Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

 

Author’s note: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the last of science fiction’s original Big Three, died yesterday at the age of 90.  Three weeks ago, I was in Colombo, where Clarke lived, and in the very brief period when I wasn’t working with the Slum Dwellers International folks, several colleagues and I strolled to dinner at the Galle Face Hotel, in whose lobby there’s a plaque honoring Clarke, who in 1997 resided there for three intense weeks while banging out his novel 3001.

 

 

I always thought of Clarke as ageless and sexless.  I knew he was infirm, and his writing had wound down, so what with my busy-ness and not wishing to try to foist myself upon him as a minor science fiction writer, the thought of trying to find him never crossed my mind, particularly as the work I was doing on formalizing and improving slums seems unimaginably far from Clarke’s futures.  Yet his novel The City and the Stars, which presents a particularly Clarke-ian vision of the future of homo urbanis, in its own way stands as something to which humanity may aspire, or which humanity may achieve.

 

I’ve had this post in inventory for some time, thinking it timeless.  Today it is in some sense one day too late.  So let this post stand in lieu of an obituary of an author whose best work I greatly admire and repeatedly recall, an author who changed what science fiction was, who changed many people’s vision of the future, and along the way contributed to my thinking about housing and cities.

 

Science fiction of the Nineteen-Fifties was strongly influenced, I think, by World War II.  For the first time, cities themselves had become vast battlegrounds, and were comprehensively destroyed.  While Hiroshima and Nagasaki put the final punctuation mark on warfare in the urban environment, the firebombing of Dresden, the house-to-house battles of Stalingrad, and the London Blitz had all shown that in aerial and mechanized warfare, cities became targets for destruction.

 

London, 1940

 

This shift — from redoubt to ground zero — represent a sea change in human history, because before World War II, cities had been spared warfare.  (This trend will continue in the twenty-first century, where war will invest itself in cities that become permanent low-level battlegrounds among sub-national micro-groups.)  Whereas in the second war Berlin and London were targets for incendiaries and ordnance, during World War I they were brightly lit fleshpots of R&R.  Further back in time, cities were the targets of siege, not of shelling.

 

The world had never experienced technological urban warfare

 

The result, in the 1950’s, was that science fiction took on the urban future as its topic.  Previously I’ve posted three times about science fiction’s cities:

 

·         First about Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), where humanity lives in overly dense grim hives.

·         Then about The Naked Sun (1956), where wealth has let a handful of sybarites cover a whole world.

·         Most recently, about Robert Silverberg’s highly disturbing The World Inside (1970), where humanity has embraced fecundity and its consequence, vertical density.

 

Common to all these visions is the presumption, indeed the axiom, that the urban environment shapes not only society but human interaction itself.  Nowhere is that thinking more explicitly presented than in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, the germinal idea of which was published in 1950 as Against the Fall of Night.  

 

Imagine how different Clarke’s story was from those published with it

 

From its opening paragraphs, the novel leaps into a far future time where the exoskeletal city itself has become protector of society and the fragile human society within:

 

 

Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert.  Once it had known change and alteration, but not Time passed it by.  Night and day fled across the desert’s face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came.  The long winter nights might dust the desert with desert, as the last moisture let in the thin air of Earth congealed — but the city knew neither heat nor cold.  It had no contact with the outer worked; it was a universe itself.

 

Neither the novel nor Mr. Clarke himself ever explained how he chose the name, but its echoes of diaspora, of people uprooted from their homes, that serves as an unstated counterpoint to the story’s manifest message of shelter.

 

Men had built cities before, but never a city such as this.  Some had lasted for centuries, some for millenniums, before Time had swept away even their names. 

 

A good candidate for the oldest continuously inhabited city is Damascus, which has traceable habitation perhaps 4,000 years. 

 

Even in 1677, Damascus had been occupied for nearly 4,000 years

 

Diaspar alone had challenged eternity, defending itself and all it sheltered against the slow attrition of the ages, the ravages of decay, and the corruption of rust.

 

Since the city was built, the oceans of Earth had passed away and the desert had encompassed all the globe. 

 

A city surviving for even multiple millennia is rare enough, so one lasting a million years is likely to be more than just luck — it takes management.

 

The last mountains had been ground to dust by wind and rain, and the world was too weary to bring forth more.  The city did not care; Earth itself would crumble and Diaspar would still protect the children of its makers, bearing them and their treasures safely down the stream of Time.  Page 3.

 

In Mr. Clarke’s conception, human memory is fallible and tradition is fickle.  Yet Diaspar keeps its nervous system intact:

 

The monitor was now recalling its memories at a far higher rate; the image of Diaspar was receding into the past at millions of years a minute….  Through all these changes, the basic design of the city had not altered.  Buildings came and went, but the pattern of streets seemed eternal, and the park remained as the green heart of Diaspar.  Page 75.

 

My favorite example of the persistence of vision effect as it relates to streets is in lower Manhattan, near Battery Park. 

 

When the Dutch settled Manhattan, the lower tip was their most accessible and defensible point, so naturally New York’s great main roads (such as Broadway) begin here.  

