CRABGRASS CHAOS
The view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.
—Clifford Simak, “City” (1944)
In his grandparents’ time, even the commute between an old Expansion suburb and a city center was impossible. His grandparents used to tell stories of exploring abandoned suburbs, scavenging for the scrap and leavings of whole sprawling neighborhoods that were destroyed in the petroleum Contraction. To travel ten miles had been a great journey for them.
—Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009)
The picture window in the modest suburban house in Belle Reve, New Jersey, is marred by a long crack from top to bottom. Built in the late 1940s for World War II veterans who are about to launch the baby boom, the house isn’t aging well. The foundation is settling and cracking after ten or fifteen years, the plumbing is permanently out of sorts, and there is no spare money to fix the fifteen-foot window that was supposed to be the symbol of upward mobility.
Forward another eighty years and the once hopeful community of Belle Reve has turned into the dangerous slum of Belly Rave, the key setting for Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s 1955 novel Gladiator-at-Law, a story of corporate malfeasance and intrigue in the socially divided society of the twenty-first-century United States. Some of the houses are abandoned, some are burned-out shells, and some have been turned into dens of vice. The house in which Norvell, Virginia, and Alexandra Bligh find themselves after a precipitous ejection from corporate comfort may be the same that we have seen generations earlier. The roof leaks, the stairs are rotten, and the cracked window is now boarded over, with just a chink left for scoping out dangers in the front yard.
The year after Pohl and Kornbluth’s book, journalist John Keats titled his best-selling diatribe against the new suburbia The Crack in the Picture Window. A signature feature of atomic age residential design, picture windows opened up the wall between dwelling and neighborhood and blurred distinctions between private and public. The cracked window was a multiple metaphor, calling out the suburbs for failing as physical places, falling short of hopes for shiny technologies, and betraying expectations for building more harmonious communities.
Pohl and Kornbluth’s depiction of Belly Rave is a classic extrapolation of the disdain with which intellectuals in the 1950s treated the massive growth of middle-class suburbs. It is also an early example of a recurring science fiction vision of feral suburbia. In tacit dialog with critics of American urban planning, SF writers have offered a series of variations on the theme of crabgrass chaos. In the future, they say, affluent society may survive in comfort with the help of private security forces that protect downtown cores and gated enclaves. Inverting J. G. Ballard’s narrative of high-rise hell, these stories project aging suburbs as the new ghettos and slums, free-fire zones of danger and depopulation where it’s everybody for him or herself and wilding gangs take the hindmost.
This is also science fiction written in close dialogue with contemporary criticism and analysis of suburban trends. Extrapolating near-future suburbia, writers from Pohl and Kornbluth to Octavia Butler to John Scalzi have paid attention to the current consensus from journalists and scholars who have tried to understand suburbs and suburban living. If science fiction suburbs are usually troubled and dangerous places, it’s in part because popular discourse about suburbia has been equally negative—from aesthetic and moral censure in the 1950s to critiques of suburban isolation in the 1980s to the trope of “slumburbia” in the present century.
Gladiator-at-Law appeared in the midst of a national debate over the implications of postwar suburbanization in which fierce indictments took center stage.1 Sociologist David Riesman, professor at the University of Chicago and then at Harvard and author of the best-seller The Lonely Crowd (1950), penned an essay titled “The Suburban Sadness,” writing, he said, as someone who loved both the city and the country, but not the suburbs. Riesman was one of many American intellectuals after World War II who began to lambaste suburbia for a litany of physical and social deficiencies at the same time that Americans were moving there in the tens of millions. Suburbs were and still are attacked as tacky, inauthentic, stifling, inefficient, boring. They were the very opposite of Morning-side Heights or Cambridge, Massachusetts (which is a former suburb, of course, but don’t tell anyone).
Anti-suburbanites wrote variations on the long-established themes of American antiurbanism: that corrupt cities were inimical to a successful democratic nation and sinful cities pernicious to the morals of individuals. To many intellectuals—even those safely ensconced in very urban universities and editorial offices—rural life held out the promise of authenticity and, especially during the Great Depression, the allure of self-sufficiency. Agrarian theorist Ralph Borsodi called for the middle class to return to the land in Flight from the City (1933). The federal Resettlement Administration promoted mini-farms with a Subsistence Homesteads program that planted several dozen semirural communities across the country. Frank Lloyd Wright floated his scheme for Broadacre City in which families would live on one-acre lots where they could tend gardens, fruit trees, chicken coops, and rabbit hutches.
