This week, we have discussed a reading called- imagining urban future and there is a part about moving cities. The writer has listed some examples of movies. Such as snowpiercer. And I have watched this movie before. This movie’s background is the surroundings of the earth in the future are not suitable for human beings anymore. Therefore, the engineers in the future have built a train that moves around the world and the train has unlimited energy to operate. But there is a class struggle between the passengers. Since the human right of the poor peoples has been deprived by the rich. After watching this movie, I raised a question in my mind, why the humans need to care about their identity or position when they are facing a desperate strait? It seems the vanity of humans is not possible to change no matter what happened. The train in the movie seems like a moving city. Because it has a society inside the train and the passengers of the train are separated by their social position which is similar to the normal city.
-Mok Hiu Chun 3035812555
You summarised “Snowpiercer” well and this particular film was, indeed, actually posing a critique toward class stratification. One of the underlying messages in the film was that the classification was done by functionality, almost like the distributed city concept introduced in Carl Abbot’s piece, where one city has a specialised function, distant from the other. In this realm, identity is clearly defined by one’s role in the community. I would suggest that one of the more productive ways to read the film through Carl Abbot’s piece is to question whether the distributed city could work in real life? Would it narrow or broaden the existing social (class) distance? By following these questions, you could open more possibilities to critically delve into more pressing issues in society.