Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fiction

Vertical noirHistories of the future in urban sciencefiction

Stephen Graham

Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities thatoperate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily domi-nated by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around verti-cally stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive effortsof H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, to many cyber-punk classics, this essay – the latest in a series in City on the vertical dimensions of cities1 –reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics andcontestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. Itbegins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang,Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical struc-tures, landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then then teases outthe complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes thatare actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some cleanand binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verti-calised projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes andurban theories mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and importantways which do much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of theessay explores such connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects inthe Gulf and forests of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. Theessay’s final discussion draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginariesoffer for contesting the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.

Key words: cities, science fiction, verticality, urban contestation, urban representation,futurism

Introduction: vertical worlds

‘We don’t go into the future from zero, wedrag the whole past in with us.’ (Syd Mead)2

Through more than a century ofhistory, from H. G. Wells, the dysto-pian classics like Fritz Lang’s 1927

film Metropolis and J. G. Ballard’s 1975novel High-Rise, to the iconic cyberpunkfilms of Blade Runner (1982) or The Matrix(1999), the image of the radically vertica-lised cityscape has so dominated sciencefiction as to be almost a cliche.3

Unerringly, across the whole history of thegenre, sci-fi cities tend to operate about

# 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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remarkably similar visions. Towering, slab-likeedifices inhabited by solipsistic and domineer-ing elites rise like mountains high above sewer-like urban streets. Pod-like cars or flyingvehicles whisk their patrons instantly upwardsthrough the poisonous air to dock at the top ofsome impossibly high structure lurking farabove the smoke and mist. Repressed minionstoil like moles deep in the subterranean bowelsof the city-as-machine to maintain the leisureand luxury of elites far above.

The politics of resistance or revolution, inturn, inevitably tend to centre on efforts bythe repressed below to work through thearchitectures and technologies of control setup to keep them—quite literally—downtrod-den.4 Through so doing they can literally riseup to undermine the fragile and pamperedworlds of the protected elites above.5

Another important continuity in sci-ficinema is the endlessly repeated depiction ofthe collapse of the towering structures ofthe city through apocalyptic events or vio-lence. In 1965, the American writer SusanSontag famously wrote of a dominant ‘aes-thetic of destruction’ in dystopian sci-fi andfantasy cinema—of the pleasures, as she putit, of ‘wreaking havoc, making a mess’.6 Incountless movies, video games, novels andcartoons, both before and since 9/11, thelofty aspiring verticality of cities likeNew York reached a predictable and specta-cular demise as it is brought low in aninstant to symbolically underline the fragili-ties of modern civilisation. Thus, Sontagargued, viewers are able to enjoy the extra-ordinary thrill of the visceral fantasy oftheir own demise.

In a world of apparently endless, hyper-mediated and all-too-real disasters, however,such imaginations are inevitably interrupted.This is especially so when the well-rehearsedvisions of dystopian science fiction increas-ingly seem, through a perverse inversion, tobecome fact through real-world catastrophes.Literary scholars Efraim Sicher and NataliaSkradol write that 9/11, for example, ‘wasan intrusion of the real that made it imposs-ible to un-imagine dystopia as nightmare or

fantasy. This destruction . . . showed that theworld was in a permanent state of unendingdisasters.’ As with Hurricanes Katrina andSandy and the 2011 Japanese tsunami disaster,there was in such events ‘an uncanny senseof an end that has been almost predestined. . . 9/11 put an end to the distinctionbetween speculation and reality in dismissivedefinitions of science fiction as a genre’.7

Examining a few of the most famousexamples, verticalised sci-fi cityscapes helpdemonstrate the remarkable consistencythrough the history of the genre.

The first example comes from one of thefounders of modern science fiction:H. G. Wells. As Lucy Hewitt and I discussin an earlier paper, Wells’ first novel, TheTime Machine (1895), envisaged a futurestarkly separated into two classes: the ‘Eloi’living in a bounteous upper world, maintainedby the slave-like Morlocks confined to a darksubterranean realm of wells and tunnels.8

Wells’ later classic, When the SleeperAwakes—first published in 1899—took suchvertical metaphors further (Figure 1).Graham, the novel’s main protagonist, wakesafter sleeping for 203 years. He finds hishome city of London transformed throughstartling and bewildering verticalities. Staringout in disbelief from his balcony, Graham’simpression:

‘was of overwhelming architecture. The placeinto which he looked was an aisle of Titanicbuildings, curving spaciously in eitherdirection. Overhead mighty cantileverssprang together across the huge width of theplace, and a tracery of translucent materialshut out the sky. Gigantic globes of coolwhite light shamed the pale sunbeams thatfiltered down through the girders and wires.Here and there a gossamer suspension bridgedotted with foot passengers flung across thechasm and the air was webbed with slendercables. A cliff of edifice hung above him . . . ’9

As the story progresses, Graham quicklybecomes aware that London’s verticalgrowth has sustained a geologic stratificationof power and status within which he is an

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unwitting figurehead. Workers are trappeddeep in the subterranean realms of the cityas virtual slaves. ‘For the poor there is noeasy death’; they are, rather, condemned toa life of hard labour, brutality and ill-healthin the city’s subterranean labyrinths.10

Moving far below the exalted towers,Graham is led to a world literally crushedbeneath the vast weight of the vertical cityabove—and its privileged elite. It is a worldthat resonates powerfully with the vertica-lised social stratifications of VictorianLondon. ‘They penetrated downward, everdownward, towards the working places . . .through these factories and places of toil,seeing many painful and grim things’, thenovel relates:

‘Everywhere were pillars and cross archingsof such a massiveness as Graham had neverbefore seen, thick Titans of greasy, shiningbrickwork crushed beneath the vast weight ofthat complex city world, even as theseanaemic millions were crushed by itscomplexity. And everywhere were palefeatures, lean limbs, disfigurement anddegradation.’11

The most influential science fiction of alltime—Fritz Lang’s remarkable Metropolis(1927)12—took Wells’ vertical allegory tofurther extremes (Figure 2). Metropolis waspowerfully influenced by the nascent sky-scrapers Lang witnessed on a trip by cruiseliner to Manhattan in 1924. The verticalityof 1920s New York at night totally transfixed

Figure 1 Contemporary illustration accompanying the serial publication of H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Awakes in1899 (Source: http://madamepickwickartblog.com/2013/04/no-escape/; public domain).

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him. ‘High above the cars and elevatedtrains,’ he wrote, ‘skyscrapers appear in blueand gold, white and purple, and still higherabove there are advertisements surpassingthe stars with their light.’13

Metropolis combines a radical exaggerationof the spatialities of Manhattan with a power-ful evocation of the tense contradictions ofWeimar Germany. The film’s infusion offears of the perils of rapid industrialisation,economic and social collapse, communist

revolution, modernism and racialisedOthers—what film scholar David Dessercalls the ‘ideological motifs’ of WeimarGermany14—are structured into a series ofallegorically vertical cityscapes of mammothproportions.