Clifford Simak turned these ruralist ideas into fiction in the ironically named story “City” in 1944. For Simak, the values of his rural Wisconsin upbringing (the background as well for Frank Lloyd Wright, not to mention Frederick Jackson Turner) trumped those of the Twin Cities where he made his living as an editor with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Telephones and personal airplanes have allowed people to abandon cities for their own “broad acres” in the country, enjoying easy access to one of those thousands and thousands of Minnesota and Wisconsin lakes. In the story, the only people left in the city are a few squatters in an abandoned neighborhood and a few old codgers sticking it out in their old suburban houses. By the end, the corrupt city government has been dissolved (it didn’t have much to do in a shrunken city anyway), and one small neighborhood has been preserved as a memorial to a vanished way of life: “In another hundred years men will walk through those houses down there with the same feeling of respect and awe that they have when they go into a museum today. It will be to them something out of what amounts to a primeval age, a stepping stone on the way to the better, fuller life.”
For Simak, cities and suburbs were an unfortunate transition between the rural nineteenth century and what he hoped might be a broad-acre society for the twenty-first century—in effect, the less said, the better. Social scientists like Riesman, however, elaborated a set of common criticisms: Suburbs were alienating environments where the bonds of community were unavailable. They lacked the intense interpersonal interactions of city neighborhoods and the overlapping social networks of small towns. Real connections to others were replaced by frantic neighboring that was both artificial and superficial. At best, they bred mindless conformity among well-adjusted children, while their hapless parents led equally empty lives as “John and Mary Drone” (names that Keats invented for his diatribe). Even a supposed rise in suburban churchgoing was not so great, said University of Chicago religion professor Gibson Winter in The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (1961), because too many people went for superficial socializing rather than profound religious experience.
The outcomes could not be good. Critics claimed that the suburbs were really “disturbia,” where rates of treatment for mental illness were skyrocketing, even though the tiniest bit of research would have shown that rates were going up in every American community because of the declining stigma on seeking psychiatric help. Suburban alienation was said to turn teenagers into juvenile delinquents, or at least the teenagers who weren’t well adjusted. James Dean’s troubled teenager in Rebel without a Cause (1955) put the problem persuasively on screen.
Meanwhile, the new suburbanites may have been transient, conformist, and materialistic, but their materialism was betrayed by what one writer called the split-level trap. Critics translated the initial monotony of mass-produced suburbs like Levittown, New York, into expectations of physical shoddiness. Composing her lyrics from the intellectual safety of Berkeley in 1962, Malvina Reynolds summed up fifteen years of criticism in her song “Little Boxes”: Shoddy and monotonous suburbs like Daly City, California, which triggered the Reynolds muse, create shallow and monotonous people destined for boxed-up lives in ticky-tacky houses.
That catchy two-minute song is a good entry point for a closer look at Belly Rave, a community whose first houses sold for $350 cash down and $40.25 monthly payments, with washing machine, freezer, and that fifteen-foot picture window. With the severe housing shortage of the late 1940s a recent memory, Pohl and Kornbluth describe buyers lining up to view model homes and opening their checkbooks before real work has begun on the larger development. The scene could have been taken from the real community of Lakewood, California, designed for veterans and workers at a nearby Douglas aircraft plant where a selling point was a garbage disposal in every house.
Things turn sour fast. To set the scene for their twenty-first-century action, the authors take four pages (27–30) to trace the community’s downward spiral in its first generation. The tiny houses are only partly finished inside. Unexpected fees and taxes for schools, fire protection, sewers, and other services eat up money that might have gone to upkeep. The market for the houses dries up as newer neighborhoods are built, and bad elements move in, including moonshiners with a still in their living room (it would now be a meth house). The father is caught in a dead-end job, the son turns into a layabout and petty hoodlum. The house itself begins to collapse because it sits on poor land that is impossible for lawns or gardens: “You start digging out there and first you go through two feet of garbage and trash, then maybe six inches of cinder and fill. Then you hit the real pay-dirt. Sand” (76).
