Cyberpunk Cities

Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory

Carl Abbott

Abstract I want to start with the sort of thing that science fiction is known for. John Shirley’s novel
City Come A-Walkin’ (2000) opens with a compelling metaphor—idea—extrapolation. A tall
The science fiction subgenre of cyber-
figure in trench coat, hat, and shades comes stalking into Stuart Cole’s down-market bar in
punk developed in the 1980s and 1990s
with a strong interest in urban settings. A San Francisco’s tenderloin. It is The City, the over mind and avatar of San Francisco itself.
reading of important cyberpunk novels
shows the way in which the ideas of for- Cole [stepped outside and] listened to the city . . . . What he was looking for was
mal urban theory, such as the idea of there. It was the presence of the city, the gestalt overpattern uniting its diversity, the
global cities, cities as communication sys- invisible relationship between the broken glass in the gutter and the antenna on
tems, and the Los Angeles school of the limousine. . . . The presence was there, outside. But the personality, the sense
urban studies, have been incorporated of willful intelligence supporting the hum of city activity . . . was indoors, embodied
into this facet of popular culture. The in a man waiting in Cole’s club. (Shirley 2000, 30)
analysis suggests that science fiction can
help planners to understand the influ- “City” draws energy from the psychic activity of “hundreds of thousands of very falli-
ence of a range of social theories on
public understanding of planning issues. ble people” and from the electronic currents of the metropolis along its “electrical
neural channels, the interlinked buildings and the loci, the nexus.” City takes human
Keywords: science fiction; cyberpunk; global form at night, commandeers televisions during the day, and controls the networks of
city; urban theory wires and pipes that constitute the infrastructure of the city. Shirley depicts a gritty San
Francisco of seedy rock clubs, porno shops, and cheap apartments and makes its avatar
a manipulative, seductive, and dangerous tough guy—a literal cybernetic punk. It’s fight-
ing the suburbanization that’s undermining the concentration of energy that keeps it
alive and ends up a “beautifully verminous, sweetly squalid, supple but hard-edged pres-
ence” that trades blow for blow with the Mob (Shirley 2000, 127, 129, 149).
John Shirley was present at the beginning of what has been called cyberpunk sci-
ence fiction. When he wrote City Come A-Walkin’ in the late 1970s, he was as far into
the punk scene as you could go and still produce a coherent novel–rock musician,
Carl Abbott is a professor of Urban Studies omnipresence in the underground scene in Portland, wildman, writer. Fellow novel-
and Planning at Portland State University. ist William Gibson (2000) has called him “cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the
He has written extensively on the history virus” of hot-edged, plugged-in science fiction.
of cities and city planning. His most Why should serious scholars of American urban development pay attention to an over-
recent book is Frontiers Past and Future:
Science Fiction and the American West, and written piece of pulp fiction that is stuffed with gratuitous violence, padded with extrane-
he is currently finishing a book manu- ous chase scenes, and permanently stranded in the genre ghetto of science fiction?
script titled How Cities Won the West: From The answer is that City Come A-Walkin’ and much other science fiction has impor-
the 17th Century to the 21st Century. tant clues to the ways that Americans think about urban life and urban development.
Science fiction is not really about predicting the future. Instead, it’s a format for seri-
ous and sometimes outrageous reflections about the past and present. Like other
imaginative writers, SF practitioners hold up mirrors to their own experiences and
Journal of Planning Education and Research 27:122-131
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X07305795
© 2007 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning

122
Cyberpunk Cities 䉳 123

social surroundings. The difference is that science fiction ignore. Max Page (2005) has examined the repeated fictional
uses mirrors that are distorted with extrapolation and specu- destruction of New York and I have elsewhere considered the
lation. The result is like a fun house—reflections that obscure urban implications of atomic age apocalypse stories (Abbott
some aspects of “reality” but highlight others. 2006a), both with the goal of understanding the dimensions
I take as given that the only way that we can think about and character of American anti-urbanism. Eric Avila (2004)
the future is through our understanding of the past and pre- has shown how the fears and motives of white flight to subur-
sent. Every story about a possible future, whether a demogra- bia can be read in space invasion movies of the 1950s.
pher predicting population ten years hence or a speculative For planning educators, science fiction can be a tool to
writer imagining the next millennium, is a projection of some engage students’ imaginations. Many of us use mainstream
aspect of human history. In every instance, the concepts that novels and films in the classroom as a way to give depth and
we deploy and the behaviors that we imagine derive from our immediacy to planning issues (Leigh and Kenney 1996).