The cityscape in Metropolis is starklydivided into high and low. Far below thedecadent, heaven-like ‘Garden of EarthlyDelights’ of the elites on the summits ofvast towers lie the hell-like subterranean

Figure 2 Technicians completing one of the models used in the making of Fritz Lang’s classic sci-fi film Metropolis, 1927(Source: http://photographyblog.dallasnews.com/2014/02/movie-magic-several-gems-from-the-archives.html/; publicdomain).

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catacombs and machine halls of the subju-gated proletariat, who commute verticallybetween them like serried ranks of automa-tons in massive elevators.15 Lacing the strataare complex webs of staircases, slopingtunnels, raised highways, aircraft and futuris-tic elevators.

Such a dialectic of above and below corre-sponds clearly to differences in class. ‘Theworkers labour below; the upper classeswho benefit from their labour frolic above’,Desser writes. ‘Scenes of upper-class liferevolve around pleasure, even debauchery;scenes of the workers reveal mechanised,depressed figures who seem barely human.’16

Joh Fredersen, the ‘Master of the Metropo-lis’, is the creator of the city. He peers downat his creation from his penthouse-cum-control room at the apex of the New Towerof Babel high in the sky. Fredersen’s son,Freder—newly radicalised by witnessing theworkers’ misery and sacrifice in the bowelsof the earth—travels back to the summitand challenges his father. ‘To the newTower of Babel—to my father’, he tellshis chauffeur. With startling resonance tothe mass killing in the contemporary con-struction of vertical city projects in theGulf, Fredersen responds to the deaths ofworkers in the city’s bowels dismissively.‘Such accidents are unavoidable’, he says.

‘Where are the people whose hands builtyour city?’, Freder asks desperately. ‘Offwhere they belong!’, his father replies scorn-fully. ‘In the depths!’ (original emphasis) Hisfather then closes the blinds to his penthouse,shielding his gaze from the lower depths ofthe city below. ‘The hymn of praise for oneman’, Maria, the film’s heroine—a daughterof one of the workers who cares for their chil-dren—exhorts, ‘became the curse ofothers!’17

Half a century later, J. G. Ballard’s classicdystopia High-Rise offers a further twist onthe use of biting allegories of class and verti-calised space. This time the setting is the cleanmodernist lines of a concrete residential high-rise in post-war London. Ballard’s fictionalaccount of high-rise living was a direct

engagement with the deepening trend inurban planning to redevelop entire cityscapesas archipelagos of modernist high-rise towerslaced together by raised walkways and‘streets in the sky’.

It’s hard not to believe that parts of the plotfor High-Rise were inspired, at least in part,by architect Erno Goldfinger’s decision toinhabit the Balfron Tower—one of two ofhis brutalist designs that were built inLondon between 1967 and 1972—for twomonths after its completion as a publicitystunt. Resonating with today’s world of sky-scraper housing for the uberwealthy, High-Rise is a searing critique of the solipsismthat is possible when high-rise housingtowers are organised, as Ballard put it, ‘as ahuge machine designed to serve, not the col-lective body of tenants, but the individualresident in isolation’.18

Once inhabited, Ballard’s 1000-suite towerquickly becomes ‘a small vertical city, its twothousand inhabitants boxed up into thesky’.19 The tower’s own vertical structures,however, are starkly stratified within whatBallard terms the ‘natural social order of thebuilding’20—an order radically isolated fromthe wider social world. Indeed, the towerbecomes what Ballard scholar RickMcGrath has called ‘an isolation tank for2000 people’.21

Reviewing the book on its initial publi-cation, novelist Martin Amis captured its res-onances with the spiralling crises surroundingmodernist housing in the UK at the time. Inan early example of the use of Ballard’s sci-fi dystopias to reflect on contemporaryurbanism, Amis felt that the scale of thecrisis was such that the whole of Londonwould one day ‘take on that qualitycommon to all Ballardian loci’ by becoming‘suspended, no longer to do with the rest ofthe planet, screened off by its own surreallogic’.22

As the narrative in High-Rise progresses,vertical class distinctions quickly becomeexaggerated and violent as the complexmachines and systems sustaining modernurban life in the tower, and the norms of

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grudging social toleration, both collapse anddecay.

Soon enough, Ballard writes, ‘the high-risehad already divided itself into the three clas-sical social groups, its lower, middle andupper classes’. Thus,

‘the 10th-floor shopping mall formed a clearboundary between the lower nine floors, withtheir “proletariat” of film technicians, air-hostesses and the like, and the middle sectionof the high-rise, which extended from the10th floor to the swimming pool andrestaurant deck on the 35th floor’.

The central floors of the tower, meanwhile,housed its middle classes, a population:

‘made up of self-centred but basically docilemembers of the professions—the doctors andlawyers, accountants and tax specialists whoworked, not for themselves, but for medicalinstitutes and large corporations . . . Abovethem, on the top five floors of the high-rise,was its upper class, the discreet oligarchy ofminor tycoons and entrepreneurs, televisionactresses and careerist academics, with theirhigh-speed elevators and superior services,their carpeted staircases.’23

Like Goldfinger in his Balfron Tower in1967, at the top of Ballard’s dysfunctionalvertical enclave we find Anthony Royal—one of the building’s architects. Royal’s pos-ition ‘on top’—a zenithal location where hecan survey the surrounding cityscape as anaesthetic backdrop—is a source of myth,intrigue and tension for the other residentsof the high-rise.

Royal is ‘well-to-do’, arrogant and defen-sive. He is ‘determined to outstare any criti-cism’ of the building he helped toconceive.24 Retreating into a hermit-likeexistence Royal feels, ‘for the first time thathe was looking down at the sky, rather thanup at it. Each day the towers of centralLondon seemed slightly more distant, thelandscape of an abandoned planet recedingslowly from his mind.’25

Crucially, Royal is also, ultimately, impo-tent—able only to limp through the building

as it crumbles materially and socially. In theend, he is destined to die rambling andstarved amongst the human and architecturaldebris.

