportation of all kinds, communication and such, literally throwing all humans into a twisted version of the Middle Ages. But, very similarly with other Hollywood stories mentioned earlier, Abrams seems to forget some very important features that are part and parcel of the texture of humanity: we question, we analyze, we innovate, and we adapt. (Not to talk about the funny fact that while all the characters in Abrams’s show seemed to have found their way to unlimited supplies of Gap and Banana Republic clothing, they somehow completely forgot that before computers, iPads and cell phones, knowledge was preserved in books for several centuries. Books are most probably not part of Abrams’s daily reality, hence he has deprived his characters of their benefit…).
Most dystopian stories of late tend to conveniently forget about such very important characteristics of humanity. Humans have always found ways to survive in direst of the conditions. As a matter of fact, our very genesis is an example of adaptation to climate changes, one that took place over a period of six millions of years and which still continuing today. To give an example, by the time Minority Report had been released with its portrayal of suffocating urban spaces sprawling everywhere (although, to be fair, the peace in the end is achieved in a rather idyllic rural space), there already was an environmental movement under way. Al Gore’s environment-awareness campaign was on its way by 1998, while the global warming controversy had already been a matter of public debate for more than ten years. The movement to add more greenery to urban areas around the world was also a wide-spread phenomenon in 2002. Humans were beginning to ask questions and to try to find solutions, so Spielberg’s movie was willfully ignoring a tendency toward the harmonization of natural elements even in the middle of the urban jungle.
Rooftop Garden in New York City
Only ten years later, we now talk naturally about rooftop and collective gardens in cities, about building and protecting parks and about not giving in to corporate pressure to destroy natural oases in the middle of the cement, glass, iron and asphalt deserts—as I am writing these lines (in 2013) the protest of the Turkish youth against the destruction of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul is running strong—about alternative energy that does not damage the earth, about building transportation that reduces and/or is completely non-polluting, about integrating technology not to increase, but to diminish the harm we have been perpetrating against our planet since the 19th century Industrial Revolution, in short, about protecting the only planet we have.
According to data from the World Bank, in 2011 over 52% of the globe’s population was already living in urban areas. And that percentage is bound to increase. It is less and less convenient for most humans to live outside urban communities. But, that does not mean that we will necessarily fall into the trap of transforming our planet into a huge city, where nature will have no place. We already know better than that and the quiet but important civil movements to bring nature back to the cities, movements that stretches from Japan to the United States, have proved that we cannot simply sit and wait for our cities to turn into deserts. It is entirely up to us not to allow today’s Hollywood producers to become the Sci-Fi prophets of tomorrow, as it happened in the case of some of their literary predecessors.