Civilization

A term whose literal meaning is the emergence and evolution of cities, although it is frequently applied approvingly to the kinds of cultural evolution facilitated by city life, especially their moral and aesthetic components.

Cities are manifestations of technological advance, their evolution mapped out in the development of building materials and techniques, the solution of such large-scale *engineering problems as water supply and waste disposal, the logistics of food distribution, and the evolution of manufacturing enterprises. These imperatives have provided the principal motive force for the advancement of applied science, and theoretical science may therefore be viewed as a by-product of civilisation. The first foundations of theoretical science were laid in Athens, the first citystate to escape the limitations of local agricultural supply by cultivating an economy based on trade; the second phase of its sophistication, in the seventeenth century, was correlated with a rapid expansion of cities, whose physical containment within strong defensive walls was being replaced by their political containment within nation-states.

Hypothetical cities, made or remade with the aid of new technology and inspired by intellectual progress, have played a central role in speculative fiction, from classical *Utopian fictions such as Francesco da Cherso’s La Citta` Felice (1553), Tommaso Campanella’s La Citta` del Sole (written 1602; trans. As City of the Sun), and J. V. Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), through such euchronian visions as Louis- Se´bastienMercier’s L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; trans. as Memoirs of the Year 2500), Edward Maitland’s By and By (1873), and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) to such images of hypermetropolitan development as Pierre Ve´ron’s ‘‘En 1900’’ (1878), Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890), and H. G. Wells’ ‘‘A Story of the Days to Come’’ (1897). Such imaginative projections reflect the sociohistorical process by which the same factors that made cities into centres of wealth, leisure, and architectural magnificence also made them into magnets for reckless but necessary migration and accumulators of industrial and organic wastes. The development of sophisticated sewage systems was too slow to prevent a nauseous reaction to city filth, resonantly echoed in much nineteenth-century literature. William Cobbett’s description of London as a Great Wen struck a plangent chord, whose most extreme response was Richard Jefferies’ After London; or, Wild England (1885). Cities had been seen as the primary arenas of both cultural *progress and cultural *decadence since Classical times, and the revision of both ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had much to do with the dramatic contrasts provided by the elaborate and exaggerated cross sections of larger societies contained within cities. The great European cities of the nineteenth century became the crucibles in which popular literature developed, providing compact audiences through which literacy gradually spread from top to bottom. One result of this was that cities became ‘‘characters’’ in their own right, explicitly so in such panoramic surveys as Euge`ne Sue’s Les myste` res de Paris (1842–1843; trans. as The Mysteries of Paris) and G. W. M. Reynolds’ imitative The Mysteries of London (1844–1845).

The literary developments spearheaded by Sue and other popular celebrants of the idea of the city-asorganism were partly the product of the advent of artificial *light, initially with the equipment of city streets with gas lamps—with which London’s Pall Mall was first fitted out in 1807. Liberation from the tyranny of night and day paved the way for a dramatic extension of economic and leisure activities—not to mention efficient policing—ushering civilisation into a new phase of enlightenment, but also bringing the nastier aspects of city life into the glare. In James Thomson’s narrative poem, gaslight is impotent to  redeem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), only serving to illuminate its horrors.

The application of science to municipal architecture and engineering, and the corollary role played by cities as hosts of scientific research and technological expertise, was given elaborate literary consideration in such nineteenth-century novels as Jules Verne’s Les cinq cents millions de la be´gum (1879, based on a first draft by Paschal Grousset; trans. as The Begum’s Fortune), which carefully contrasts the political organisation of the cities of Frankville and Stahlstadt. In Verne’s novel Frankville is triumphant, but it was the imagery of Stahlstadt that was more widely echoed in futuristic projections of city life. Mrs. Oliphant’s afterlife fantasy ‘‘The Land of Darkness’’ (1887) depicts a sector of Hell as a City of Science: an Infernal factory complex ruled by mad Master. By contrast, the central exhibit at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 was the White City, designed by a host of architects, engineers, and artists to embody rather than merely to model the future of civilisation; its classically styled white buildings were topped by a series of gilded domes. The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 attempted to go one better with a Rainbow City organised around a central Electrical Tower, but its symbolic significance was direly compromised when the U.S. president, William McKinley, was assassinated in its Temple of Music. The evolution of cities was always coupled with nostalgia for a mythical Arcadian past, when the various kinds of artifice represented by civilisation were allegedly unnecessary because *Nature provided everything necessary to human happiness. Such nostalgia increased rather than diminished as time went by, although the image of an Arcadian Golden Age was gradually replaced in Britain by the idea of an agricultural paradise whose relics still maintained a lingering presence in ‘‘the countryside’’. In America, whose geographical horizons were much vaster, the equivalent contrast was part of a more complex spectrum whose key axis, as far as literary images were concerned, was that between the city and the ‘‘small town’’ surrounded by broad tracts of cultivated land and wilderness. While inhabitants of the countryside and small towns fixed avidly ambitious eyes on cities, inhabitants of cities maintained an artificial affection for towns and villages—but the fact that the cities provided the core audience for literary endeavour ensured that the latter attitude would have the louder literary voice. Traditional agricultural practices and
methods of transportation, especially the horse, are routinely rose tinted in twentieth-century literary mythology, as in such genres as the Western and such subgenres as horse-riding stories aimed at teenage girls.