experience of the present . . . and from our knowledge and Planning students (at least those in my classes) are frequently
interpretation of the past.1 comfortable with speculative thinking. They grew up playing
Readers have long known that the problems and worries of Sim City and video games, they watch science fiction movies
the day quickly find their way into science fiction: stories about and television, and they’re familiar with the fantasies of
technology as a cure for economic depression in the 1930s, Japanese manga and animation. To start a conversation about
allegories about the Red Menace in the 1950s, responses to the the power of nostalgic middle class ideals in American culture,
Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, environmental disaster for one example, ask why Sunnydale, California, the fictional
scenarios in recent decades. These connections are a staple for town that Buffy the Vampire Slayer repeatedly saved from the
science fiction criticism, which pursues the lines of influence forces of evil over several television seasons, has bungalows,
and argument among politics, social change, and fictions of cemeteries, and a cute downtown but no slums or shopping
the future. Writer and critic Samuel Delany (1999, 343) has mall—and why it resembles the town that was ground zero in
argued that “SF is not about the future . . . . It works by setting the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
up a dialogue with the here-and-now, a dialogue as rich and Science fiction can also contribute to planning pedagogy
intricate as the writer can make it.” Thomas Disch (1988, 91) by offering insight into the social and cultural assumptions
writes that “science fiction is not about predicting the future that constrain the possibilities of plans and planning in the
but about examining the present.” Those who ignore the past, specific context of the contemporary United States. Thinking
in other words, can have no conception of the future. about speculative futures does not help planners write better
As the fun house metaphor suggests, there is a special findings on a zoning variance application or facilitate a com-
value in looking at science fiction. Science fiction writers uti- munity meeting about bicycle planning. It does help students
lize accepted narratives of the past and common understand- and educators to deepen their “understanding of human set-
ings of the present to frame their visions of the future, but tlement as it relates to planning based on knowledge of the
they do so in extreme forms. Their futures are far reaching in relevant concepts and theories from . . . social sciences . . .
time, crammed with speculations about new technology, and including knowledge of the social and spatial structure of
full of serious and satirical extrapolations of social trends. Just urban and regional systems. . . . and effects of globalization”
as historical analysis is one of the tools available for real world (Criterion 4.2.1. [a] of the Planning Accreditation Board
planning (Abbott and Adler 1989), imaginative analysis of standards for graduate planning programs). Speculative fic-
future histories can play a role in framing planning issues. tion is also one of many ways to “anticipate and envision
Science fiction is thus a particularly interesting and useful future changes to society and the built environment”
way to surface some of the implicit understandings that lie (Criterion 4.2.2 [d]).
beneath the surface of our society, and even our scholarship. Readers who remain skeptical might note that urban plan-
One specific goal of this article is to suggest ways to introduce ning and speculative fiction about urban futures both
such theory to students and readers by using fictional sources in emerged from the crisis conditions of late nineteenth-century
conjunction with the standard academic literature. A second is industrial cities. The last decades of that century produced a
to highlight one of the ways in which the ideas of planning wave of cataclysmic thinking (Jaher 1964) ranging from
and social science make their ways into popular culture. Josiah Strong’s statistics-laden attack on immigrant-filled
A number of scholars have been exploring the assump- cities in Our Country: Its Present Crisis and Possible Future (1885)
tions and ideas about U.S. cities that are embedded in specu- to Ignatius Donnelly’s dark fantasy of urban anarchy in
lative fiction, using the mirror of SF to better understand Caesar’s Column (1891). On the optimistic side, the same con-
what Americans think about themselves. Mike Davis (1998) text also produced Jules Verne’s posthumously published
has written about Southern California disaster fictions, argu- technological fantasy Paris in the Twentieth Century (1996) and
ing that they betray an underlying social unease that Los Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889), a positive utopia
Angeles boosters and public officials have long tried to that inspired a political movement in the United States and
124 Abbott

helped to fertilize the imagination of Ebenezer Howard as he and a hard-driving rock-and-roll sensibility. Female characters
worked on To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). channel Joan Jett, not Stevie Nicks. William Gibson, one of the
In addition to utopian and dystopian narratives, more- key figures in the field, cites Lou Reed as an influence. Bruce
over, planning history and theory has long accommodated Sterling describes Schismatrix (1986) as “bare bones, like a
what we might call design science fiction. The Radiant City of Ramones three-minute pop song: we’re not going to have any
Le Corbusier, the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright, and pretentious light shades of pale guitar noodling here, it’s going
the fantastic Arcologies of Paolo Soleri are all extrapolations to be ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker,’ blam, blam, blam, let’s move
of the possibilities of new technologies and new cultural val- on” (McCaffery 1990, 228).