Liberated from the need to repress anti-social behaviour, Ballard portrays the verticalarchitecture as the purveyor of an amoralworld of psychopathic and violent desiresunleashed. The building emerges, in Ballard’swords, as ‘a model of all that technology haddone to make possible the expression of atruly “free” psychopathology’.26

Finally, the exaggerated vertical scale iswidely used to signify futurity in themyriad of postmodern, cyberpunk specu-lations about the spectacular future urbanismproduced between the late 1960s and 1990s.Cyberpunk rejects the clean lines of moder-nist dystopias like High-Rise. Instead, itdepicts startlingly verticalised future urbanworlds as gritty and half-decayed placesridden by extreme time-space compression,population explosions, environmentalexhaustion and terrifying advances in tech-nology (virtual realms, cyborg beings,hyper-surveillance and the like). In suchworlds, philosopher Anna Greenspanwrites, ‘spectral entities unleashed by themodern machine haunt dark cities teemingwith nocturnal life’.27

Scott’s Blade Runner—his iconic 1982treatment of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel DoAndroids Dream of Electric Sheep—is by farthe most influential example here (of whichmore later). But the tried and tested tech-niques of radical vertical exaggerationremain pivotal to the genre. In his 1988novel Islands in the Net, for example, cyber-punk author Bruce Sterling depicts a futureSingapore in which vertical dimension wasalso radically extended. The city ‘was likedowntown Houston’, he wrote. ‘But morelike Houston than even Houston had everhad the nerve to become.’ The City:

‘was an anthill, a brutal assault against anysane sense of scale. Nightmarishly vast spireswhose bulging foundations covered wholecity blocks. Their upper reaches were pocked

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like waffle irons with triangular bracing.Buttresses, glass-covered superhighways,soared half a mile above sea level.’28

Reel to real: urban facts and fictions

Sterling’s conflation of a futuristic Singaporewith a contemporary Houston brings us tothe complex connections between sci-fi ima-ginaries and lived cities. Imaginations offuture cityscapes as vast, three-dimensionalvolumes work, like all science fiction, in oneof two ways. On the one hand, they radicallyextrapolate perceived current trends withincontemporary cities into future scenarios of‘cultural prophecy’.29 On the other, theyoffer future allegories to act as a lens tolook ‘back’ at the contemporary, highlightingthe political and ideological tensions withincontemporary life.30

Either way, sci-fi cities, whilst being futur-istic fables, inevitably resonate powerfullywith contemporary concerns.31 They arealso, as we shall see, pivotal in constitutingthe materialities of contemporary cities.Rather than expecting sci-fi dystopias tosimply mirror contemporary societies, cul-tural researcher Mark Fisher stresses that‘their value lies in hyperbolic excess, in theircapacity to convert real political tensionsinto mythical terms and dream-likeimages’.32 This is crucial to the power ofscience fiction in creating what sci-fi theoristDarko Suvin called ‘cognitive estrange-ment’—the process of taking viewers out oftheir everyday worlds into a world whichseems strange and disjointed, but believablyso.33

As such, the linkages between sci-fi citiesand material cityscapes that are actually con-structed, lived and experienced are so dense asto make some clean separation impossible.Dichotomised and binary oppositionbetween ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities arenot—and never have been—possible. Builtprojects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginaryfutures, architectural schemes and urban the-ories mingle and resonate together in

complex and unpredictable ways. Thisoccurs within broader ‘postmodern’ culturesdominated by multiple circuits of mediation,prediction and simulation. These, in turn,fatally undermine remaining notions of an‘authentic’ urban life which exists inadvance of its representation in fiction andmedia.34

Contemporary portrayals of future citiesare so hyper-mediated in films, fiction,video games, architecture and other mediathese days that science fiction, film andmedia, rather than reflecting the livedworlds of built cities, very often become adominant initial experience which, in turn,powerfully shapes their production.35

At the outset, sci-fi cities are obviouslyinfluenced both by their creator’s experienceof built, existing cityscapes and prevailingideas of futurism in architecture itself.Beyond Fritz Lang’s visit to Manhattan,Ridley Scott famously admitted that hisrainy, industrial superstructures in his iconic1982 film Blade Runner owed much to hischildhood in and around the vast chemical,steel and shipbuilding complexes in hisnative Tyneside and Teesside.36 Scott alsostressed that his experiences of travelling inthe short-lived commercial helicopter flightsbetween Kennedy airport and the heliporton top of the Pan Am skyscraper provided afurther inspiration.37

Like many sci-fi filmmakers, though, Scottwas not simply interested in projecting a puta-tively futuristic cityscape. Through classicpostmodern techniques he toyed with thevery idea of linear and modernist notions ofthe historic, the present and the future. Infact, he playfully hybridised aspects of allthree. Blade Runner, Scott famously said in1982, was a ‘film set forty years hence madein a style of forty years ago’.38 In otherwords, it was a retro-futurist classic: an inter-vention invoking historic ideas about thefuture refracted through the historic tropesof the history of Manhattan refractedthrough film noir Los Angeles (LA).

As such, as we shall see, Blade Runner—and other retro-futurist verticalised sci-fi

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movies such as The Fifth Element (1997), the2005–2008 Batman trilogy39 and numerousothers—has surprising and important linksto the retro-futurist architecture and infra-structure mushrooming to the skies in con-temporary cities like Shanghai.

Syd Mead, the influential ‘visual futurist’and ex-architectural draughtsman who con-tributed much to the detailed set design forBlade Runner, set the film’s scene by exagger-ating the vertical scale of the LA of 2019—where the film was set—by multiplying thescales of the world’s highest skyscrapers in1982 by 21

2 times.40 Within his city of 90million people, like Lang, Mead and theother set designers on the team then drewof Langian and Wellsian traditions to inscribetheir powerful stratification of class and racevertically. ‘The street level becomes the base-ment, and decent people just don’t want to gothere’, Mead said in 2015. Meanwhile, he con-tinued, the 700-storey pyramid-like towersinhabited by corporate elites were allequipped with a sky lobby, ‘and nobodygoes below the 30th floor, and that’s theway life would be organized’.41

Blade Runner—arguably the second mostinfluential sci-fi film of all time after Metropo-lis—has had such an effect that all sci-fi citys-capes since rather inevitably seem to directlyimitate it. It is one of the few postmodern cul-tural outputs to have achieved the rather oxy-moronic status of the canonical.42

‘The “standard” version of the city of thefuture,’ cultural scholar Aaron Barlowwrote in 2005, ‘now comes from the LosAngeles that Scott and his “visual futurist”Syd Mead created for Blade Runner.’43 Inthis, the sci-fi city’s rich and complex verticalstratigraphy—as well as its horizontalgeography—is depicted in ways that makethe experience of the city both familiar andbewildering to viewers and readers.44

Ballard’s High-Rise, meanwhile, was pub-lished in 1975, just as the backlash againsthigh-rise living in the UK was gaining full force.

Once produced, sci-fi cityscapes in turnwork to profoundly influence the imaginarygeographies that shape urban culture—in

art, film, novels, cartoons, theatre, militarismand video games. The influence is alsoespecially powerful in architecture.

‘Big architects have copied Blade Runner’,Ridley Scott said in 2015. What he describedas ‘the biggest architect’ in the world—hinting that it was Richard Rodgers—saidto him recently ‘“I run Blade Runner once aweek in my office for the staff.”’45 BladeRunner is clearly an influence on much ofcontemporary architecture. The most star-tling and clear current examples of such influ-ence, however, come from the vastarchitectural edifices now proliferating inthe Gulf region and in China.