By 2050, more or less, Belly Rave has turned nasty and brutish. People huddle in their houses with guns at the ready to prevent shakedowns. The economy runs on barter, stoked by the government food allowances that every resident receives from central handout stations (73–75). Alcohol and narcotics circulate freely. Brave thrill-seekers arrive at night for illicit sex, but the city police only come in armored cars (58), leaving gangs of preteens and teens to roam the streets, some armed with broken bottles, some with knives, some nine-year-olds with carbines. The Wabbits are the “nicest” and play a part in the action as messengers and finders, having avoided being sold as pickpockets and child prostitutes.
Belly Ravers are society’s outcasts. Apart from the captains of finance who still can maintain Westchester estates, the majority of other Americans are corporate workers who enjoy steady paychecks but who are locked into nearly unbreakable long-term contracts (like major league baseball players before free agency). Their greatest perk is the opportunity to live in a super-high-tech bubble house with smart closets, self-minding appliances, and walls that turn transparent or opaque as needed. Bubble cities sit protected behind wide beltways—but once you leave the safety zone on the way to Belly Rave, you are on the disintegrating remnants of the old six-lane expressway, passing toll booths “crumbled into rock piles and rust” (58).
In describing Belly Rave, Pohl and Kornbluth drew directly on the older literature about the underside of industrial-era cities. “Wabbits” for a juvenile gang echoes the Dead Rabbits of antebellum Manhattan as immortalized in Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (1928). The street kids and gangs draw more generally on descriptions of Victorian London by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1851–61) and Charles Booth in Life and Labour of the People of London (1891–1901)—not to mention Oliver Twist. The cookie-cutter money pits recapitulate everything that was wrong with the flimsy house that traps Jurgis Rudkus and his family in Upton Sinclair’s muckraking classic The Jungle (1905).
Charles Platt in The Twilight of the City (1974) offered an equally dangerous future for suburban New Jersey. New Vista is a vast new town built by the government as a safety valve for New York. It is “kind of a showplace. The government did it to inspire confidence,” says a character. “Surrounded by man-made hills of brown earth churned by the wheels of giant excavators, the city stood like a vast, grandiose piece of modern sculpture. Hundreds of towers of shining white concrete, soaring ramps and pedestrian walkways, walls of glass, shopping precincts, rows and rows of apartment blocks” (55). But it is neither finished nor occupied before American society collapses from resource scarcities. The novel’s protagonists are able to find temporary refuge among the instant ruins, huddling in unheated apartments and scrounging from the malls that were stocked but never opened for business. “People in the zone wandered freely; sometimes one little group would encounter another and would pause to trade what news there was, but most of the time was spent within one’s own nomadic party, in isolation. Little was said, nothing was planned” (126–27). Things can quickly get anarchic and violent among the few folks wandering New Vista: “There is no center. There’s a dozen little independent groups of people wandering around and a handful of crazy old folks…. That’s all” (156).
