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[bryant]

"Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s Alley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city."

Richard Norton of the Naval War College on feral cities, via Future Now. This was written last year; he mentions Iraq with careful obliqueness in a footnote, but I would be somewhat surprised if the piece was not written with Iraq in mind. To follow along at home, apply his feral city taxonomy to Fallujah, Mosul, and Baghdad.

Comments

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Good post, good blog, great term. "Feral cities." Mostly makes me think of the kid in The Road Warrior.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

Makes me think of that short story China Mieville wrote for McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, which was about "feral roads" that disappear and re-appear around the world, in different cities.

[bryant]

OK, that was creepy.

[bryant]

Makes me think of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, which is a completely surprising subversive piece of children's literature -- it's the far future, cities have become mobile, they prey on one another to survive. Mechanically mobile, made mobile by the hands of man, that is. It's sneakily leftist; sort of as if China Mieville wrote books for teenagers.

I gotta remember to write about it.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Oh hell. There totally goes my Weirdotron game. I need to read that now.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Sounds more like descriptions of Mogadishu I've read.