In both regions there is an uncanny senseof entire cityscapes rising rapidly to the skywhich directly mimic many of the verticalisedtropes of urban science fiction. Such aphenomenon led sci-fi author WilliamGibson to offer one of his famous aphorismsin 2003. ‘The future has already arrived’, hewrote. ‘It’s just not evenly distributed.’46

Futurism in the Gulf

In the Gulf, Qatari-American artist SophiaAl-Maria suggests in particular that the par-ticular fetish for super-tall and highly futuris-tic skyscrapers—as sheiks seek to out-engineer each other through extreme verticalarchitecture like schoolboys in a play-ground—is directly linked to the depictionof vertical cityscapes within iconic cyber-punk sci-fi films.

Drawing heavily on French theorist ofpostmodernism Jean Baudrillard, Al-Mariaterms this ‘Gulf Futurism’.47 It involves acocktail mixing an obsession with hyper-con-sumption, hyper-elitism and hyper-reality,with absurd, utterly unconvincing greenwashabout the environmental sustainability oftheir constructions.48 Also crucial is a preoc-cupation with erecting extraordinary verticalstructures in an environment of endless, hori-zontal desert—a standard trope in Westernscience fiction—as harbingers of a putative‘future’ materialised in today’s landscapes.

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‘A generation [of Arab elites], forcedindoors because of intense heat,’ journalistNatalie Olah speculates, ‘developed a view ofthe future informed almost exclusively byvideo games and Hollywood films.’49 End-lessly reworked futurism also saturates cor-porate and local media in the region. Al-Maria recalls a children’s TV show in the Gulf

‘where these kids get on a monorail in themodern day, they travel through a lab and areteleported to 2030. They come out the otherside and there are even bigger buildings andthe train is flying through the air.’50

Funded by petrodollars and constructedthrough bonded labour, the resulting aes-thetic obsessions, when these elites becamesheiks, CEOs or presidents, are since beingmaterialised in steel, glass, concrete andaluminium.

Occasionally, such mimicry is surprisinglydirect. Blade Runner’s Syd Mead, forexample, visited Bahrain in 2005 and dis-cussed future building projects with theroyal sheik there, Abdullah Hamad Khalifa.He also visited Qatar, Abu Dhabi andDubai. ‘I am here because of the unique exci-tement of seeing the future come true inDubai’, he said.51

In 2013, meanwhile, legendary cyberpunkauthor Neal Stephenson, stung by the sensethat contemporary sci-fi writers were not asbold as their forebears on imagining newtechnologies, put his weight behind a towerfully 20 kilometres tall—fully 24 timeshigher than the Burj Khalifa—that wouldhelp launch craft into space (Figure 3).

Inspired by sci-fi author ArthurC. Clarke’s important role in the inventionof the communications satellite in the 1940s,the idea was, Stephenson said, a ‘somewhatplayful, somewhat serious attempt’ to stirthe minds of a generation he considered tobe starved of really big, step-change inno-vations by technologists’ preoccupationwith banal IT and social media apps.52

On other occasions, key Western skyscra-per architects import their own sci-fi

influences from their childhoods. AdrianSmith, of Chicago’s SOM office—designerof the Burj Khalifa (Figure 4) and 7 of theworld’s 15 tallest skyscrapers as of 2014—isa powerful example here. Smith’s own influ-ences in designing the Burj Khalifa was thefuturistic skyline of the ‘Emerald City’ inMGM’s 1939 film Wizard of Oz. ‘I justremembered the glassy, crystalline structurecoming up in the middle of what seemedlike nowhere’, he admitted in 2007.53

No wonder, then, that people remark onthe eerie sense of visiting sci-fi movie setswhen they travel to Saudi Arabia, AbuDhabi or Dubai. In addition to futuristic

Figure 3 ‘Project Hieroglyph’: artist’s impression byHaylee Bolinger of the 20-km tower envisaged by cyber-punk sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in 2015 in partnershipwith engineers at Arizona State University (Source: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/story/tall-tower/; illustration usedwith permission of Arizona State University).

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towers, the region’s other megaprojects hintat similar influences. The world’s largestunderwater hotel, in Dubai, for example,will give inhabitants of its 21 sub-sea rooms‘windows’ onto deep-sea ecosystems underthe tag line ‘enjoy the highlife at a subterra-nean level’. It seems to be a direct retro-

futurist imitation of Tracey Island from the1960s puppet sci-fi series Thunderbirds.

It seems brutally inevitable, too, that fast-rising cities of the Gulf are vertically stratifiedbetween the super-elite inhabiting the cool,airy and prestigious heights of helicopterflights, flyovers, VIP elevators and

Figure 4 The 828-metre Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. Opened in January 2010. It is the world’s tallest skyscraper—fornow (Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=17812395&searchId=aa64abcf0aca61fb01fc7c07d204db11&npos=123; A. Davey Attribution Licence).

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penthouses, and the slave-minions andsocietal outcasts trapped on or below the ter-restrial surface far below. Such circularrelationships between filmic, virtual andmaterial cityscapes become further convo-luted when new cityscapes become the nextmovie sets. Hollywood quickly turned upto use the new landscapes of Dubai as a futur-istic set for its next iteration of sci-fi andaction epics.

Indeed, Dubai is so redolent of the stage setsof many sci-fi movies that it may even be sup-planting the need for stage or digitised sets forfuture sci-fi films. Michael Winterbottom’sdystopian portrayal of a starkly segregatedurban future in Code 46 (2003), for one,simply intercuts scenes of Dubai—as well asShanghai, Hong Kong, Seattle and London—to stand for its global archipelago of high-tech, hyper-surveilled interiors and abandonedperipheries.54 In 2015, it was announced thatthe latest Star Trek movie—Star TrekBeyond—was going to be largely set inDubai. ‘We came searching for the future andfound it’, Jeffrey Chernov, one of the film’sproducers, reflected.55

Retro sci-fi Shanghai

‘Shanghai is a city hungry for the future. Toget a taste, head to the heights of the financialdistrict in Pudong’s Lujiazui. At dusk, theview from the ninety-first floor of theShanghai World Financial Center isfantastically alien. Outside the enormouswindows, the metropolis stretches out like anoff-world fantasy; a film apparition of ascience-fiction city.’56

In China, meanwhile, Blade Runner’s retro-futurism and retro-noir—itself influenced ofcourse by orientalist Western imaginationsof Asian cities such as Hong Kong andTokyo at night57—have in turn hugely influ-enced the architecture and design of fast-ver-ticalising cities. With modernist beliefs inlinear progress toward prosperity throughnew technology and architecture maintainedin aspects of Chinese culture, long after

their abandonment in the West, such influenceshave combined with influential memories ofChina’s—and especially Shanghai’s—pre-communist cosmopolitanism.

