The reading shows cities in films in a concise yet detailed approach, exploring all of the different functions that help the city work. I find it interesting that most of the cities within the film are set in a post-apocalyptic world, and they are constantly mobile, a city that holds the last trace of humanity traversing across a ruined world. This setting can help spawn a lot of unconventional cities that are beyond our imagination, but the creators always seem to draw references from real cities, for example, the class disparity and mistreatment of the lower class within the moving

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

Science fiction cities move by floating and flying in the sky, crawling and walking on the road, sometimes floating and sailing on the water. The mobile city from Strength of Stone disassembles and  reassembles itself during the journey. This city moves by the elephant legs. Swarm is a city assembled by more than 150 airships, which have different parts scattered in different places and interact with each other by the control of the computer. This moving city looks like the real city, the area in this city is parceled by the functions. Distributed areas can remotely connect to the others

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

The reading fascinates me with a new perspective on how the imaginary world envisioned in science fictions are related with the real world. I was provoked to ask the question of what defines a city. The concept of walking cities imagined the flexibility and motion of a territory moving around the globe. In a way, this is similar to rail-riding cities like in Snowpiercer, that small societal systems are built within the drifting city. Yet the largest difference between the two lies in their interaction with the surrounding world. A walking city trades, and hunts other territories, while inhabitants in

Continue readingReading response: Carl Arbott

This chapter mainly talks about migratory cities. Migratory cities are imagined cities in SCI-FI films, they are moving mobile cities including the walking city, distributed city, instant city, and so on. Among all types of cities mentioned in the chapter, I am most impressed by the train city. In the film Snowpiercer, an eternally moving train is the only thing that protects the remaining humans after an ecological disaster has frozen the Earth. On the train, lower-class passengers live in crowded rear cars, while the elites live in comfortable front cars. The train city in the film actually points to

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

Carl Abbott depicts the futuristic cities observed in fiction as “Migratory Cities”1. Variations of these include the Hunter-Gatherers, Riding Rails and Distributed Cities which serve as superficial locations and worlds to enhance the narrative or atmosphere of a film. Particularly through the Riding Rails concept, it reveals despite how advanced or innovative these cities are, there are still underlining disparities and equality in the population. Snowpiercer (2013) explores the poor faction in a circumnavigational train (The Snowpiercer) supporting the last vestiges of humanity. The poor initiates an uprising aiming to take control of the train. Through the exploration of each

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

From “Walking city”–a huge and self-sufficient mini-city that looks like a combination of giant construction cranes, robots and praying mantises,published by British architect Ron Herron,to a migrating city that can move in the ground in Flood which published by Stephen Baxter,these cities are the result of the authors’ imaginings of the cities of the future based on the issues facing their time and their own insights(Abbott, C.2016).Many times there is something behind science fiction that allows readers or audiences to connect. For example, trains are often regarded as a bridge between the future and the present (Abbott, C.2016). Distributed cities

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott

The idea of cities on the move is an interesting trope we often see in sci-fi films. As described in the reading, migratory cities, or distributed cities specifically, simultaneously highlight the specialization and interaction of the urban city. It is an excellent media that allows the creators to magnify and display in-depth a specific phenomenon in real life, be it social stratification in Snowpiercer, or the endurance of humanity shown with the Cooper Station in Interstellar being so strong that even a deadly blight on earth is not enough to kill us off. Migratory cities are always on the move,

Continue readingReading Response: Carl Abbott