Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

After the cities-are-doomed gloom of the 1950’s, as imagined by Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1956) — about which I wrote a two-part post — the 1960’s ushered in a different era of urban pessimism, with the Club of Rome’s frightening pseudo-computerized forecast, The Limits to Growth, and Paul Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian dystopia, The Population Bomb, which practically licked its chops at the thought of the next decade’s grim reaper:

 

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”

 

What worried Malthus in 1798 …

 

… likewise worried Paul Ehrlich in 1968 …

 

… namely, the explosive growth of people

 

Even though population has grown exponentially, neither Malthus nor Ehrlich was right.  Ehrlich in particular claimed that only a New World Order could avert a human cataclysm:

 

“Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

 

Meanwhile, just about the time Ehrlich was spouting brimstone across America’s air waves, science fiction author Robert Silverberg published a series of short stories that he eventually strung together into a most disturbing novel, The World Inside, where the ‘problem’ of overpopulation has been stood on its head.  With commendable contrariness, Silverberg in effect challenged Ehrlich: All right, suppose we have billions of people - who says we can’t feed them?  As he put it in an email to me

 

I may not have had Ehrlich specifically in mind, but I was starting to form the opinion that we could probably manage a much larger population than we had if we halted suburban sprawl, built vertically, and kept our agricultural land for agricultural use.  I wasn’t particularly advocating that, just trying to examine it speculatively.

 

In Silverberg’s 2381, people are breeding like rabbits:

 

“We average 6.2 children per family on this floor.  It’s one of the lowest figures in the building, I have to admit.  High-status people don’t seem to breed well.  They’ve got a floor in Prague — I think it’s 117 — that averages 9.9 per family!  Isn’t that glorious?”

 

Another futurist high-rise dweller on the way

 

“Just because I have a scholar’s detachment, you shouldn’t assume that I disapprove in any way of my cultural matrix.”  Page 4

 

His humans thumb their nose at birth control:

 

“We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be a sick, a cheap, anti-human way out.  Instead, we’ve met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn’t you say?  And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone.  Few die, many are born, and the world fills up, and god is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you can see we are all quite happy.  Page 11

Mr. Silverberg grew up in New York City, and in his building I hear extrapolations of Co-Op City, Starrett City, and Stuveysant Town, with which he was intimately familiar: 

I [grew] up in New York and had plenty of opportunity to see (and occasionally visit) the megaprojects, particularly Stuy Town where Galaxy’s editor lived. 

 

Silverberg’s world has a population of seventy-five billion, which it sustains by constructing enormous arcologies.

An urban acrology, as imagined by Paolo Soleri 

Indeed, he drew raw material directly from Soleri: 

Right around the time I was pondering this, along came Paolo Soleri’s arcology concept, right down to blueprints for giant buildings.  I made a quick trip to DC to see an exhibit of Soleri’s drawings and incorporated his vision right into mine, and away I went.  I wanted to see what the consequences of such a departure from present trends would be, and out of that came my story, 

It’s quite a story.  Each urbmon (urban monad) houses over 800,000 people apiece:

“The building is made of super-stressed concrete.  It is constructed about a central service core about two hundred meters square.  Originally, the plan was to have fifty families per floor, but we average about 120 today, and the old apartments have been subdivided into single-room occupancies.”   Page 8

Though engineering is a huge challenge, it has been solved: 

“Obviously 800,000 people within a sealed enclosure will produce an immense thermal surplus.  Some of this heat is directly radiated from the building through cooling fins along the outer surface.  [Termite mounds]  Some is piped down here and used to run the generator.  In winter, of course, we pump it evenly through the building to maintain temperature.  The rest of the excess heat is used in water purification and similar things.”  Page 9

Apartment flats are almost very similar, and functional:

Mattern’s home is quite adequate.  He has nearly ninety square meters of floor space.  The sleeping platform deflates; the children’s cots retract; the furniture can easily be moved to provide play area.  Most of the room, in fact, is empty.  The screen and the data terminal occupy two-dimensional areas of wall that in an earlier era had to be taken up by bulky television sets, bookcases, desks, file drawers, and other encumbrances.  It is an airy, spacious environment, particularly for a family of just six.  Page 5 

In hindsight, this description is ironic.  While I believe Mr. Silverberg was aiming to project a kind of antiseptic Slums Inside, in fact his futuristic flats are actually larger than many current New York City apartments.  Further, they’re way more livable: because the furniture and appliances vanish when not needed, the working space is quite a bit larger.  If we ever do figure out how to make things manifest and disappear as required, people’s space requirements will shrink dramatically.   