As in the Gulf, Shanghai’s great leap intothe sky since the mid-1990s—the greatestconcerted construction of vertical architec-ture in human history—has been shaped byhistoric ideas of the vertical future as well asa desire by elites that such efforts will, inturn, allow the city to emerge as the globalicon of urban futurity in the 21st century.‘Shanghai’s ambition—to emerge as thegreat metropolis of the 21st century—requires not only that it impart what is inthe future but also, more fundamentally,that it transforms the very idea of what thefuture might mean.’58

To Western eyes, the architectural futurismin Shanghai’s extraordinary vertical growthspurt directly seems to invoke historic,Western ideas about future urbanism embo-died so powerfully in ‘retro’ aspects ofBlade Runner’s futurism (Figure 5). The468-metre Oriental Pearl Tower, completedin 1994, is a pivotal example here. Thetallest tower in China until 2007, the towerwas built to symbolise the massive verticalconstructions that followed it in the new dis-trict of Pudong. It is now the most importantarchitectural icon in Shanghai.

Recalling American 1950s pulp sciencefiction, Cold War TV towers and ‘spaceneedles’ like the one built in Seattle in 1962,once built, the tower seemed, in philosopherAnna Greenspan’s words, like ‘an apparitionof a future that had already past’.59 She inter-prets this as the result of the city’s elitesworking to ‘fill in’ the ‘lost’ period of culturaland urban dominance and futurism thatcoincided with the communist period betweenthe city’s ‘golden age’ in the 1920s and the com-munist party’s reforms in the mid-1980s.

Many of Shanghai’s skyscrapers built sincethe Oriental Pearl Tower mimic its retro-futurism. Roof top restaurants withindensely clustered forests of outrageous sky-scrapers are shaped like UFOs. At night, daz-zling digital screens and neon lights festoon

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flyovers, river boats, towers, skyscrapers andhistoric buildings. These create carefullychoreographed futuristic lightscapes whichrefract ominously through the hot hazysmog created by China’s pollution crises.

‘This futuristic new skyscraper glows green,then purple, then yellow, then red as it curls toa height of more than 2000 feet’, Dave Taconwrites on the opening of the ShanghaiTower, the world’s second tallest skyscraper,in 2015. ‘It’s no wonder that its present hascome to double as the future in films such asthe Academy Award-winning Her and theBruce Willis blockbuster Looper.’60

Meanwhile, fleets of driverless, high-techtrams, monorails, subways and MAGLEVtrains seem to directly mimic historic Westernfantasies of future mobility. Expo pavilionsdisplay classic Western sci-fi films on repeat;

elites shelter from the lethal air within air-filtered bubbles. Visitors to the startlinglyverticalised and mediatised landscapes of con-temporary Chinese megacities, meanwhile,commonly remark on how closely the experi-ence feels to inhabiting an upscaled BladeRunner set.61 In both cities, journalists, travel-lers and bloggers compete to draw or imagethe most obvious resonances with BladeRunner and other classic sci-fi movies.

Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, ‘wouldhave fitted right in with the apocalyptic citys-cape in Ridley Scott’s film,’ journalist CathUrquhart wrote in 2005, ‘while Shanghai’ssmog and flashing billboards make it a deadringer for the Los Angeles of the movie.’

A travel blogger, meanwhile, responding toShanghai’s multi-coloured and vertical night-scapes, reflected that ‘it was just like Blade

Figure 5 Night-time view of the Oriental Pearl Tower, along with other illuminated skyscrapers, in Shanghai’s Pudongdistrict. The photographer uploaded this and other images onto the skyscraper city website under the title ‘Blade Runner:Nighttime Edition’ (Source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1163669; R@ptor, Attribution Licence).

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Runner, without Daryl Hannah trying to killme with her thighs’.62 And a visitor who put avideo of Pudong at night seen from the top ofa skyscraper up on YouTube in 2013 com-mented that ‘the only thing missing is flyingcars!’63

The often thick and polluted atmospheresof Shanghai and Beijing only add to theirallure as live imitators of Blade Runner sets.One image of a large video screen showingads through the murky air atop a largetower in Beijing went viral around theworld in 2015 precisely because it so closelyresembled scenes from the film (Figure 6).

Contemporary Chinese megacities, thus,gain a good deal of their power over Westernimaginations through their role as whatSwedish media theorist Amanda Lagerkvist,calls a ‘hyper-representational landscape’. Bythis she means that they offer cityspaces care-fully shaped to achieve their ‘allusion to theposition that towering cities occupy in thescience fiction genre’.64 The allusions are sopowerful that tourist companies in Shanghaieven offer ‘Blade Runner nights’ joggingtours to Western tourists which are routedthrough the city’s most Blade Runner-esque

landscapes. Meanwhile, the ‘Shanghai Synco-pators’—a group of British singers—give con-certs containing classic songs from the 1920sand 1930s heyday of cosmopolitan Shanghai,combined with songs from the Blade Runnersound track.

It is important, though, to interpretChina’s spectacular urban futurism as agreat deal more than merely an uncannydeja vu for Western tourists filtered, nodoubt, through the lenses of a long historyof Western orientalism. Such an interpret-ation is prey to accusations of a crass ethno-centricism. As philosopher Anne Greenspanstresses, whilst naive utopian futurism haslong been discredited in the West, weshould not see the sci-fi futurism of Shanghaior Beijing as merely some Chinese replace-ment for long-dead Western modernist cul-tures. Rather, she argues, China’s dynamismand confidence—linked to its very differentcultures and sense of history and time—relate powerfully to its own faith—or atleast the faith of its elites—in an absolute(rather than relational) futurism.

This is manifest in China’s obsession notwith running period expos demonstrating

Figure 6 Beijing: ‘This is not a scene from Blade Runner’: a video screen shows ads through the polluted gloom atop alarge tower in Beijing, 2015 (Source: Photo by Marty Halpern).

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the sorts of futures where progress mighteventually lead, but with building entire set-piece cityscapes, at almost any economic,social or ecological cost, as futuristic visionsmaterialised in the here and now. Ratherthan linking specific technologies or urbanlandscapes to a time in the putative future,then—as in Western modernism—China’selites remodel its verticalising cities by reani-mating a lost futurism without reference tolinear notions of time.