The reality of 1950s New Jersey and its counterparts, of course, was not half so bad. The suburban myth, as analyst Scott Donaldson called it, or even the suburban slander, was a moral and aesthetic judgment. Critics who threw out terms like “slurb” and “sloburb” were not interested in objective analysis of social data. Urban planning intellectuals like Lewis Mumford disliked mass-produced suburbs because they seemed to betray the ideals of carefully sequenced decentralization through green Garden Cities. Leftists feared that relocated and shuffled populations would be harder to organize than the urban working class of the 1930s. Conservatives worried that new communities lacked the established institutions that helped to maintain social stability (echoing the fears of nineteenth-century Tories about industrial Manchester and Birmingham). Columbia University architecture professor Peter Blake, in God’s Own Junkyard (1964), used a photographic sequence of the construction of Lakewood to epitomize the contribution of the new suburbs to the devastation of the American landscape, in an early salvo in a swelling critique of the impact of suburban sprawl on the natural landscape.2
The reality of new suburbs was not social disorder à la Belly Rave, but rather the reconstitution of community in new settings. When University of Pennsylvania sociologist Herbert Gans decided to study Levittown (now Willingboro Township), New Jersey, as a participant observer by moving there rather than critiquing it from afar, he found that 85 percent of his new neighbors preferred the new suburb to their old city neighborhood for the down-to-earth reason that it offered the biggest and best house for the money. Few Levittowners were changed by their new environment, and even fewer saw any reason to be embarrassed by their suburban home. For many, after all, the alternative was a walk-up apartment or a South Philly row house shared with in-laws. Bennett Berger found that autoworkers at the new Ford assembly plant in suburban Milpitas, California, acted a lot like autoworkers in Detroit. In a sense, all that the new suburbs lacked was sufficient age, so that suburban children could grow up and look back nostalgically at the neighborhoods of their school days—as D. J. Waldie would observe in Lakewood, California, in Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1995). As the acerbic urban planner and commentator Charles Abrams once put it in The Language of Cities (1971), community “is that mythical state of social wholeness in which each member has his place and in which life is regulated by cooperation rather than by competition and conflict. It has had brief and intermittent flowerings through history but always seems to be in decline at any given historical present. This community is that which each generation feels it must rediscover and re-create” (60).3
CALIFORNIA BEHIND WALLS
Far up Topanga Canyon on the west side of Los Angeles sits Arroyo Blanco Estates, an affluent community inhabited by writers, real estate brokers, corporate executives, and entertainment industry functionaries. At the beginning of T. C. Boyle’s biting novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995), Arroyo Blanco Estates is a normal, albeit pricey, suburb with open street access. Residents have already claimed the literal and metaphorical high ground of ridgetops and view lots. As real estate whiz Kyra Mossbacher knows, hilltops are refuge against invaders, for many of her clients “wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe—something removed from people of whatever class or color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants” (106). As the story proceeds, the increasingly nervous Arroyo Blancans gate and wall themselves in as protection against the threats of “coyotes,” their shorthand for intrusive poor people—but they hire undocumented Mexican immigrants to do the work, of course.4
Arroyo Blanco Estates, despite its wall, is an entry point into a particular science fiction vision for suburban California that exploded onto pages in the 1990s. The anti-suburban indictment had moved beyond the moral and aesthetic posture of the 1950s to an explicitly political argument about the way that increasing economic polarization plays out on the metroscape. Coming soon to Southern California, or already arrived, said novelists and social scientists alike, was the deeply divided metropolis of global capitalism. Urban sociologists such as Saskia Sassen in The Global City (1991) and Manuel Castells in The Information City (1997) and End of Millennium (1998) saw the global market sorting the world into winners and losers—among nations, within nations, within cities. The metropolitan command centers of the international economy, they have argued, are increasingly bifurcated societies in which a growing servant class tends the needs and wants of the bankers, advertising executives, consultants, and corporate executives who run the world. What is disappearing is an urban middle class. Local businesses fall to global franchises, routine white-collar jobs evaporate, and neighborhoods become either derelict slums or protected enclaves of privilege.
The feisty historian and critic Mike Davis popularized the vision of the dual city in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), both bitter attacks on the ways in which the large landowners and their hangers-on have shaped the metropolis to their own benefit and to the detriment of everyone else. The founding dynasties of greater Los Angeles, associated with the Los Angeles Times, banks, oil companies, and land speculators, presided over “one of the most centralized—indeed, militarized—municipal power structures in the United States. They erected the open shop on the bones of labor, expelled pioneer Jews from the social register, and looted the region through one great real-estate syndication after another.” In the last half century, horizontal growth and the rise of the entertainment, aerospace, and electronics industries have fragmented the single power elite, but the result is more of the same: “Darwinian place wars as new centers and their elites, from Century City to Orange County’s Golden Triangle, have challenged the squirearchy of Downtown L.A.”5
The physical result of unequal power, says Davis, is the creation of Fortress LA. In the San Fernando Valley, the middle class tries to defend its status by protecting home values and neighborhood exclusivity with every political tool available. On the south side of the city, police department helicopters hover over the poor neighborhoods of South Central and play their searchlights along its mean streets, while police ground forces mount search-and-destroy operations against gangs and drug houses. Meanwhile richer neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides isolate themselves with walls, security patrols, and closed-circuit television surveillance. A biting diagram in the Ecology of Fear puts the pieces together in a parody of standard sociological models of urban form: In place of a downtown, working-class zones, and middle-class suburbs are “natural” districts with labels like Neighborhood Watch, Armed Response, Narcotics Enforcement Zone, Prostitution Abatement Zone, and Toxic Rim. Combine Neighborhood Watch and Armed Response and the result is the imagined future of Southern California as a mosaic of gated and protected communities—Arroyo Blanco taken to logical extremes as Fortress LA.
