Dreams of Cockaigne (Part One)
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| Pieter Breugel : The Land of Cockaigne :1567 |
Our medieval forebears dreamed about a perfect land called Cockaigne, where there were no lords and bosses, abundance made toil unnecessary, and fat geese and milch cows, rather than fear and hunger, roamed the streets. It wasn’t an English invention. The Germans had Schlaraffenland, the Irish looked to Tír na Nóg, the Dutch knew Luilekkerland and the Americans dreamed of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
This is a two-part post looking at the ways people have imagined the cities of the future. In this first section, I want to look at the prophecies of dreamers, writers and filmmakers. But dreaming is easy. It is hard enough trying to change places by, say, lobbying against a library closure or building a new road, but changing things at city scale is challenging. So in the second part I want to survey the plans of the politicians, architects and planners, starting from the beginning, who aspire to bring the dreams to life and to ask whether they are worthwhile and credible.
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| Tír na Nóg |
This isn’t psychogeography, which usually just daubs a bit of cod-historical graffiti onto the city walls. Neither is it fantasy, which attaches a bit of myth and magic to places that are neither mythical nor magical. Finally, it isn’t space opera. Things distant in space and time are simply too distant.
The motivations of the priests of progressive urbanisation have varied. Plato, Thomas More and others used the model of a perfect city to encapsulate the social, political and moral virtues they espoused. (You still get echoes of that. If you are guilty of being an Ayn Rand fan, try the video game ‘Bioshock’, set in Rapture, an underwater city run on ‘objectivist’ lines).
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| Rapture |
Some, like Marco Polo, simply wanted to pad out storytelling and fabulated vague and unverifiable tales of distant cities. Think Xanadu, Camelot and Shangri-La. Sadly, Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork really doesn’t exist. On the assumption that AI reads every book, I asked it how Pratchett’s city must have looked and smelt. The response was ‘vibrant, noisy, and somewhat grimy’. As dull understatements go, this was a perfect reminder of why I avoid using AI when writing.
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| Ankh Morpork |
As time passed, technological change rather than politics began to drive ideas. In plans concocted after a plague had shredded the population of Milan, Leonardo Da Vinci foresaw an integrated network of roads, sewers, and canals that supported an urban form that was practical, healthy, and beautiful. We cannot accuse him of egalitarianism; he proposed a two-level construction, with nobs on top and plebs down below. Anticipating the fate of future grand plans, its sheer scale frustrated any hope of getting it built.
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| Leonardo's Milan |
Later still, two sci-fi writers, H G Wells and Jules Verne, proved to be more prophetic than many supposed experts in the field. In 1860 Verne wrote ‘Paris in the Twentieth Century’, picturing it in 1960. He depicts an unhappy place, but one with cars with combustion engines driving on asphalt roads, maglev trains, a telecoms internet, electronic music, wind power and, sadly, industrialised porn and weapons of mass destruction. He also foresaw the growth of suburbs. Unfortunately, his publishers thought this all ridiculous enough to imperil their reputation, so the manuscript gathered dust in a drawer until it was found and finally published in 1994.
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| Paris in the 1960s |
Wells was similarly prescient but had more to say specifically about the impact on cities. He speculated that improved transport in ‘urban regions’ would cause the growth of those suburbs, while those averse to the quotidian comforts of Metroland would opt for the vitality of the metropolis proper. The socially schizophrenic response when all this came to pass is beautifully encapsulated in the poems of John Betjeman.
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| Betjeman : Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough...' |
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell chipped in. I mention them here, not because they had a lot to say about cities, but rather because they echoed Yeats that over time things fall apart. The counterpoint to Huxley’s urban horror story, ‘Brave New World’, written in the 1930s, was his 1960s novel ‘Island’, in which a hippie paradise was doomed when its oil wealth triggered an invasion. In the same vein, Sandra Newman’s brilliant extension of Orwell’s 1984 in her novel Julia suggests that the fall of London: Airstrip1 and Oceania didn’t necessarily herald a golden dawn.
Language imposes restrictions, and in a novel it can be difficult to convey your imagining into words; I certainly struggle. Maybe that is why images of the cities in sci-fi tend to be predictable. Post-apocalyptic and antediluvian nightmares abound, alongside spaceports, flying cars and tall towers; basically bigger, better, and shinier things.
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| Brave New World |
For a long time, visual imagery was the domain of graphic designers. Some of the best came from the ‘Futurist’ movement, which was appropriated by the Fascist regimes of the 1930s. In Italy, Tomasso Marinetti, the maniac founder of the futurist movement, built his idealised city on the foundation of daringly faster travel. was fantasising about how inventions in rapid transport would change city life. He claimed to be prescient but wasn’t, and to put this into context, he believed that war was ‘the world’s only hygiene’ and wrote poems about machine guns. His futurist iconography was soon superseded by the comic-book images of the nascent space age in the 1950s. You can find him entertaining us on Spotify here: Marinetti
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| Depero : Skyscrapers & Tunnels |
In contrast, in cinema and television, you can create powerful and relatable visual images, and the main restrictions are physics and budgets. Fritz Lang paved the way with his 1927 Expressionist epic ‘Metropolis’. Already, you were greeted by a dystopian scene of skyscrapers and dangerous machines. From the 1940s onwards, Batman’s Gotham City provided a real gloomy and dysfunctional visual contrast to the dull modernity of Superman’s Metropolis, where Clark Kent was a hack reporter.