In such a model, invoking sci-fi futurismworks as the model for central, set-pieceurban megaprojects precisely because acentury or more of cultural work has beenmade by traditions of sci-fi media. Theseallow the present landscapes of Shanghai,Beijing and other Chinese cities to become avirtual realm infused retroactively with theeffects of previously imagined sci-fifutures.65 ‘The future is not only a prospect,it is physically located here, in Pudong’,Amanda Lagerkvist stresses. ‘And in thatsense it is now.’66

Contesting sci-fi cityscapes

Real and imagined sci-fi cities, finally, offerpowerful opportunities for progressivelychallenging contemporary urban transform-ations. Occasionally, as with GeorgeOrwell’s 1984, they end up framing a wholecontested political world. Struggles againstintensifying surveillance across the worldrely heavily on invoking Orwell’s omniscientfigure of ‘Big Brother’ and widely describetrends in surveillance as ‘Orwellian’.

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film MinorityReport—like Blade Runner, based on a PhillipK. Dick story—has also become a standardreference point for those analysing and contest-ing the growth of many types of anticipatoryand pre-emptive surveillance systems thathave paralleled the ‘war on terror’.67

Those contesting the vertically stratifiedclass structures in contemporary cities alsohave a host of sci-fi urban dystopias to invokein their efforts. These offer powerful resources

through which to contest a world where theuberwealthy increasingly cocoon themselvesoff in a raised strata of penthouses, sky-pools,air-filtered domes, luxury decks, and privateaircraft and helicopters whilst oppressedminions—flown in from some of the world’spoorest places in the very ‘planes that carrythe coffins of their forebears—construct andmaintain the airy refuges of the elites frombelow (with often lethal consequences).

One thing here is certain: in the contem-porary world, as architect Pedro Gadanhohas put it, ‘you don’t have to beam yourselfto Mars to envisage a sci-fi urbanism that isconceived in the face of extreme con-ditions’.68 There is a powerful sense, ratherthat the tropes of apocalyptic science fictionare increasingly here and increasingly now.‘The catastrophe is not coming’, the InvisibleCommittee write in their powerful 2008manifesto against neo-liberal globalisation,The Coming Insurrection. ‘It is here.’69

In this vein Andy Merrifield, followingHenri Lefebvre’s 1968 book Le Droit a laVille (The Right to the City) published atthe height of the Paris insurrections in1968,70 is using Isaac Asimov’s discussionsabout fictional planets from his novels inthe Foundation, Robot and Empire series toadd power to his discussions about the urban-isation of planet earth.71

Asimov’s fictional planet Trantor, in par-ticular, offers a startling allegory of contem-porary and near-future earth.72 Its 40 billioninhabitants, for whom green countryside isbut a folk memory, inhabit a single, world-scale city which covers the entire surface ofthe planet. Far below millions of steeldomes rising into the sky, the vast bulk ofthe population inhabits machinic warrensburrowed deep into the crust and continentalshelves. And much of the planet’s social lifeoccurs within deep architectures where lightand air are climate-controlled. Whilstacknowledging that Asimov takes urbanis-ation ‘to the max’, Merrifield—andLefebvre—both stress that its seeds can berecognised in the contemporary urbanisationof our world.

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Perhaps, then, the present needs to be reima-gined as apocalypse so that efforts to mobiliseagainst it can themselves learn from the politicalstrategies deployed in science fiction?73 Acti-vists and urban critics experiencing and con-testing recent cycles of hyper-austereruination and despair in Athens, for one, havepowerfully invoked the city’s experience as akind of ‘science fiction of the present’.

Life in contemporary Athens certainlymimics many tropes of dystopian sciencefiction in the here and now. Civilian liberaland urban life in the city has been assaultedin parallel by systematic immiserisation byinternational financial regimes and systematicrepression by high-tech, increasingly mili-tarised—and often self-avowedly fascist—police. Above all, post-Enlightenmentnotions of future ‘progress’ and modernityhave been systematically reversed.

The increasingly ruinous city seems to con-front an apocalypse straight out of a sci-fifilm—one where the future seems indefi-nitely suspended—but also one curiouslyunnoticed in the outside world.74

Powerful resonances also exist between theanomie of verticalised cityscapes in lived andsci-fi cities. Architect Julian Gitsham of themajor global practice Hassell reflects onhow one scene in Blade Runner underlinesthe worrying level of isolation and anomieexperienced in many verticalised and for-tressed cities. ‘In one scene, Deckard [Harri-son Ford’s character, the main protagonist]drives through town via a tunnel, goes intoa basement car park, takes the lift and goesinto his apartment, all without talking to asingle person’, he writes. ‘When you buildtall, you can become incredibly isolated.’75

In 2003, meanwhile, cyberpunk author,William Gibson, reflected on the pervasiveinvocation of the term ‘Blade Runner’ todescribe the gritty, dense and decayed—yetoften hypermodern—streetscapes of manyverticalising megacities. Gibson even turnedthe term into a verb, suggesting that amulti-tiered expressway in the Roppongi dis-trict of Tokyo—itself used as ‘future cityfound’ in certain scenes in Andrei

Tarkovsky’s classic 1972 sci-fi film Solaris—had since ‘been Blade Runnered by half acentury of use and pollution’; its ‘edges ofconcrete worn porous as coral’.76

However, problems can emerge here pre-cisely because of the deep continuities in theiconography of sci-fi cities over a century ormore. Because it is so common and so easy,the tendency to invoke the vertical gigantismof sci-fi cities in the contested politics of livedones can easily become hackneyed andcliched.

The urban writings of California-basedcritic Mike Davis—with his penchant in hisinfluential books such as City of Quartzand Ecology of Fear77 for what film theoristPeter Brooker has called ‘grimly sublimeapocalyptic rhetoric’78—are clearly influ-enced by noir and science fiction. Despitethis, Davis criticises the ways in whichBlade Runner was so lazily invoked as a dys-topian depiction of the kind of hyper-corpor-ate and radically inegalitarian urban shiftsthat characterised Los Angles in the late1980s.79 ‘Virtually all ruminations about thefuture of Los Angeles,’ Davis wrote in 1990,‘now take for granted the dark imagery ofBlade Runner as a possible, if not inevitable,terminal point of the land of sunshine.’

Davis is unconvinced by suggestions thatBlade Runner is a simple dystopian alter-ego for LA, even though the film is notionallyset in that city (in 2019). This is preciselybecause the film seems to offer up merely apostmodernised re-hash of the urban gigant-ism served up by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in1927 (which, in turn, relied on thinly veiledcopies of the skyscrapers depicted by 1920sUS Futurists like Hugh Ferris).