ues. As Robert Fishman (1977) has written, these are urban The early cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s is a circum-
utopias. Their presentation is pictorial rather than verbal, but scribed subgenre in which the plot lines and sensibility of the
their purpose is to speculate about the sort of city we might down-and-out detective story are used to tell stories that posit
build if we were to take certain innovations (like the tele- direct machine-brain interactions that often lead to ventures
phone and automobile for Wright) and think through their or adventures in virtual realities. The heroes are computer
possible implications. It is no accident that Hugh Ferriss’s hackers, weary cops, marginal musicians, and streetwise
dreamscape drawings of a future Manhattan in The Metropolis young women. Their opponents are corrupt executives,
of Tomorrow (1929) and the great Fritz Lang movie Metropolis crooked cops, and psychopathic enforcers. There is careful
(1927) share the same visual rhetoric—because both are attention to the details of daily life: language, fashion, archi-
types of science fiction. tecture, drugs. The telling is always fast-paced. And the lines
Science fiction thus marks a far end in the array of ways blur. Some of the human protagonists are cyborgs with phys-
that planners can think about the future. As Dowell Myers ical and neural enhancements. Sometimes the computer net-
and Linda Kitsuse (2000) have very usefully described, plan- work spawns its own self-aware intelligence. In the 1990s, the
ners construct the future with a variety of methods. They pro- genre lost some of its distinctiveness, contributing much of its
ject current patterns and utilize trend lines to forecast future sensibility and many of its coinages to the field at large. Some
conditions. They develop verbal and graphic scenarios that writers added nanotechnology and the manipulation of bio-
show the likely effects of different planning assumptions. logically coded information to electronic data systems. The
They engage in planning as the construction of persuasive shared interest is to explore the implications of information-
stories about the future (Throgmorton 1996). In most based or programmable technologies.
instances, these efforts and exercises are heavily empirical, The influences on this sort of science fiction are multiple.
involving the adjustment of key variables within structured Literary cousins and progenitors include William Burroughs
models of land use or transportation demand. However, and Philip K. Dick, with their marginal heroes and interest in
much of their value may lie in opening planners and citizens altered states of consciousness. More direct influence is the
to a wide range of future possibilities. Citing the pioneering noir approach to crime novels and movies that is closely asso-
commentary by Warren et al. (1998), Myers and Kitsuse ciated with California. One of the most curious spin-offs is
include a role for science fiction as one of the more radical Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), which
and comprehensive means for accomplishing this latter goal. follows all the conventions and plot elements of the classic
As a contribution to the conversation about urban futures, noir detective story but takes place in a near-future Oakland
I want to use science fiction set in the early and middle of designer drugs and sentient genetically engineered ani-
decades of the twenty-first century to uncover a particular set mals. The mob enforcer is a young punk kangaroo who
of ideas about the problems and character of American cities throws a mean punch.2 If you look closely at cyberpunk sto-
that have currency and imaginative resonance. There is no ries, you’ll also see the shadows of Joan Didion, Robert Stone,
claim that the ideas and images of science fiction are accurate Don DeLillo, and especially Thomas Pynchon, whose novels
reflections of objective circumstances, but they influence the walk the edge between the mainstream and the fantastic.
public imagination and therefore help to construct the envi- William Gibson, an American transplanted to Vancouver,
ronment for planning. is the best known of the cyberpunk writers. Starting with
At the center of my particular discussion is the subgenre Neuromancer in 1984, he initiated a long series of overlapping
commonly known as cyberpunk science fiction (Warren et al. novels and stories about “console cowboys” and “street samu-
1998). Emerging in the 1980s, a set of writers tried to integrate rai” who move back and forth between cybernetic and mater-
“the realm of high tech and the modern pop underground.” ial underworlds. John Shirley has already been introduced.
Continuing to quote SF writer Bruce Sterling (1986, xi, xiv), Neal Stephenson (who still writes in longhand) has con-
cyberpunk combined “visionary intensity” with attention to tributed Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1996).
cultural minutia and “willingness to carry extrapolation into Bruce Sterling has been a key figure as writer, anthologist,
the fabric of daily life.” It blends ideas about the potential of and advocate. Names on the margins include Linda Nagata,
information technologies with nighttown visions of urban life Nicola Griffith, and Pat Cadigan.3
Cyberpunk Cities 䉳 125

What sort of urban world do these writers construct for The cyberpunk genre developed contemporaneously with
the 2030s or 2050s ?4 world city theory, and its authors have most often set their sto-
First, it is a world that world city theorists would find famil- ries in the global cities of Tokyo, New York, and London.
iar. Over the past twenty years, urban scholars have These are the nerve centers, control centers, information
responded to the growing scale of global flows of goods, cap- nodes—the places you need to be to stay in touch, to be part
ital, and labor by arguing that the world economy is central- of the action. Whether your work as a cyberpunk protagonist
ized within a small number of world cities or global cities is legitimate or illegitimate, these are the places where the
(Friedmann 1986, Savitch 1990, Sassen 1991/2001). This bosses live and operate. Cyberpunk cities are fast-paced and
view was clearly stated by John Friedmann (1987, 493), whose often dangerous to individual characters, but they are the
concern was to explain “the contemporary system of global centers of economic and social change. They are places of
capital accumulation and its spatial articulation through a sys- motion, change, and opportunity that are exciting and
tem of ‘world cities.’” World cities are characterized by con- deadly at the same time—the bigger and faster the better for
centrations of international banks, multinational corporate plot twists and vivid action.