The polarized and decrepit Los Angeles in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) is a case in point. Francie, the protagonist, is nineteen years old in 2052, but she lives in an aging city. With her parents dead of a wasting disease that is a metaphor for cultural malaise and economic decline, she is living with her aunt in a rundown Los Angeles bungalow and working for the family’s financially marginal delivery service. As the aunt’s life falls apart, Francie strikes out on her own to live in tacky apartments, work odd jobs, and attend community college. She endures an auto accident, gets fired as a waitress, investigates stories for the college newspaper, goes to unsuccessful parties, finds a boyfriend, gets a tattoo. Francie and her friends are constantly driving across town, but they usually find that one nondescript location doesn’t offer much more than another.
Francie’s Los Angeles is leading the downward spiral of the American economy, an exhausted reflection of the more exuberant twentieth century. A new highway system—intended originally to relieve the old freeways—looms unfinished over the landscape, started “before everything ran out of money, back at the beginning of the century.” American banks are bailing out of the city, and “hardly anybody was as rich as they’d once been.” While Francie lives off her dead-end service jobs, her acquaintances make do with petty crime and an off-books barter economy. The family house, bought by her great-great-grandmother, is now “in a section of town largely abandoned by anyone who mattered to the country’s economy.” Riots are spreading across the nation, and Francie sometimes wakes to the smell of burning buildings not too many blocks away. Meanwhile, upscale cemeteries maintain armed security guards, and the people of “richtown” (her term for places like Brentwood) are increasingly moving to “camps,” communities “enclosed by high metal fences and guarded by uniformed, armed men and women” (2, 8, 33, 124). We can assume that Kadohata, of Japanese American ancestry, picked the term “camp” to recall the internment experience of 1942–45 and relishes the inversion of the image as the elite pull barbed wire around themselves rather than stringing it around others. The city, and presumably its nation, are now incapable of reforming themselves, with the leadership elite having voluntarily interned themselves for safety.
Neal Stephenson takes Kadohata’s “camps” and runs with them. Snow Crash (1992) anticipates a city of franchised Burbclave city-states, or FOQNES—Franchised-Organized Quasi-National Entities. All of them post guards and customs agents at gates and require visas for entry—although couriers and pizza delivery vans have electronic chips to open gates automatically. Some of the FOQNES such as New South Africa and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong handle their own security, and Narcolombia depends on its reputation. Access to the microplantations of White Columns is race restricted: “WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED.” Jails are private franchises, Stephenson’s take on the recent phenomenon of private prisons that had begun to take off in the later 1980s.
Lesser Burbclaves hire WorldBeat Security or Metacops Unlimited, which also patrol private highway systems run by Cruiseways (World-Beat) and Fairlanes Inc. (Metacops). “You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you,” says a deputy of Meta-cops Unlimited who has just snared a skateboarder trying to get through a gate. “Or, as we used to say,” the other Metacop says, “Freeze, sucker!” With their claims of effective sovereignty, Burbclaves and FOQNES can enter into security treaties with neighboring burbs. “Under the provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code,” says Metacop no. 1, “we are authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony” on the territory of White Columns. “A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved.” The second Metacop again translates: “Your ass is busted” (44).