Davis is especially sceptical of the rathercliched use of the common trope of vertica-lised science fiction—from Wells through toBlade Runner and beyond—to offer up thefuture city relying merely on the idea of‘everything swollen up to vast proportionsand massive beyond measure’.80

A final issue is that many sci-fi cityscapes,offered up as dystopian cities, offer a senseof beguiling possibilities as well as hellish

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nightmares. In the early 1980s, Western plan-ners were in the throes of replacing the cleanand sterile functional city of modernistutopias with visions of cities restored withdense, pedestrian-friendly and vibrantstreetscapes. This meant that, when thethronged and teeming street life of BladeRunner’s streets hit the cinema screens in1982, to many urban professionals, ratherthan some chilling dystopia, the film actuallybecame a normative model of a desired city tobe planned for. By 1997, ‘three out of fiveleading planners agreed that they hoped thatLA would someday look like the film BladeRunner’. Rather tongue in cheek, Australianplanner Stephen Rowley suggests, ‘ifvibrancy and vitality are what we’re after,there is a lot to like about this fictional LosAngeles of 2019. It has plenty of street-levelconvenience retailing and restaurants.’ And‘the nightlife looks fantastic’.81

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Lucy Hewittwhose excellent research between 2010 and2012 laid key foundations for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reportedby the author.

Notes

1 See Stephen Graham, ‘Life Support: The PoliticalEcology of Urban Air,’ City 19, nos. 2–3 (2015):192–215 and “Luxified Skies: How Vertical UrbanHousing became an Elite Preserve,” City 19, no. 5(2015): 618–645. See also Stephen Graham,Vertical: The City from Above and Below (Londonand New York: Verso, 2016).

2 Syd Mead and Patrick Sisson, ‘Meet Syd Mead, theArtist Who Illustrates the Future,’ Curbed, July 23,2015, http://curbed.com/archives/2015/07/23/syd-mead-city-architecture-blade-runner-design-future.php

3 See Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham, ‘VerticalCities: Representations of Urban Verticality in 20th-

Century Science Fiction Literature,’ Urban Studies52, no. 5 (2015): 923–937; Donato Totaro, ‘TheVertical Topography of the Science Fiction Film,’ OffScreen (August 2010): 14, http://offscreen.com/view/vertical_topography

4 In the sub-genre of super-hero sci-fi cartoons, novelsand films, meanwhile, the sudden ability of thevarious protagonists—Batman, Superman,Spiderman and their ilk—to transcend gravity byflying through the forests of skyscrapers, is little lessthan the very means to (repeatedly) save the city—orthe world—from malign attack. See Scott Bukatman,Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen inthe 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2003).

5 In some sci-fi films—Blade Runner and Elysium arenotable examples—the elites have shifted so far‘upward’ as to be ‘off-planet’ altogether inhabitingextra-terrestrial colonies.

6 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’Commentary 40, no. 4 (1965): 42, at 44.

7 Efraim Sicher and Natalia Skradol, ‘A WorldNeither Brave Nor New: Reading DystopianFiction After 9/11,’ Partial Answers: Journalof Literature and the History of Ideas 4, no. 1(2006): 151–179, at 153–154, 174.Philosopher Slavoj Zizek called the news imagesof the burning World Trade Center ‘a specialeffect which outdid all others’. Slavoj Zizek,Welcome to the Desert of the Real(New York: Verso), 11.

8 See Hewitt and Graham, ‘Vertical Cities,’ 928–932.9 Herbert George Wells, When the Sleeper

Awakes (London: Penguin, [1910] 2005), 42.10 Ibid., 162.11 Ibid., 193 and 196.12 Metropolis was based on an original novel of the

same name by Thea von Harbou.13 Cited in Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten, Fritz Lang:

Die Stimme von Metropolis (Berlin: Henschel,1990), 9.

14 David Desser, ‘Race, Space and Class: The Politicsof the Science Fiction Films,’ in Alien Zone II: TheSpaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. AnnetteKuhn, Vol. 2 (London: Verso, 1999), 80–96.

15 As in many vertical sci-fi films, the arrogance andvulnerability of those in power is shown using vastskyscrapers clearly inspired by the biblical myth ofthe Tower of Babel—a building whose top was toreach Heaven (from Genesis 11), but which wasultimately destroyed by a wrathful God. See AntonKaes, ‘The Phantasm of the Apocalypse: Metropolisand Weimar Modernity,’ in Noir Urbanisms:Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. GyanPrakash (New York: Princeton University Press,2010), 17–30.

16 Desser, ‘Race, Space and Class,’ 82. H. G. Wells,who was not happy with his When the Sleeper

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Awakes, actually criticised the extreme verticalstratification in Metropolis, as ‘stale old stuff’. Citedin Dietrich Neumann, ‘Before and After Metropolis:Film and Architecture in Search of the Modern City,’in Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis toBlade Runner, ed. Dietrich Neumann (Munich:Prestel, 1999), 35.

17 Fritz Lang, Metropolis (Paramount Pictures, 1927).18 J. G. Ballard, High-Rise (London: Jonathan Cape,

1975), 10.19 Ibid., 9.20 Ibid., 14.21 Rick McGrath, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise:

Adventure Thru Inner Space,’ May 2004, http://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/highrise.html

22 Along with ‘Blade Runner-esque’, ‘Ballardian’ is acommon adjective in contemporary urban andcultural criticism. Martin Amis, ‘High-Rise Review,’New Statesman, November 14, 1975, http://sdicht.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/high-rise-review-by-martin-amis-1975/

23 Ballard, High-Rise, 53.24 Ibid., 15, 27.25 Ibid., 9.26 Ibid., 43.27 Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity

Remade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 76.28 Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (New York: Ace

Books, 1988), 215.29 British Marxist critic and writer Raymond Williams

points out that, historically, ‘out of the experience ofthe cities came an experience of the future’.Raymond Williams, The Country and the City(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 179. Seealso Robert Crossley, ‘The Grandeur ofH. G. Wells,’ in The Cambridge Companion toScience Fiction, ed. Edward James and FarahMendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2007).

30 This distinction was first identified by Darko Suvin,Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poeticsand History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1979), 27.

31 Susan Sontag, quoted in A. O. Scott, ‘MetropolisNow,’ New York Times Magazine, June 8, 2008,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08wwln-lede-t.html?ref=philip_k_dick

32 Mark Fisher, ‘Things to Come,’ Frieze Magazine,December 17, 2014, http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/things-to-come/

33 See Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the ScienceFiction Genre,’ College English (1972): 372–382.

34 See Peter Brooker, ‘Imagining the Real: BladeRunner and Discourses on the Postmetropolis,’ inThe Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of aScience Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker(New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), 213–224.

35 Sicher and Skradol, ‘A World Neither Brave Nor

New.’ See also Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desertof the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 andRelated Dates (London: Verso, 2002).

36 As well as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Blade Runner’sinfluences were wide-ranging: Mayan pyramids;the architecture of the Italian Futurist AntonioSant’Elia; William Hogarth’s engravings of streetlife in 18th-century London; Hong Kong at night;and the work of French comic book artists (notablythe Metal Hurlant—‘Heavy Metal’—series and JeanGiraud’s—pen name ‘Moebius’—Incal series).

37 Cited in Michael Webb, ‘“Like Today, Only MoreSo”: The Credible Dystopia of Blade Runner,’ inFilm Architecture, ed. Neumann, 44–47, at 44.