headquarters, and supporting experts. Decisions are made Here is one example of many: William Gibson opens All
about the allocation and use of capital on a world scale and Tomorrow’s Parties (1999, 4) with squatters in the dark corners of
transmitted through hierarchically organized institutions and the Tokyo subway system, one of whom is also plugged into com-
communication networks housed in smaller and secondary manding knowledge of the global communications matrix. That
cities. World city “command posts” radiate “a web of elec- character remarks that “It’s all going to change. . . . We’re com-
tronic conduits and air corridors across the globe” (Savitch ing up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all
1990, 150). The greater the availability of telecommunica- going to change.” Gibson thus places Tokyo, of all possible
tions, argue theorists such as David Harvey (1989) and points in real space and cyberspace, as the center of the future.
Manuel Castells (1989), the greater the concentration of con- Nicola Griffith’s Slow River (1995) uses the setting of the London
trol functions and the consequent power of world cities. Docklands to represent that city as an economic decision point.
Some writers have pursued this topic by trying to measure Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), set in London, New York,
and describe the evolution and structure of the world hierar- Tokyo, and Moscow, revolves around the hyper-communication
chy. Taking a historical approach, Anthony King (1990, 7) has of advertising, branding, and style.
explored the ways in which the world city system emerged These are the socially bifurcated cities that Sassen has deftly
from the linked development of colonialism and industrial pinned to the specimen board. Some cyberpunk protagonists
capitalism, finding colonial cities “instrumental in creating are members of the corporate elite and its business service aux-
the space in which today’s capitalist world-economy operates” iliaries. The fictional protagonists fit into the global city model.
by introducing western values, capitalist business organiza- Some are suppliers of specialized services. They are advertising
tion, and industrialized systems of production.5 Geographers consultants, media stars, market analysts, journalists, program-
such as Paul Knox and Peter Taylor have worked to develop mers, but always operating on the economic margins where
precise measures of the degree to which specific cities are fads, fashions, and feuds can make or break careers. At the
engaged internationally and the patterns of influence among other end of the socioeconomic scale are bicycle messenger,
such international cities (Knox and Taylor 1995, Taylor 2003, pizza delivery kid, private detective, bodyguard, and other mar-
Taylor and Lang 2005). ginal service workers. The contrast provides food for thought
Other scholars have focused on the internal conse- about the future of planning, for these are imagined cities in
quences of the world city system. Saskia Sassen’s Global Cities which the professional and managerial middle class—historically
(1991/2001) remains one of the most detailed presentations. the core constituency for urban and regional planning—has
She has described New York, London, and Tokyo as a sort lost its economic and political relevance.
of three-headed capital of the world economy, “centers of Another warning signal for thinking about the future of
finance . . . [and] for global servicing and management” planning is the fact that government is nearly as absent as the
(1991/2001, 324). Sassen’s work is also representative in its middle class—or present only to be bamboozled by the multi-
attention to the internal consequences of world city status, national puppet masters. In Snow Crash (1992), Neal
including the rearrangement of land uses in the service of Stephenson depicts the federal government as simply one
corporate elites and the emergence of a supporting class of among many competing multinational organizations that has
low paid service workers to tend the everyday needs of that a hard time standing up to Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong
elite. She is among a number of scholars (Ross and Trachte (also see Warren et al. 1998). For urban planners, whose work
1983, Savitch 1988, Beauregard 1989) who have examined remains deeply tied to government programs and regulations
the inequities of dual labor markets for elite workers and sup- despite strong efforts to more fully engage with private mar-
port workers, the costs of office core expansion, and the ket mechanisms and to foster nongovernmental community
assimilation of immigrants as phenomena exaggerated by the action, this is a sobering (even if satirical) way to envision the
intensity of change within world cities. future.
126 Abbott

Second, these world cities—in theory and in fiction—are The Bridge is home to a cross section of the bad and the
places where communication not only drives the plot but takes good, drug addicts, and thieves, but also eccentrics and
over the very fabric of buildings and infrastructure. Sterling, dropouts and artists. It is a squatter town equivalent of the
Gibson, and others have taken to heart the admonition of Strip, but also a metaphor for the excitement and risks of art.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Stephen Izenour At night it glows with scrounged and recycled lights. To a
(1972) to learn from Las Vegas. They use strong visual images Japanese anthropologist, it is a place of discovery and magic:
to picture neon cityscapes full of blaring advertisements, street “Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the
vendors, bars, shops, and crowds and recycle the dreamscape walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass,
of Las Vegas in their real and virtual settings. There is loving sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peel-
attention, as Dani Cavallero (2000, 138) writes, to “detail and ing in the salt air” (Gibson 1993, 62–63).
