Dystopian Cities of the Future

      The prospect of an age where Earth's cities and the civilization that builds and inhabits them fall into ruin or dysfunction is as old as literature itself.  Even before "the grandeur that was Rome," the Book of Genesis speaks of the annihilation of the Tower of Babel by a heavenly power that also strikes the Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah.  Plato mentions the annihilation of Atlantis.  Later, archaeology discovered physical evidence of vanished cities, from Pompeii to Mohenjo-Daru to Tikal.  When not expressly destroyed by the hand of God, these troubling cityscapes posed intriguing mysteries for humans who tried to grasp the significance of their downfall and whether a similar fate awaited many a modern metropolis.

     H. G. Wells brought the ruined city into science fiction in several of his works.  War of the Worlds has London and all the other capitals of Earth utterly destroyed by Martian invaders.  Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast and subsequent film versions brought the same fate to New York, Los Angeles, and Washington in stunning technicolor.  The Shape of Things to Come and The Time Machine show a similar downfall of civilization wrought by the hand of mankind itself, leaving survivors scuttling about to survive in sewers or crumbling buildings.  Wells opened the door to a vision of dystopia that resonnated particularly with the nuclear generations that did not need to imagine the horrors of the Blitz, the Dresden and Hamburg firestorms, or Hiroshima.  Reality more than reinforced the possibility that the "proud towers in the town" would one day stand watch over a desperate and degraded human race struggling in their decaying remains.

     The 1973 film Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison's chilling 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, moved the image of the dystopian city of the future even closer by showing that it could happen not through some interplanetary or geopolitical catastrophe, but simply by the natural evolutionary trends of human population explosion.  Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, and Leigh Taylor-Young portray people crammed into a mega-city to live like rats in confined quarters and polluted conditions, ultimately ground into sustenance for the cannibalistic survivors of the species.  Harrison's rabble are even more helpless than Wells's Eloi, who were bred as food for the atavistic Morlocks, since they become degraders and consumers of themselves.

      Above all, the post-Apocalyptic visions of the 1980's brought a deluge of possibilities ever more immediate than Soylent Green's 1999 timetable.  In John Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York, the Big Apple is already rotten at the core and uninhabitable, except as a hellish prison where only a total desperado like Snake Plissken can thrive.  One year later, Ridley Scott would release Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, featuring a nearly psychedelic presentation of moldering Los Angeles teeming with leftover Asians and such genetic misfits as Germanic dwarves, inhabiting the cyclopeian fragments of sodden skyscrapers.  

     What captures our attention today, though, is a different prediction of the corporatization of the city depicted in a pair of simplistic and sensational (yet unusually prescient) Italian sci fi films directed by Enzo Castellari: 1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx (aka The Bronx Warriors, 1982) and Fuga dal Bronx (aka Bronx Warriors 2 or Escape From the Bronx, 1983).  Capitalism plays a more direct and apparent role in the urban system in these movies than in most predecessors.  Through manipilative real estate schemes, financial powers actually design the degradation of the existing city from Castellari's viewpoint.  

     Castellari's Bronx was not entirely visionary, moreover, since it already existed in a ruined form.  The Italian filmakers had only to go into the streets of the delapidated borough without having to construct expensive sets.  Through a combination of parastic landlords, drug culture, white flight, financial redlining, political corruption, and related phenomena, the Bronx had already transformed itself through a "natural" evolution into a dystopia.  This was merely the most photogenic possibility available for the opportunistic Italians, since similar forces had long been at work in other American centers, albeit not in such a remarkably convenient fashion.  Most commonly, vast areas of urban waste typify America's "sprawl cities," bloated population centers unconfined by natural boudaries of water or terrain that relentlessly expand to devour surrounding counties.  One thinks of Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit, for example.  As the most desirable homes and business locations increasingly move toward the periphery, concentric rings of blight are left behind, surrounding a skyscraper core that becomes a dead zone by night.  Without a policy of real estate renewal, homes and buildings fall into disrepair, become crack houses, and are burned down or squatted by addicts, gang members, dealers, runaways, petty criminals, and homeless folk.  The Bronx situation was somewhat different from this pattern in several ways, but nevertheless it served as a more-than-adequate tableau for the futuristic projections of Castellari and company.