This isn’t how I expected to shrink my space requirements 

Even if we do live in less space, we will still eat and drink as much as now, which means we’ll have to evacuate it all: 

“You press the button for the privacy shield.  We excrete in this.  Urine here, feces here.  Everything is reprocessed, you understand.  We’re a thrifty folk in the urbmons.”  Page 6 

Yet even if we are all one big fecund family, busily breeding on every one of our thousand floors, we will still maintain the human instinct for social stratification, and in a world of elevators, where view improves as the lifts ascend, the better neighborhoods literally look down on their neighbors, for each cluster of forty-floors is its own ‘city’: 

“This is Reykjavik.  Populated chiefly by maintenance workers.  We try not to have too much status stratification, but each city does have its predominant populations — engineers, academics, entertainers, you know.  My Shanghai is mostly academic.  Each profession is clannish.”  Page 10 

To rise in life, you have to rise in floors: 

The liftshaft shoots him 160 levels heavenward.  When he gets off, he is in Rome.  Crowded halls, tight faces.  The people here are mostly minor bureaucrats, a middle echelon of failed functionaries, those who would never get to Louisville except to deliver a report.  They are not smart enough to hope for Chicago or Shanghai or Edinburgh.  Here they will stay in this good gray city, frozen in hollowed stasis, doing dehumanized jobs that any computer could handle forty times as well.  Page 40 

Height does matter.  Just check the difference in office rates as you move up in an office building, or in per-square-foot prices when you buy condos in a Trump tower. 

The higher you go, the higher his price goes 

What’s interesting is the reader surrogate character’s evident distaste for this world: 

“It’s all wonderful.  I could imagine how one little planet with 75,000,000,000 people could even survive, but you’ve turned it into — into –”

“Utopia?” Mattern suggests.

“I meant to say that, yes,” says Gortman.  Page 10. 

Is it a dystopia?  Or is it just the result of high-density urban living?  And it is here, perhaps in his desire to make his world a dystopia, that Mr. Silverberg’s future takes a sharp left turn, with its approach to sex: 

“Do you know our custom of nightwalking?  Doors are not locked in Urbmon 116.  We have no personal property worth guarding, and we are all socially adjusted.  At night it is quite proper to enter other homes.  We exchange partners this way all the time; usually wives stay home and husbands migrate, though not necessarily.  Each of us has access at any time to any other adult member of our community.”  Page 6 

Here’s the ultimate depersonalization of sexuality; not only do these urban dwellers have no personal property of their own — everything folding back into the apartment itself, so they are little more than residential hotels — but people’s bodies are also part of the furniture.  As another of his point-of-view characters (a sociologist) reflected upon it: 

In an urban monad, naturally, no man has a right to withhold his wife from anyone who desires her.  Page 58 

Sex is offered the way you or I would offer a guest a drink: 

Would you like me shaken or stirred, with my peel squeezed or on the side? 

“Forgive me for being over-obvious, but I must bring up the matter of your sexual prerogatives.  We three will share a single platform.  My wife is available to you, as am I.  Within the urbmon it is improper to refuse any reasonable request, so long as no injury is involved.  Avoidance of frustration, you see, is the primary rule of a society such as yours, where even minor frictions could lead to uncontrollable oscillations or disharmony.”  Page 6 

Why such a view?  Again I consulted the oracle itself, the author: 

Just part of the speculative process.   I figured that either privacy would have to be maintained at gunpoint or given up entirely under such conditions, and my storytelling instinct told me to go for the latter. 

Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, who said (in 1999!): “You have zero privacy anyway.  Get over it.”   

I have seen the future, and it’s seen me 

Silverberg’s future urbanites have not simply gotten over it, they’ve been genetically pruned to get over it: 

There has been a monumental change in sexual morality in the past three hundred years, and it cannot be explained only on cultural grounds.  We are different, he tells himself.  We have changed, and it is a cellular change, a transformation of the body as well as the soul.  They could not have permitted, let alone encouraged, our total-accessibility society.  Our nightwalking, our nudity, our freedom from taboos, our lack of irrational jealousies, all of this would have been wholly alien to them, distasteful, abominable.  Page 74 

This urbanity – in both senses – is maintained by a titanium fist inside a sterile glove:

 

The truth is that if he didn’t escape from Michaela and their five littles every day, he’d go flippo.  That is, accumulated frustration and humiliation would cause him to commit non-social acts, perhaps violent ones.  He is aware that there is no room for the non-social person in an urban monad.  He knows that if he loses his temper and heaves in a seriously unblessworthy way they will simply throw him down the chute and turn his mass into energy.  So he is careful.  Page 57

I re-read The World Inside every few years.  Though its story line is wispy, something about his human hive is endlessly absorbing, both fascinating and deeply disturbing.  Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window toyed with urban voyeurism as an inescapable feature (bane and benefit) of high-rise living,

Whether we’re shocked or enthralled, it was there for our viewing

but The World Inside took it a step further.  If we are surrounded by our fellow beings in every direction, at every moment of our existence, we may choose to conceal or flaunt ourselves but we are unlikely to have secrets for long.  So unless we are all to be obsessed voyeurs of each other, we might as well shed our historical prudery and accept that anything about us can become visible to all of us.

We today may not like such a world, but it is coming upon us whether we like it or not.

 
In the future, you won’t need a zoom lens to peep your neighbor

 

 

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