assemblage . . . . The aesthetic and psychological impact of In conceptualizing cities as communication systems, sci-
their sprawling megalopolises derives from both a keen eye for ence fiction writers touch on a long-established theme in
the minutiae of settings and architecture and a concern with urban theory. A generation ago, for example, Richard Meier
the multifarious ways in which these fragments coalesce.” tried to frame A Communication Theory of Urban Growth (1962)
Gibson supports the view by noting that one of the inspirations while Seymour Mandelbaum (1965, 1972) used communica-
for Neuromancer was the video arcades along Vancouver’s tion theory as a framework for understanding the functional-
Granville Street. He has described his work as “stitching ity of historical and contemporary urban systems. More
together all the junk that’s floating around in my head,” recently, William J. Mitchell (1995, 1999, 2003) took time
mental junk that he accumulates by browsing thrift shops for from his quite respectable day job to publish three imagina-
entertainment (McCaffery 1990, 140). tive books that combine description of new communication
In Stephenson’s Snow Crash the Metaverse infinitely repro- and information technologies with speculations about their
duces the Las Vegas Strip, the district that epitomizes a real city impacts on human behavior and built environments in both
that has been helping to “start the twenty-first century” near and far futures. The title of the second volume—E-Topia:
(Rothman 2002). The Metaverse is the virtual world where “Urban Life, Jim–But Not As We Know It”—pays direct homage
characters take on cybernetic identities. They can chat, plot, to the world of television SF. His forecasts and projections are
fight, or enjoy themselves. But they do so along a nearly infinite much more firmly grounded than Star Trek transporter rooms
highway that in different parts is a super Broadway, a hypertro- and cyberpunk adventures, but he is engaged in the broad
phied Wilshire Boulevard, and a vast suburban commercial enterprise of speculation and extrapolation.
strip. One can create buildings, parks, signs, “as well as things Third, cyberpunk SF largely accepts the world that Andre
that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light Gunder Frank has envisioned in Re-Orient: Global Economy in the
shows.” The heart of the Metaverse, its Downtown, is “garish Asian Age (1998), a book that argues that China and South Asia
and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from the constraints of have been the center of gravity in the world economy for most
physics and finance.” It is “a dozen Manhattans, embroidered of the past two millennia, with the recent rise of Europe and
with neon and stacked on top of each other”(Stephenson 1992, North America a short term aberration. For the coming cen-
23–24). Some people visit simply to ride up and down the tury, he sees the rise of Japan, the Asian “tiger economies,” and
Street, looking at the sights. It’s a place, after all, just like the the growth of China as a natural rebalancing of the world sys-
Ginza or Times Square or Piccadilly. tem. This is a view shared in part by Manuel Castells (2000),
William Gibson’s vision of future San Francisco centers on who pursues a somewhat different analytical track to argue the
the Bay Bridge, where a spontaneous squatter town has simultaneous rise of the Asia-Pacific region in contrast with
accreted after a quake rendered the bridge unusable. Squatters the decline of the former Soviet Union and the increasing
have built and bolted all sorts of secondary structures to the information-isolation of much of Africa.
frame of the bridge, created their own social rules, and manage Highlighting Asian connections and influence is one more
their own barter economy. installment in the deeply ambivalent history of North
American attitudes toward East Asia. Americans have marveled
Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an over the possibility of East Asian markets, viewed Asia as a
accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly
prime ground for religious missionization, used Asian workers
lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fire-
works, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed as cheap labor, acquired Pacific colonies and possessions as
pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of com- stepping stones, and asserted American national interests by
merce, their locations generally corresponding with the fighting five Asian-Pacific wars since 1898 against Spain, in the
decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above
Philippines, against Japan, in Korea, and in Vietnam. At much
them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the
intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered popula- the same time, Americans have feared the impacts of Asian
tion and its zones of more private fantasy. (Gibson 1993, 25) immigration, leading to formal restrictions on immigration
Cyberpunk Cities 䉳 127

from China and then from Japan. A lurid “yellow peril” litera- admirable book anticipates cyberpunk settings as it careens
ture of the early 1900s was revisited in warnings 1980s about through the emergent Pacific Rim economy circa 1970—
the power of Japan (Prestowitz 1988) and in the present cen- from Vietnam to the East Bay to the American Southwest and
tury about the economic and military power of China (Barnett Mexico. In its trans-Pacific world, Samoan immigrants muster
2004).6 out of the Coast Guard to work for the petty gangsters; San
Embedded in this complex background of attitudes, the Francisco flight attendants smuggle pot from Bangkok; South
cyberpunk century revolves around the Pacific economy. Its Asian women spin topless in seedy bars; Japanese military
protagonists bounce back and forth across the big ocean, con- brides work for Filipino dentists; and the outlaw hero draws
necting Asia and America with the flight paths of airliners and inspiration from Native American warriors and East Asian
passenger rockets. To New York and Tokyo, Neal Stephenson warrior religion.
