The ultimate future city: Cities in Flight: Part 2, city economics
Continuing our occasional series on the
The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg, 12/07
Diaspar, The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke, 3/08
Opinions change with age; otherwise, what is age for?
– James Blish, in The Triumph of Time, page 504
James Blish and his children, mid-1950s’
Yesterday’s post, one of our series on the ultimate future city, introduced James Blish’s Cities in Flight, who provide the knowledge transfer and wealth generation of an entire galaxy, as
“Do you know what a bee is? It’s a prime factor in cross-fertilization of plants. The bee doesn’t know that he’s essential to the ecology of his world – all he’s out to do is collect as much nectar can – but that doesn’t make him any less essential. The cities have been like the bee for a long time. The governments of the advanced planets, earth in particular, know it, even if the cities generally don’t. The planets distrust the cities, but they also know that they’re vital and must be protected. “ 399
3. Cities and cops in the economic ecosystem. Cities, as mission entrepreneurial entities, keep the galactic ecosystem healthy. They are therefore protected – the ecosystem needs them – but they must stay financially healthy, for bankruptcy means not just insolvency but physical dissolution:
It may seem heartless to dissolve an entity, but …
Before bankruptcy, the alternative was the poorhouse, from which few emerged undamaged
“According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed. It’s essentially a humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city manages from taking bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half the Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in charge.” 337
The system works only because the rule of law applies not just to workers but also to the enforcers:
“I’d have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the corps for that ‘treason’ charge.” 287
Outright piracy is rare because the cities need the galactic society to thrive:
“The pirates eventually died out, thousands of years ago, when sailing ships were replaced by fueled ships. The fueled ships were faster than sailing vessels, but they couldn’t themselves become pirates because they had to touch civilized ports regularly to coal up. They could always get food of some uninhabited island, but for coal they had to visit a real port.” 292
Blish here highlights an important dynamic relevant to our world. If thieves, criminals, and terrorists can operate completely outside the civilized system, they have the ability to retreat to deserted islands – but if they need the technological benefits of civilized society, eventually civilized society can develop admission and regulatory procedures to hunt down the pirates.
We can’t get nice clothing from a hole in the wall
Blish’s worker cities are citizens, with rights and the expectation of rights, and that’s an important element of balance in the power relationships with the cops:
“The law prescribes that participating cities be broken up. The full penalty will be applied.”
“No, it won’t either, any more than it is in ninety-four cases out of a hundred. We’re not a raiding force and we aren’t threatening Earth with anything but a couple of good loud beefs. We’re here because we couldn’t hope for a fair deal any other way. All we want is justice. We’re citizens, not crooks. We want justice done us, and we’re coming on in to see that it gets done.” 410
An essential of citizenship: demanding justice from one’s government
As I’ve posted elsewhere, non-government entities also have their useful role of being agents on behalf of government, where government transfers risk and pays only for results.
“You [cops] don’t risk a thing. Either I deliver the planet to you, or I don’t. If we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.” 270
4. Rogue cities and the shared interests of civilized entities. In every ecosystem there are parasites, free riders, who exploit the brand value of pollinating bees, and Blish’s universe has such rogue cities:
“[Bindlestiffs are] the kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name. Most Okies are true hobos; they work for their living wherever they can find work. The bindlestiff lives by robbery – and murder.” 290
As in other situations, both cops and cities have a shared interest in running the bindlestiffs out of business:
We can’t make a living if the bindlestiffs predominate
“The planets are tough on bindlestiffs for the same reason. The bindlestiffs are diseased bees; the taint that they carry gets fastened upon innocent cities, cities that are needed to keep new techniques and other essential information on the move from planet to planet. Obviously, cities and planets alike have to protect themselves from criminal outfits, but there’s the culture as a whole to be considered, as well as the safety of the individual unit; and to maintain that culture, the free passage of legitimate Okies throughout the galaxy has to be maintained.” 399
Over the years, I’ve read Cities in Flight four or five times, previously just for sheer entertainment, but when I hauled it off my shelf to collect the quotes for this post, I found myself hitting paragraphs like that one and thrilling with satisfaction. Cities, in Blish’s universe, are not only the agents of commerce, they are also the custodians of culture.
This has been true throughout history. The Medici were urbanists.
If we have a Renaissance, I can make more money
The Renaissance was hatched in cities; so was the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution. (Religions may be inspired by hermits and born in deserts, but political revolutions start in cities – St. Petersburtg,
Cities, in short, drive technology, and they drive culture.
What drives the city?
5. What is the soul of a city? Blish started his series out of rapture for his premise, and wrote Earthman, Come Home as a series of serialized novellas, but even from the beginning he incorporated the role of computers. Blish’s City Fathers, basically a massive CPU in the basement of City Hall somewhere, are described in sketchy early 1950’s terms – they run on vacuum tube, for goodness’ sake! – as huge lumbering boxcars of circuitry that actually shuttle about, coupling and uncoupling to make synaptic connections.
It looks like this …
But it thinks like these
Nowadays, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for; they stored data. Living mean memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines. 319
They are an adjunct to decision-making, something important when life spans have extended to centuries:
The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers — if he were insane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the insane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked on answer over another. 319
Perhaps because mayors could become insane autocrats, the City Fathers have a curious role as a check on the executive. Although only advisory – a mayor can turn them off, and Amalfi several times does – they also adjudicate the results of elections, and when displeased can remove a city manager from office (by shooting him dead, as happens to one of Blish’s protagonists). Despite this, Amalfi and others see them as little more than electronic abacuses:
“Let’s put the whole problem up to the City Fathers. I have always found them useful for resolving doubts. In questions involving value judgments, it’s helpful to have an opponent who is not only remorselessly logical, but also can’t distinguish between a value and a Chinese onion.”
On this point, of course, he was wrong, as he found out rather quickly. He had forgotten that machine logic is a set of values in itself, whether the machine knows it or not. 571
A value system even if all unknowing
Blish also endows them with unexpectedly poetic memory banks:
‘If this be the whole fruit of victory, we say: if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, to protract in saecula saeculorum their contended and inoffensive lives – why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.’ The Will to Believe, by William James. 474
William James: I will believe in a better future
There comes a moment, whose plot significance I will not spoil, when the City Fathers are consulted about a matter of great importance, to which they respond with a remarkable display of what Amalfi calls ‘the prime rationalization of all time’:
“Contradiction. Third factor. Take us.”
“Justify,” said Amalfi, a little unevenly.
“Our prime directive is the survival of the city. The city no longer exists as a physical organism, but we are still being consulted, hence the city in some sense survives. It does not survive in its citizens, since it no longer has any;’ they are new Earthmen now. We conclude that we are the city, and we are ordered to survive by our prime directive; therefore, take us.” 572
I grew up in a pleasant suburb –
It’s not an illusion: people walk faster in cities, like Dharavi, Mumbai
As Amalfi says, at another apologetic moment:
“Mind you, Miramon, I hold out no hope, but –”
“—except the hope you hold out,” said Miramon, his eyes shining. “Now I am hearing from you what I hoped to hear. This is the voice of Earth of memory.” 518
Hope is a phenomenon of cities. So is creativity. So is squalor, injustice. Cities in Flight is more than just a story of the far future; it’s a clarion call for the twenty-first century, and a motto for what we want human society to be.
That was unknowable. But the unknowable was what he wanted.
There was no reason to delay. Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.
“So be it,” Amalfi said. He touched the button over his heart.
Creation began. 596
Not just a vision, a motto
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