It was partly due to this imbalance of envious viewpoints that the city was displaced from the core of Utopian imagery to become the focal point of its twentieth-century *dystopian opposition, routinely appearing in hypothetical examples either as a slumridden gargantuan sprawl where filth, crime, sickness, and vice flourish in appalling profusion—the rich and powerful having exiled themselves to luxuriously equipped baronial fortresses—or as an oppressive exercise in enforced orderliness, whose ruthless suppression of any and all deviance is ruthlessly dehumanising. The future of civilisation in scientific romance and science fiction is dominated by images of increasing *automation, pioneered in H. G. Wells’ ‘‘A Story of the Days to Come’’ (1897), E. M. Forster’s reactionary ‘‘The Machine Stops’’ (1912), Otfrid von Hanstein’s enthusiastic Elektropolis (1928; trans. As ‘‘Electropolis’’), and John W. Campbell Jr.’s deeply ambivalent ‘‘Night’’ (1934). The imagery of the future city reached an apogee of sorts at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose central Perisphere contained a huge model of the futuristic ‘‘Democracity’’, and for which General Motors built a spectacular Futurama exhibit.

The city of the future was carried to various extremes of ‘‘perfection’’ in such images of ‘‘ultimate cities’’ as Isaac Asimov’s Trantor, Arthur C. Clarke’s Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1948; rev. 1956 as The City and the Stars) and its analogue in ‘‘The Lion of Comarre’’ (1949), the infinite city of J. G. Ballard’s ‘‘Build-Up’’ (1957; aka ‘‘The Concentration City’’), the solicitous cities of Bellwether in Robert Sheckley’s ‘‘Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay’’ (1968) and Reflex in Ray Banks’ ‘‘The City That Loves You’’ (1969), the culminating image of Thomas F. Monteleone’s The Time-Swept City (1977), and the animate cities of Greg Bear’s Strength of Stones (1981). There is, of course, a countertradition of defiant pastoralism, evident not merely in *disaster stories in which mortally wounded cities must be abandoned, but in images of deserted supercities such as those featured in John Campbell’s ‘‘Forgetfulness’’ (1937), Clifford Simak’s ironically titled City (1944–1952; book, 1952), and Ballard’s ‘‘The Ultimate City’’ (1976).

The sharp tension between the attractions and repulsions of city life—clearly evident in the real world in the growth of intermediate suburban environments and the emergence of commuting as a way of life—is often evident in speculative fiction in an absolute division of the urban and the rural. In such imagery defensive city walls often reappear as encapsulating domes, as in Jack Williamson’s ‘‘Gateway to Paradise’’ (1941; book, 1955, titled Dome Around America), Rena Vale’s ‘‘The Shining City’’ (1952; exp. as ‘‘Beyond the Sealed World’’, 1965), and Daniel F. Galouye’s ‘‘City of Force’’ (1959). Such re-enclosed spaces are often described in agoraphobia-inducing terms, reflected in such accounts of subterranean civilisation as Gabriel Tarde’s Fragment d’histoire future (1896; trans. as Underground Man) and Fritz Leiber’s ‘‘The Creature from Cleveland Depths’’ (1962; aka ‘‘The Lone Wolf’’), and neatly summarised in Isaac Asimov’s characterisation of The Caves of Steel (1954).

In the extreme case of James Blish’s Cities in Flight series (1950–1962), domed cities literally tear themselves away from the Earthly soil in order to become rootless galactic wanderers. The vertical extension of Manhattan island provided a key model for both real and imaginary cities; hypothetical extrapolations of the skyscraper generated such images of urban isolation as Philip K. Dick’s conapts, the Urbmons (urban monads) of Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971), and the ‘‘arcologies’’ featured in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty (1981) and Elizabeth Hand’s Aestival Tide (1992).

All of this imagery is abundantly represented in futuristic *art, which is understandably rich in cityscapes, and has lent considerable impetus to the Notion of agglomerations of supremely tall buildings that scrape crystal domes for want of solid sky. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) presented an influential image of a skyscraper city embellished with aerial walkways and airborne commuter traffic, while Frank R. Paul’s cityscapes, featured on the covers and internal illustrations of the early science fiction pulps, largely defined what William Gibson was eventually to label ‘‘the Gernsback continuum’’. Gibson cited that assembly of images in order to highlight the fact that it never came to pass, but the imagery of the city as an extreme of technological enterprise has not yet developed any rival consensus, thus maintaining an impression that the realisation of Paul’s megalopolis has merely been postponed.

The notion that the city has its own developmental imperatives beyond the control of planners retains its dominance of futuristic imagery—by contrast with the nostalgically exotic imagery of Italo Calvino’s Le citta` invisibli (1979; trans. as Invisible Cities)—but is opposed by the multiple imagery of C. J. Cherryh’s Sunfall (1981), the weird cities of Storm Constanine’s Calenture (1994), and such depictions of customdesigned cities as Nightingale in Catherine Asaro’s ‘‘Aurora in Four Voices’’ (1998).