adds Shanghai in The Diamond Age, Bruce Sterling adds For planners, the multicultural cities of Robert Stone and
Singapore in Islands in the Net (1989), and Linda Nagata adds Neal Stephenson are a pressing challenge. At the theoretical
Saigon in Limit of Vision (2001). On this side of the Pacific, Los level, it is easy to agree with planning theorists like Leonie
Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle are favorite Sandercock (1998, 2003), who argue for the cultural and
sites for cyberaction. Gibson’s (1996) Idoru is typical, taking its intellectual creativity of ethnically diverse “mongrel” commu-
star-struck teenaged protagonist (Chia Pet McKenzie) from nities. At the practical level, planners face challenges of eth-
Seattle to Tokyo, where she interacts with a pop music star nic transition in communities like Compton, California, that
from Taiwan, mobsters from Russia, and Japanese-American change from white to African American and then to Latino
recording technicians from Tacoma and San Francisco. (The (Camarillo 2007), in places like Monterey Park, California,
science fiction part deals with a computer-generated pop “star” where Chinese Americans, Latinos, Anglos, and new Chinese
who begins to take on a life of her own.) immigrants have had to negotiate shifting politics (Fong
In another Gibson novel, the daughter of a yakuza over- 1994, Saito 1998), or in Vancouver, British Columbia, where
lord is hustled off to London for her safety at the start of land use issues were the lightning rod for resentments and
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1989). London is dynamic and interest- fears about wealthy Chinese immigration in the 1980s and
ing, but “it isn’t Tokyo.” It is the past rather than the future. 1990s (Ley, Hiebert, and Pratt 1992).
In England, fragments of the past are meticulously preserved Fourth, cyberpunks also internalize the world of Mike Davis
in “the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth (1990, 1998) and other southern California dystopians, for
of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and mean- poor, beat-up Los Angeles is the favorite city of dystopian
ing, age upon age.” The London economy endlessly recycles futures. In the world as envisioned from Hollywood, it is the
antiques and junk as “a major national resource.” In Japan, battleground in The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991).
the same rubbish is dumped into Tokyo Bay as landfill for the Philip K. Dick set his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
expansion of the city (Gibson 1989, 33, 5–6, 131). There is an in San Francisco, but moviemakers shifted the setting to Los
element of truth to this characterization, for Tokyo is indeed Angeles when they filmed the story as Bladerunner, understand-
rebuilt on the ruins of the 1923 earthquake and 1944–45 fire- ing that the Southern California metropolis has seemed to
bombing. But Gibson is after more, the sense that the epitomize the future. In turn, that movie has become an over-
Japanese are a society that—like Americans—happily plow worked source of metaphors for Los Angeles, reinforcing the
under their past in the pursuit of the future. popular image that it originally drew on.
The theme of Pacific ascendancy can be serious or satiri- Future Los Angeles is commonly divided even more deeply
cal. China is the new technological leader in Greg Bear’s than Saskia Sassen or Manuel Castells fear, with a protected
Queen of Angels (1990). Agents of the New Hong Kong space elite, a marginalized and struggling middle, and the feral poor.
habitat are drugging and abducting San Francisco workers in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in Oath of Fealty (1982) focus
Richard Paul Russo’s Carlucci’s Edge (1995) and the city’s on the socially and economically competent who have isolated
Asian Quarter is the most vibrant and most threatening part themselves in a vast arcology and severed all but predatory rela-
of the city, revisiting the cultural construction of Chinatown tionships with the surrounding city. Neal Stephenson’s Snow
as a danger zone where anything goes (Shah 2001). In Neal Crash, for another example, anticipates a city of burbclaves,
Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), in contrast, Mr. Lee’s each of which hires mercenaries, claims national sovereignty,
Greater Hong Kong is a chain of mini-mart outposts that dou- and enters into security treaties with neighboring burbs.