     The antihero of the Bronx dyptich, a stolid biker named Trash, is the focus of Bronx activity.  His crew, the Riders, reign over an anarchic area disputed by a colorful assortment of other gangs, spanning a variety of members that range from inarticulate mutants to roller bladers to some who look like rejects from A Chorus Line.  Their Bronx has no normal economic activity, lacking even providers of food, drink or gasoline.  Having once lived on the edge of one of these "commodity deserts" in Philadelphia, I can attest to the fact that this unlikelihood is all too true in today's America and that human beings somehow manage to put up with it, even if it means carrying weapons to go to the distant grocery store or planning a virtual commando raid to fill the gas tank.  As in Castellari's films, it is a fact of life that Big Capital simply declares parts of our cities "off limits," chokes off the economic activity, and only sends in its police watchdogs under rules of engagement that would prevail in Kabul or Baghdad as much as in South Central.  

     After Trash's fellow Riders are killed off in a bloody holocaust at the end of the first film, he becomes an urban nomad who is forced into a vengeful pact with some anarchist psychopaths to seek for retribution against a capitalist militia that barbecues his parents.  A single real estate giant has managed to gobble up title to the entire Bronx and is forcefully removing or exterminating the remains of its population in preparation for a huge construction project.  All of this is somehow motivated by undescribed financial forces, but in today's world of virtual chicanery and cryptofinance, such lack of detail becomes surprisingly plausible.  Of course, another bloodbath "concludes" the film, without restoring anything of value to Trash or his fellow displaced persons and without doing any discernible damage to the business forces behind the hardship.  

     This lack of specificity has turned out to be eerily prescient.  The actual Bronx has been, in fact, largely torn down and replaced with more lucrative (for the time being) investments, a New York real estate heir has become POTUS, and the primitive Bronxers have disappeared into the fetid pool of American economic failure, removed to graveyards, carcerial institutions, or new economic dead zones that are developing just now.  If anything, Castellari's prophecy is itself transforming into a kind of cultural ruin as new economic developments push the dystopian vision into a new phase.

     What captures our attention today is the corporatization, not just of the tenement jungles like the old Bronx, but of the entire spectrum of American urban and increasingly suburban housing.  A greater and greater fraction of habitable American real estate is slipping out of the hands of individuals and families and into the hands of corporations.  The housing and mortagage crisis of 2008 brought more attention to this rapidly accelerating trend.  Its roots, nonetheless, go further back.  One notable contributor was the collapse of the Savings and Loan institution and the displacement of all mortgages into the coffers of banks or collatoralized credit institutions.  This marked an inevitable step away from private ownership of housing toward corporate control -- control that became more and more centralized as thousands and thousands of banks fused into only a handful of huge "too-big-to-fail" corporations.  Another step was the inception of reverse  mortgages.  This was marketed as a boon to needy elderly folks, but was designed to take massive chunks of real estate away from family heirs and put them into the hands of megalandlords, including superbanks, real estate trusts, hedge funds, and specialized mutuals.  Both the mortgage crisis and now Covid have caused a disproportionate transfer of real estate ownership away from individuals, often burdened with tricky "underwater" mortgage commitments, and into the realm of impersonal financial management organisms.  The archaic single family home is already being replaced by flimsy, ephemeral "townhouse" clusters that will decrease in value in a decade.  The apartment warrens of Soylent Green are not far over the horizon, especially for today's youth, yoked into "gig contracts" that will leave them without resources or a roof over their head as they are pushed out of the fungible employment market.  

     It may not be as jazzy as a battle in space or as bone-chilling as a drooling xenomorph, but the rent is a bigger futuristic monster for America's youth than anything George Lucas or Ridley Scott has yet imagined.  Cheesy as Castellari's Bronx dyptich may be, it may well turn out to be a voice for future sci fi speculation as its imagination turns into the reality of dollars and yuen.