[Reading Response: Carl Abbott]

In Science fictions, cities are always migratory. In contrast to Le Corbusier’s proposals for building high rise buildings in fixed placed, migratory cities are movable and flexible, which means they do not have a fixed location. For example, in fiction Armada, cities are built on ships that are connected together and floating on the water. This scenery reminds me of the rising sea level nowadays due to global warming, which has threatened some low-level cities and small islands to vanish from the ground level. This is the issue that our many countries across the world have been working on, developed

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Reading Response: Carl Abbott

The concept of migrant cities is often used in science fiction, where, unlike real cities, science fiction writers imagine them to walk, crawl, roll and float.In science fiction, migratory cities exist in a perceptual bubble, with a self-satisfied narrowness and a distorted world that doesn’t care about the relationship between energy and physics. In snow-piercer, the train is a high-speed, closed loop, hierarchical system that protects people from the natural wind and snow, but they must endure confinement and not freedom. The gluttony of the upper part of the train comes from the extreme poverty of the lower part of

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

Reading Response: Carl Abbott

In the reading, several imagined cities were introduced. For example, walking cities can change their position, and the distributed city is network-connected but physically separate. In my view, apart from their elaborate design, what is more important is to understand the solution they provide to the problems in reality. If a city has legs, it can reduce losses by quickly move away when a catastrophe occurs. Furthermore, the distributed city allows people in different places in the world to cooperate more easily, improve work efficiency and speed up the process of globalization. Although most cities in the martial only appear

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

Reading Response: Carl Abbott

In Abbott’s interpretation of migratory cities, unlike how cities are in real life and viewed as a static entities, in-universe such as in science fiction, it is very mobile. It could travel move and rotate in all kinds of ways and forms, which the train in snowpiercer resembles, as while the space itself is static, the location is constantly on the move. This concept of the migratory or mobile city is actually more present in reality than expected. While it is not as cybernetic or has fancy visuals (cg) in real life, with constant movement from people from different backgrounds

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[Reading Response: Carl Abbott]

There are quite a few parallels we can draw between sci-fi films and reality. The hunter-gatherer city has a few versions. The first version is quite benign, it only looks for better places to reside, when its original location is polluted or politically unsuitable. Other versions are less friendly, some throw citizens out and others may be led by greed. The harmful version reminds me of some countries which throw out their minorities today. Their rights are disrespected and their wellbeing or even right to life threatened. This happens in India to Muslims, in Myanmar to Rohingya, etc. Although the

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Reading response: Carl Abbott

In Abbott’s text, a review concerning the cities in sci-fi films and a probable future of humanity is raised. Examples of imaginary cities from various sci-fi films are used to discuss how our future world will become. And most of these examples depict a dark and pessimistic future of humanity.  This idea has some kind of resonance for the genre of ‘Cyberpunk’. In movies or literature that falls into the genre of cyberpunk, people are living with ‘high tech, low life’ as the advanced technology is used by tyrannical authorities as a tool to control them. The ‘low life’ of

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[READING RESONSE] CARL ABBOTT AND M. CHRISTINE BOYER

Science-fiction has always played a strong resonance with the architecture in reality. It is unsurprising to see how familiar the architecture in film looks as creativity still has to be based on reality. For instance, the repetitive buildings in Inception are taken reference from cities in the modern world Meanwhile, the future is also projected through film. M. Christine Boyer depicted Cyber City in 1992.  In the 21st century, cyber cities have swept across the globe, and become more prevalent during the pandemic. Films have given different possibilities of our future in which our behaviours are pivotal to. In the

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[READING RESPONSE] M. Christine Boyer

Architecture and sci-fi films have similar aims in some sense. They are both artifacts that generate interactions via a physical existence that comes through woolgathering and multiple experiments. However, the difference is that sci-fi films shape the way we investigate the future. They can act as an inspiration to create an utopia from cybercities, which is “the mixture of cyberspace and urban dystopia”. The futuristic and fantasy world do not help us escape from the reality, but to raise reflections on the current problems and help us better understand the reality. In this pandemic time, each of us is building

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Reading Response – Carl Abbott

In the tutorial, one of the readings we discussed was Imagining Urban Futures by Carl Abbott. It was about a variety of fantastical, impossible moving cities, mostly shown in science fiction movies. For example, Ron Herron’s Walking City was a self-contained city that looked like a robotic insect-like creature, and could move around on its legs like some giant monster seen in fiction. It was designed in such a way so that its citizens wouldn’t need to leave, almost like it was a “giant caravan”. They could leave if the situation of wherever the city was at turned bad, a concept

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[Reading Response: M. Christine Boyer]

Imagination has no boundaries but does have some limitations, which reflect the norms and values of a given society. From forms to information, as Michael Heim mentioned, is what Boyer tried to discuss. Despite its sci-fi nature, such change is not only due to technological advancement. It is interesting to see, for example, how the game theory represents an efficient-oriented mindset and assimilate into the imagination of cybercities. I appreciate the anime ‘Ghost in the shell’, which defines cybercity as ‘Still not able to integrate the individual into unity.’ Somehow it is exactly the world nowadays, we are interconnected by

Continue reading[Reading Response: M. Christine Boyer]