ble as fortified safe houses. Mr. Lee’s co-owns UCLA with the “Under the provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code,”
Japanese in a send-up of Los Angeles real estate fears. says a Deputy of Metacops Unlimited who has just snared a
To connect this sort of science fiction to more mainstream straying skateboarder, “we are authorized to enforce law,
writing, think about Thomas Pynchon’s semi-fantastic national security concerns, and societal harmony” on the terri-
Vineland (1990), whose plot moves between California and tory of White Columns. “A treaty between The Mews at
Japan. Or recall Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974). That Windsor Heights and White Columns authorizes us to place
128 Abbott

you in temporary custody until your status as an Investigatory a target of yourself, so “Fashion helps. You’re supposed to be
Focus has been resolved.” Another cop translates: “Your ass is dirty now” (Butler 1993, 18). Middle-class families live in con-
busted” (Stephenson 1992, 44). stant fear inside walled suburban cul-de-sacs. Adults venture
In the common backstory, the unprotected families of the outside on jobs or errands, but only in daylight and always on
downwardly mobile middle class live in constant crisis. The watch: “That’s the rule. Go out in a bunch, and always go
polarized and decrepit Los Angeles in Cynthia Kadohata’s In armed” (Butler 1993, 8). Lauren’s walled street of eleven mul-
the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) is set in 2052. This future tiethnic households is somewhere in the San Fernando Valley,
L.A. is leading the downward spiral of the American economy. a sad survivor of the Valley isolationism described by Mike
A new highway system looms unfinished over the landscape, Davis. The whole community learns to handle guns; the only
started “before everything ran out of money, back at the begin- safe respite from the tiny community is a group excursion for
ning of the century.” Now “hardly anybody was as rich as they’d target practice in the surrounding ravines. Lauren’s neighbors
once been” (Kadohata 1992, 2, 8, 33, 124 ). While the college- live to themselves, growing as much food as they can, home-
age protagonist Francie lives off dead-end service jobs, her schooling each other’s children, and acting as a volunteer fire
acquaintances make do with petty crime and an off-books department and security watch, for police protection is now
barter economy. The family house, bought by her great-great- fee-for-service.
grandmother, is now “in a section of town largely abandoned Lauren’s tiny neighborhood, and others like it, is
by anyone who mattered to the country’s economy.” Francie squeezed between the privileged and the desperate. The rich
sometimes wakes to the smell of burning buildings not too live in protected communities or mansions protected by
many blocks away. Meanwhile, the people of “richtown” (her multiple walls, while the poor squat in burned-out houses:
term for places like Brentwood) are increasingly moving to “Up toward the hills there were walled estates—one big house
“camps,” communities “enclosed by high metal fences and and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants
guarded by uniformed, armed men and women.”7 lived . . . we passed a couple neighborhoods so poor that
Kadohata’s previous novel dealt with Japanese Americans their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of
struggling to reintegrate themselves into American society in concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled
the 1950s. For this second book, she imagines a young residential areas . . . squatted in by homeless families with
Japanese American woman in the mid-future rather than the their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children.” And it gets worse, far-
near past. There is nothing comprehensive about her por- ther up into the brown California hills: “There are always a
trayal of American in the 2050s, for Kadohata is more inter- few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living
ested in character than the sort of detailed extrapolation out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rab-
found in much science fiction. She posits unimpressive tech- bits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge what-
nological changes: Foamite floors are soft and warm and a ever dies” (Butler 1993, 9, 38).
pipeline from Alaska helps relieve water rationing, but peo- Butler’s chaotic future Los Angeles embodies the angry
ple still wait at bus stops, use TV remotes, read newspapers on despair with which many observers approach the burgeoning
paper, and wait in line at City Hall. Parking fees remain the cities of the third world. Despite many scholarly efforts to
biggest student issue at the college. Indeed, the lack of fun- explore and analyze the self-organizing capacities of residents
damental change is central part of the message. The city is in the vast informal suburbs that surround many Latin
not incapable of reforming itself. Fifty years hence, Los American, African, and Asian cities, the popular image in films
Angeles is exhausted, a pale reflection of the more exuberant from Los Olvidados (1950) to City of God (2002) and in widely
twentieth century—even more exhausted than in Joan circulated magazines (Kaplan 2000, Packer 2006) remains one
Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), whose alienated character of social disorganization and physical squalor with few hopes
Maria Wyeth has much in common with Francie. Francie’s for improvement (Davis 2006). The Parable of the Sower simply
coming-of-age search is not to find where she fits in this brings this war of all against all across national borders into
a fragmented and enervated society, with its vanishing mid- American backyards. It does so just a step more extremely that
dle class, but to determine whether she is actually “alive”— a “realistic” mainstream novel like T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The
capable of choosing alternatives and shaping herself by moral Tortilla Curtain (1995), where successful members of the infor-
choices (Comer 2003). mation elite decide to wall off their subdivision in the Santa
Societal disaster is even starker in Octavia Butler’s Parable of Monica Mountains at the same time that Mexican immigrants
the Sower (1993) where the extinction of the middle plays out in are living in semi-starvation in nearby ravines.
fire and blood. Lauren Olamina grows up in a collapsing Los We can conclude by circling back to the fun house
Angeles. In 2024, the internal combustion era is over, with rust- metaphor. This article tries to show that the exaggerations,
ing vehicles cannibalized for metal and plastic and three-car extrapolations, and distortions of science fiction give us clues
garages turned into rabbit hutches. In this quiet apocalypse, about the implicit understandings that lie beneath the surface
potable water costs more than gasoline. To be clean is to make of our culture, and even our scholarship. Because it places its
Cyberpunk Cities 䉳 129

characters on the margins of society, the particular subfield of William Gibson does not always display a sense of humor,
cyberpunk fiction adds additional twists to more common but Pattern Recognition amounts to a big joke about communi-
space opera and galactic adventure stories of the Star Wars vari- cation. Its characters are fascinated by a mysterious set of film
ety. At least since the middle of the nineteenth century, jour- clips that circulate on the Web. After weaving grand theories
nalists and novelists have assumed that visits to society’s about new approaches to the cinema, they discover to their
margins (e.g., Orwell 1937) and characters living at its frayed chagrin that the clips are fragments from surveillance cameras,
edges (e.g., Crane 1893) offer the opportunity to challenge the not pieces of art. But wait, there is a second joke. The pieces do
stories that validate the established hierarchies of class and fit together, but as a map of an imaginary city. Peel back the
race. With protagonists who have fallen from the middle many concealments of multinational capitalism and what do
class—or never quite reached it—many cyberpunk stories are you find?—a souped-up version of Sim City (Skeates 2004).