 

Many cities start with a fort on a point of land

 

Then came the ferries, which tied up at Battery Park because that was where the city was.  Then, when it came time to build the bridges and tunnels, sure enough they ran right through Battery Park, because that was where the major streets were. 

 

The sea and streets were the same seventy years ago

 

Each layer of network and nervous system braided into the established one, even as the buildings were torn down and built higher, ever higher.

 

A nerve center for 350 years, and still green

 

Yet, for all its persistence, the time scale I’ve just described is only 350 years.  If the ultimate future city is to preserve its imprint of itself for multiple millennia, it must have an incorruptible and eidetic guardian.  Enter Mr. Clarke’s favorite protagonist, the computer:

 

“Diaspar is not merely a machine, you know — it is a living organism, and an immortal one.  We are so accustomed to our society that we can’t appreciate how strange it would have seemed to our first ancestors.  Here we have a tiny, enclosed world which never changes except in its minor details, and yet which is perfectly stable, age after age.  It has probably lasted longer than the rest of human history — yet in that history there were, so it is believed, countless thousands of separate cultures and civilizations which endured for a little while and then perished.  How did Diaspar achieve its extraordinary stability?”

 

“Through the Memory Banks, of course,” he replied.

 

Though wags suggested Clarke derived H-A-L from taking one letter off of I-B-M, he himself denied it.

 

“That is only a very small part of the answer.  With exactly the same people, you could build many different patterns of society.  I can’t prove that, and I’ve no direct evidence of it, but I believe it’s true.”

 

Here Mr. Clarke’s vision diverges from his contemporary Asimov: he seems to be positing that even if its coral skeleton is immutable, the people within it are permutable.  He goes so far as to imagine that the people of Diaspar have fixed their numbers in absolute terms.  No deaths — when a body has accumulated enough experiences, the person goes to the Memory Banks, edits out unpleasant or dross memories, and stores his personality electronically, heading into a sleep of many centuries.  Although Diaspar’s notional population might be ten million (as I recall, the author himself never specifies), at any given time only 1/1000th of them are alive at any one point, so the subset animate population is always a new shuffle of the psychological, intellectual, and cultural deck.  Even this constant aeration is, however, merely a diversion, simply a chance to create new combinations within tightly circumscribed limits.  Diaspar’s denizens sought stability at all costs:

 

“The designers of the city did not merely fix its population; they fixed the laws governing its behavior.  Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot change outside of narrow limits.”  Page 42.

 

Though culturally static, Diaspar as an adult’s Disneyland, where everything is imaginable and nothing Is dangerous:

 

They were not bored, for they had access to everything that had happened in the realms of imagination or reality since the days when the city was built.  To men whose minds were thus constituted, it was a completely satisfying experience.  That it was also a wholly futile one, even Alvin did not yet comprehend.  Page 30.

 

A city in perfect stasis is a dull place for a story, so Mr. Clarke combines his amateur sociology with its storytelling imperatives and introduces an out-of-whack-event maker:

 

I’ll play the fool, to fool the king

 

The office of Jester was the solution — at first sight naïve, yet actually profoundly subtle — which the city’s designers had evolved.  In all the history of Diaspar there were less than two hundred persons whose mental inheritance filled them for this peculiar role.  They had certain privileges … on rare and unforeseeable occasions, the Jester would turn the city upside-down by some prank which might be no more than an elaborate practical joke, or which might be a calculated assault on some currently cherished belief or way of life.  Page 51.

 

Diaspar needs the Jester because it lacks children as the eternally randomizing element.   And it lacks something else:

 

There was now no woman in Diaspar who knew or cared for what had once been the final aim of love.

 

So central we deify it

 

This is a very curious conception for an author who himself never had any children and whose marriage was exceedingly brief, almost perfunctory.

 

There were no real emotions, no deep passions, in the immortal city.  Perhaps such things only thrived because of their very transience, because they could not last forever and lay always under the shadow which Diaspar had banished.  Page 165

 

The shadow of death?  The shadow of birth?  We never learn, for there is very little story in The City and the Stars aside from its conception of the immortal city, self-preserving through its inanimate computer guardian.  Yet there is a curious linkage because Mr. Clarke’s antiseptic Diaspar and Mr. Silverberg’s bountiful urbmons.  Both of them assume that the human reproductive urge is a powerful driver not only of civilization but also of urbanization — that we make cities in order to be fruitful and multiply beyond nature’s un-technological bounty.  At the same time, whereas Mr. Silverberg’s world is so consumed with procreation that every form of leisure is sacrificed, Mr. Clarke’s is so consumed with eternal leisure that procreation itself is banished as unnecessary.

 

For Mr. Silverberg, homo urbanis is a baby-making swarm; for Mr. Clarke, homo urbanis is urbanely childless.  Despite their antithetical approach to the child-rearing problem, by taking their imperatives to their logical conclusion, they have respectively produced cities that are as much dead ends as Asimov’s antipodes of the enclosed steel caves or the wide-open empty spaces populated by narcissistic recluses.

 

In the eternal city, we watch each other watching each other

 

Postscript: Arthur C. Clarke had no children.  His progeny were exclusively in the realm of ideas, and in the realm of ideas they will live on long after him.

 

Another ultimate future city: the ship Discovery

 

Send post as PDF to