The reading, “Migratory Cities”, is about some examples of moveable cities imagined by writers, urban planners and architects in the past. It is quite inspiring and interesting of how futurists imagined about an innovative city which could be transformed from the ground to a moveable machine. It has reminded me that the first time I had seen a similar idea from a Japanese Anime, Howl’s Moving Castle, by Hayao Miyazaki when I was little. The Moving Castle is similar to the design by Ron Herron. However, the Walking City carries a society inside the megastructure and the moving castle is much smaller scale for the owner and his family. By comparing to a smaller scale of the Moving Castle, the city itself has a much more complicated system of forming the society which means the designer has to reconstruct the social system of the city. Most of them are mainly about bureaucratic societies and distributed cities. The political system of the society could easily change a wonderland to a brutal machine which snatches the benefits of lower social class because most of the stories mentioned in the text commonly show the social hierarchy created from the moveable utopia where the upper class always takes more from the bottom class.
“Surely we pay for their services.” “Yes, but at our price. This is a poor region. … and I suppose we take more than we give”.
It is questionable that what forces drive the system of the society and mostly change the moveable city to a machine to snatch the poor. Is the reason mainly related to the design of moving cities because of the restricted resources gained from migrating different places so there are no sustainable resources for society. Whether or not the elevated city becoming one of the potential solutions of resolving the land use problem in Hong Kong is still interesting to develop.