implicit criticisms of the power of large economic organiza- This article has examined ways in which specific urban the-
tions built on their ability to control flows of information. ories are embedded in a specific subcategory of recent science
In many of its facets, cyberpunk also celebrates the power fiction. Reading and discussing science fiction, whether cyber-
of the “Los Angles school” of urban studies, sharing the inter- punk novels or work from other thematic streams, will not help
est in finding a new urban model to replace old industrial a planning student learn how to model transportation demand
Chicago, and they find that model in metropolitan or a practitioner to write up findings on a conditional use
California. Science fiction has always had an affinity with application. Science fiction does, however, have the capacity to
American mythologies of the frontier. Some writers simply engage our imagination in thinking about present problems
transport the metaphor into the future, some structure plots and future challenges, a heuristic function that derives from its
around a westward quest, and others buy into the expectation willingness to take economic, social, and cultural patterns a
that the relatively young and flexible society of western North step beyond their common sense extensions.
American is the most natural place to locate stories about Because the cyberpunk subgenre draws on ideas that
social and cultural change (Abbott 2003, 2006b). They see ascribe power to technological change and global capitalism
the Pacific Rim and its cities as the sites where civilization will as all-encompassing forces, it offers relatively little direct
change—for better or worse—frustrated by the end of old guidance for planners. However, it does suggest the need for
frontiers, revitalized by the unfolding of new ideas. flexibility, for seeing plans as reflexive processes intended as
We do not have to agree with all the expectations of a frameworks for responding to inherent instability. It also sug-
Pacific future, or with all the fears of a fully bifurcated city, or gests the value of creating opportunities for spontaneous and
with the substantive claims of the Los Angeles school to informal social institutions by loosening building codes, pre-
acknowledge their resonance. The issue, for example, is not serving low-rent commercial spaces, and making information
whether the L.A. folks are right or wrong, but that they are infrastructures as ubiquitous and cheap as possible.
claiming attention and erecting signposts that many people Other topics of interest to planners can also be addressed
are noticing and sometimes following onto new avenues of through many of the different facets of science fiction not
investigation. As Robert Beauregard comments, the idea of a explored here. DeWitt Douglas Kilgore (2003), for example,
radical break in urbanization is less an empirical hypothesis has used science fiction to examine ideas about the possibilities
than a metaphor and a call for attention: “Empirical justifica- of an increasingly heterogeneous society as linked to changing
tion is tangential to what is really at stake. More important is patterns of race relations in the United States, a concern that
the work that the claim does in focusing attention, mobilizing fits directly with arguments for retooling planning as a multi-
ideas and research, and challenging the community of schol- vocal undertaking. Forthcoming work by John Cheng uses sci-
ars to re-think the wisdom they have so patiently acquired” ence fiction to explore the meanings of professional
(Beauregard 2006, 220). In this light, we can understand the expertise—a topic of perennial interest in the fields of plan-
appeal to imaginative writers, for the idea of a new Los ning theory and ethics. Pamela Sargent’s (1986, 1988, 2001)
Angeles not only promises action, dramatic contrasts, and trilogy about terraforming Venus and Kim Stanley Robinson’s
new sorts of conflicts to embody in headlong prose but also Mars trilogy raise another set of basic ethical questions about
certifies their stories as part of the cutting edge. the tradeoffs of environmental regulation and protection.8 My
These writers also share the postmodern/L.A. school fas- recent book (Abbott 2006b) explores these same narratives of
cination with the problems of communication in a frag- planetary terraforming to probe the ideas about the character
mented and contingent society. Its imagined cities are big, and capacities of government and its ability to make effective
bad, bifurcated, and baffling. But they can also be spirited plans, both in parallel and contrast to the lines of thought
and specific, sometimes sinful, sometimes suspenseful, but developed by James Scott (1999). Some powerful writers (Le
always stimulating. Cities are great machines for facilitating Guin 1974, Robinson 1990) have similarly probed the possibil-
and channeling communication—and for frustrating com- ities of moving from large and inclusive governments to sys-
munication when race and class intervene. tems of civic life that depend on local contact and direct
130 Abbott

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