The facts of gated communities are more complex than Kadohata or Stephenson might seem to suggest. The spread of gated suburbs has been a very real trend, especially in Sunbelt cities like Miami, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix. Census data showed that seven million American households lived behind walls and fences by 2001. By estimate of urban planner Ed Blakely, 40 percent of new housing in California was in walled or access-controlled developments at the start of the twenty-first century. Residents of “Fortress America” or “Privatopia,” to borrow two book titles, are seeking freedom from crime and freedom from strangers. Bringing the upper-class compounds of Latin American cities to the United States, they are the suburban equivalent of expensive New York apartments with doormen.6
But not all gated communities are “richtowns.” Census data show that millions of lower-income Americans live in communities with walls or access control—for example, in modest apartment complexes or mobile home parks with single entrances. Residents of distressed neighborhoods, including some in Los Angeles, sometimes ask that through streets be closed off to block passage of drug dealers. Dayton, Ohio, consulted with Oscar Newman, the architect responsible for promoting the concept of defensible space, about how best to close streets, erect gates, and install traffic barriers to limit through traffic in several modest older neighborhoods experiencing increasing crime. Five Oaks, where I used to study piano with Miss Elizabeth Stuart as a junior high and high school kid, became, for a time, “Fort Five Oaks.”
In perhaps the most wrenchingly realized of the gated suburb fictions, fortress LA is literal, and the extinction of the middle plays out in fire and blood. Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower (1993) imagined defensible space not as a policy experiment but as a basic survival strategy for a community at the same socioeconomic level as Five Oaks. The story centers on Lauren Olamina, who grows up in a collapsing Los Angeles. Her parents and the other homeowners have created the ultimate cul-de-sac, having surrounded their street of eleven houses with a locked gate and wall that is “three meters high and topped off with pieces of broken glass as well as the usual barbed wire and the all but invisible Lazor wire” (74).
By 2024, the internal combustion era is over, with rusting vehicles cannibalized for metal and plastic, and three-car garages turned into rabbit hutches. In this quiet apocalypse, potable water costs more than gasoline. To be clean is to make a target of yourself, so “fashion helps. You’re supposed to be dirty now.” A money economy survives, but barter is taking its place. The shrinking middle class holds on and hopes for better times. Foreign corporations are buying up the United States and turning Americans into agricultural slaves or white-collar debt peons in defended enclaves, such as Olivar on the California coast. Like their counterparts in Gladiator-at-Law’s bubble cities, Butler’s characters are enticed by the possibility of enlisting for life with one of the multinational corporations that are buying up the United States, in order to live in a defended company town.7 It is the economically bifurcated society of the early twenty-first century made manifest, and Lauren muses about the new economy: “Maybe Olivar is the future—one face of it. Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science-fiction novels. The company-town subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped ‘the company.’ I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it is” (114).
Middle-class families live in constant fear inside their walls that enclose one block, two blocks, even five blocks. “We hear so much gunfire, day and night,” muses Lauren, “single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasionally blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs” (50). There is really no safety outside, even in supposedly safe neighborhoods like this one not far from Elliott’s house in the film E.T. “Last week Mrs. Sim’s son, his five kids, his wife, her bother, and her brother’s three kids all died in a house fire—an arson fire. The son’s house had been in an unwalled area north and east of us, closer to the foothills. It wasn’t a bad area, but it was poor. Maybe it was a vengeance fire set by some enemy of a family member or maybe some crazy set it just for fun” (23).
Churches become forts, and the only truly secure place is a huge indoor mall that protects vendors with a massive security force. Adults venture outside on jobs or errands, but only in daylight and always on watch: “That’s the rule. Go out in a bunch, and always go armed” (8). Lauren’s walled street is on the northern side of the San Fernando Valley near the 118 Expressway, a sad survivor of the Valley isolationism described by Mike Davis. The whole community learns to handle guns; the only safe respite from the tiny community is a group excursion for target practice in the surrounding ravines, where they are likely to encounter feral dogs and human corpses.
As far as possible, Lauren’s neighbors keep to themselves. Fathers still work in guarded offices, schools, and clinics, but they sometimes don’t come home—killed for their bicycle, perhaps, or caught in drug-war crossfire. Residents grow as much food as they can, valuing every fruit tree and turning yards into gardens. They home-school their own children or cooperate in a rudimentary living-room school—young children who manage to wander out of the tight compound are not likely to survive. There is still a real fire department, but it is always late, leaving bucket brigades as the only practical way to fight accidental blazes. Increasingly aggressive thieves force residents to establish an armed nightly security patrol (the police, too, are always late, and charge a fee for service).