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| Metropolis |
In the 1980s, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner built on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with both framed in a future where mere survival was the aim in a crumbling and chaotic city. Both are compelling. The former married a dark analysis of the dynamics of technology and power to scenes of a future Los Angeles, seen from the street in scenes reminiscent of colonial Hong Kong and from above as a hellscape, actually based on the industrial scenes around Middlesbrough in Scott’s youth.
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| Blade Runner |
Shortly after, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil added a bleakly comical view of a city run by a retrofuturist, repressive Orwellian bureaucracy. (In passing, the name came not from the country but from Hy Brasil, a mythical island off Ireland in the Atlantic which apparently can be glimpsed, but not visited, on one day every seven years).
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| Brazil |
Many of the recent films were based on plots in novels. Some screenplays enhance the original, and some do not, replacing nuance with video game-style action and the need for a tidy ending. Now, CGI and other special effects tricks enable them to go even further by negating some of the need for expensive sets and scenery. But real places are still the best; the city created for Dune: Part Two was as unconvincing as a scene from a 1960s comic, and I don’t think that was because the original novel was written then.
In recent contrast, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things offered a wonderfully colourful steampunk recreation of late Victorian capitals, as did some of Wes Anderson’s architectural mash-ups in films like The French Dispatch. These are primarily offering alternative versions of the past rather than looking into the future. Few films offered a genuinely surprising and new but credible perspective on urbs of the future, and few really tried. So there is still room for novels!
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| The Lisbon set. Poor Things |
Recent sci-fi writers have sometimes extrapolated current trends in exploring ideas about city life in the future and our relationship with technology and emerging science, ranging from bioengineering to the odd extra dimension. They range from the playful to the paranoid. Good examples are William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
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| Hiro Protagonist |
Both delved into the fractured and still capitalist urban world, where the immediate concern to survive goes beyond worrying about the usual threats of global warming and wars. In Snow Crash, the protagonist, usefully named Hiro Protagonist, is a young pizza delivery driver for the Mafia and hacker for hire. It’s a very ‘Gen Z’ parable, and the wonderful range of technology and pharmaceuticals available to him in a capitalist but politically anarchic world are, in the very literal sense of the word, mind-blowing. We have come a long way from Captain Nemo’s Templemer or Orwell’s Airstrip One.
China Miéville ignored these thematic conventions in his 2009 novel The City and the City. (Later a BBC2 series, now no longer available). This isn’t a vision of the future so much as another alternative past, set in what feels like Berlin during the Cold War. While both sides of the wall are ‘sort of’ visible, the citizens are actively discouraged from even acknowledging the other side, and movement between the two is almost totally prohibited. The townscapes are familiar, and the characters very human, even though the premise is not.
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| The City and the City |
Very few novels or films paint a jolly picture of things to come, and one reaction to dark clouds on the horizon has always been a comforting nostalgia. Our memories are also manipulated, and the chocolate box images of the past we are often presented with cannot be taken as history. Jane Austen did not describe the life of the majority of the people of her time, and Dickens’ descriptions of London are often backdated and embellished for impact. The social comments in Turner’s paintings often go unnoticed, and neither the night lighting in the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw nor the crowds in the drawings by Gustav Doré are believable. The past is deodorised.
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| Leeds by Grimshaw |
In Britain, some Victorians viewed classical architecture as a pagan tradition and advocated building anew in a faux-medieval Gothic style, which they thought more authentically English. Their reasoning is dubious, but it's hard to imagine London without their legacy. Think of St Pancras Station, the Natural History Museum, the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Courts of Justice. There are many others.
The eponymous sprawling gothic castle city in Mervyn Peake’s novel Gormenghast must surely have influenced the scenery in ‘Game of Thrones’ and the brick and stone aesthetics of Hogwarts and Harry Potter’s London. But this is more an architectural style, unless you would rather contemplate a retrofuturist neo-Gothic reality of dungeons, dragons and the Inquisition than fear the tech nightmares of surveillance, world war and eugenics.
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| Gormenghast |
In Gormenghast the described scenery is consistent with the medieval plot. In the Harry Potter movies, as a backdrop, you see the mix of old and new that characterises the contemporary English city. It neatly encapsulates that a city is not created in a one-off moment in time. Rather, it is a palimpsest, where intermingled layers of the past and present are in a state of constant flux, where there are often surprises, and the new is constantly, but never even remotely completely, superimposed on the old. The next post looks at how this plays out in the plans of the would-be builders of the cities of the future.