38 Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012), 41–42.

39 Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008)and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

40 Blade Runner’s teeming street scenes were filmed ina dramatically updated Hollywood set depicting aManhattan street built initially in 1929. Many criticsthus interpret the film as a futuristic film noirexaggeration of New York as much as of LA.

41 Sisson, ‘Meet Syd Mead.’42 Marcus Doel and David Clarke, ‘From Ramble City to

the Screening of the Eye,’ in The Cinematic City, ed.David Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 141.

43 Aaron Barlow, ‘Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities:Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the ContemporaryScience Fiction Movie,’ in The Blade RunnerExperience: The Legacy of a Science FictionClassic, ed. Will Brooker (New York: WallflowerPress, 2005), 43–58, at 43.

44 Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The VirtualSubject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.

45 British Film Institute, ‘Blade Runner Day at BFISouthbank’ (n.d.), http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4fc75d98f0212

46 William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003.47 Artist Fatima Al-Qadiri also helped coin this term.48 Even some within the real estate industry admit that

many contemporary skyscrapers are laden with‘environmental’ features and discourses that arenothing but ‘ornament or greenwash’. WilliamMurray, ‘Selling Tall: The Branding and Marketingof Tall Buildings,’ Council for Tall Buildings andUrban Habitat (2012), http://global.ctbuh.org/resources/papers/download/261-selling-tall-the-branding-and-marketing-of-tall-buildings.pdf

49 Natalie Olah, ‘Gulf Futurism is Killing People,’ Vice(n.d.), http://www.vice.com/print/the-human-cost-of-building-the-worlds-tallest-skyscraper

50 Cited in Ibid.51 Middle East Online, ‘Syd Mead Praises

Dubai’s Foresight, Ambition,’ February 21, 2005,http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=12769

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52 The idea had to be withdrawn, however, as itbecame clear that the winds of the Jetstream at thatheight would make the building structurallyunsound. See Sammy Medina, ‘Straight Out of Sci-Fi: Cyberpunk Author Plans Tallest Skyscraper Ever,’Fastcodesign, October 1, 2013, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018510/straight-out-of-sci-fi-cyberpunk-author-plans-tallest-skyscraper-ever

53 Quoted in Sarah Noal, ed., The Architecture ofAdrian Smith SOM: Toward a Sustainable Future(Sydney: Images Publishing Group, 2015), 29.

54 This follows a long tradition in sci-fi filmmaking ofusing futuristic or brutalist cityscapes and buildingsas sets when filming. See Yasser Elsheshtawy, ‘TheProphecy of Code 46: Afuera in Dubai, or OurUrban Future,’ Traditional Dwellings andSettlements Review (2011): 19–31.

55 Jon Gambrell, ‘Filming Begins in Dubai for NewMovie “Star Trek Beyond”.’ Associated Press,October 2, 2015, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/5a37f2e182834954b2d6daca98d89b8b/filming-begins-dubai-new-movie-star-trek-beyond

56 Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: ModernityRemade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), iii.

57 ‘Los Angeles of 2019 can indeed be read as HongKong on a bad day’, cultural analyst Wong KinYuen argued in 2000. Wong Kin Yuen, ‘On theEdge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell,and Hong Kong’s Cityscape,’ Science FictionStudies (2000): 1–21, at 4. See also Chi HyunPark, ‘Orientalism in U.S. Cyberpunk Cinema fromBlade Runner to The Matrix’ (PhD thesis, Universityof Texas at Austin, 2004), https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/2159

58 Greenspan, Shanghai Future, xv.59 Ibid., xxiv.60 Dave Tacon, ‘Shanghai: The City that Changes the

Way you See the Future,’ CNN.com, November 12,2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/11/travel/shanghai-future-trip-that-changed-my-life/

61 See Amanda Lagerkvist, ‘The Future is Here: Media,Memory, and Futurity in Shanghai,’ Space andCulture (2010).

62 Both cited in Amanda Lagerkvist, Media and Memoryin New Shanghai: Western Performances of FuturesPast (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 63.

63 Culveyhouse, ‘Shanghai’s Pudong Skyline.’64 Lagerkvist, Media and Memory, 63.65 Greenspan, Shanghai Future, xix–xx.66 Amanda Lagerkvist, ‘Future Lost and Resumed:

Media and the Spatialization of Time in Shanghai,’The ESF-LiU Conference (2006), http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/020/009/ecp072009.pdf

67 See Cynthia Weber, ‘Securitising the Unconscious:The Bush Doctrine of Preemption and MinorityReport,’ Geopolitics 10, no. 3 (2005): 482–499;

Alberto Toscano, ‘The War Against Pre-terrorism:The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection,’ RadicalPhilosophy 154 (March/April 2009).

68 Pedro Gadanho, ‘Taken to Extremes,’ in BeyondScenarios and Speculations, ed. Pedro Gadanho(Amsterdam: Sun, 2009), 9–14, at 11.

69 Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (LosAngeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).

70 Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit a la Ville (Paris: Anthropos,1968).

71 See Andy Merrifield, ‘The Urban Question UnderPlanetary Urbanization,’ International Journal ofUrban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (2013):909–922.

72 Issac Asimov, Foundation (London: VoyagerPaperback, 1955).

73 See David Cunningham and Alexandra Warwick,‘Unnoticed Apocalypse: The Science FictionPolitics of Urban Crisis,’ City 17, no. 4 (2013):433–448.

74 See Crisis-Scape.Net, ed., Crisis-Scapes: Athensand Beyond (2014), http://crisis-scape.net/images/conference/CrisisScapesConferenceBookWeb.pdf; NasserAbourahme, ‘Ruinous City, Ruinous Time: FutureSuspended and the Science Fiction of the Present,’City 18, nos. 4–5 (2014): 577–582; and the2014 documentary Future Suspended, https://vimeo.com/86682631

75 Rakesh Ramchurn, ‘Building Brave New Worlds:The Architecture of Sci-fi Movies,’ Architects’Journal, December 3, 2014, http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/culture/building-brave-new-worlds-the-architecture-of-sci-fi-movies/8673490.article

76 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York:Putnam), 146.

77 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future inLos Angeles (London: Vintage, 1990); Mike Davis,Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination ofDisaster (New York: Macmillan, 1998).

78 Brooker, ‘Imagining the Real,’ 219.79 Mike Davis, Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, the

Ecology of Fear (Westfield, NJ: Open Media, 1992).80 Ibid.81 Stephen Rowley, ‘False LA: Blade Runner and the

Nightmare City,’ in The Blade Runner Experience:The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. WillBrooker (New York: Wallflower Press, 2005),203–212, at 203.

Stephen Graham is based at the School ofArchitecture, Planning & Landscape, New-castle University. Email: [email protected]

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