Lauren’s neighborhood is squeezed between the privileged and the desperate. Outside the walled neighborhoods are drug dealers and the street poor who envy the modest security and wealth of people behind the gates. The rich live in protected communities or mansions protected by multiple walls, while the poor squat in burned-out houses. On a group expedition out of the neighborhood, Lauren sees the contrast: “Up toward the hills there were walled estates—one big house and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants lived…. We passed a couple neighborhoods so poor that their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas … squatted in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children.” And it gets worse, farther up into the brown California hills: “There are always a few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rabbits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge whatever dies” (9, 38).
As Lauren comes to realize, her community is staring into the abyss. The older generation hopes that things will get better, back to normal, but she knows better—that someday “a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people” will come over the wall (55). Her brother runs away to a short life of robbery, drug dealing, murder, and then his own death. Her father never returns from one of his weekly trips outside the wall. As the story unfolds, thieves grow bolder, scaling the wall and cutting the wire, first to strip the gardens, then to ransack houses for anything they can sell. Invaders set one house on fire to distract neighbors while they pillage the others, exercising one of the few ways that they can exert any power—by making others as miserable as they are. Three years after the story opens—it’s now 2027 and Lauren is eighteen—the community dies in a night of riot and fire, murder and rape. She escapes by luck and returns in the morning to a neighborhood of ash-covered bodies, a host of tattered strangers plundering the ruins and stripping the dead. With the two other survivors out of dozens of neighbors, she salvages what she can and starts a long trek north on what will be the road to a new, hard-won, tentative, and very rural utopia.
THE EVERTED METROPOLIS
In the nearly six decades since Gladiator-at-Law hit the shelves, Americans have continued to vote with their Chevrolets and Volkswagens (they could scarcely vote with their feet when many suburbs have no sidewalks). By the 1970 census, a plurality of Americans lived in suburban areas around major cities (76 million people, more than the number either in central cities or in rural areas and small towns). In 2000 the nation was officially suburban—146 million people, or 52 percent of all Americans.
But the suburban triumph can also be read as a suburban crisis. As early as the 1980s, social scientists realized that the aging of the baby boom generation was bringing problems to inner-tier suburbs. Moving beyond the cultural critique of Columbia and Harvard professors, they looked at reams of data to see that demand for housing was stagnant or falling and that declining numbers of students were rattling around in schools built for 1950s families. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it was clear that older suburbs often shared “central city problems” of declining tax base and crumbling infrastructure.
These declining environments make cameo appearances in Douglas Coupland’s novels about the suburban West Coast. On the outskirts of Palm Springs, where the cast of Generation X (1991) idle away their lives, sits West Palm Springs Village, “a bleached and defoliated Flintstones color cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s…. In an era when nearly all real estate is coveted and developed, West Palm Springs Village is a true rarity: a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye upon our arrival through the town’s welcoming sentry—an abandoned Texaco gasoline station surrounded by a chain link fence” (14–15). There is a failing shopping mall in Lancaster [Richland], Washington, in Shampoo Planet (1992), half its stores plywooded up or burned out. Even booming Palo Alto in Microserfs (1995) has an empty corporate research campus, unused after only two decades—“a 1970s utopian, Andromeda Strainishly empty tech complex” (211).
This very devaluation has made older suburbs the destinations of choice for new waves of international immigrants, turning the older suburbs of Boston, Atlanta, Portland, Los Angeles, and most other large cities into new melting pots. By the 2010 census, 51 percent of immigrants to the United States lived in the suburbs of the hundred largest metropolitan areas. In metropolitan areas as different as Hartford, Washington, and Orlando, more that 80 percent of foreign-born residents were suburbanites. The suburbs also pick up more and more folks on the economic margins; the number of poor people in suburban rings rose by a whopping 67 percent from 2000 to 2011. The political impacts of these trends have been well documented by urban scholar and activist Myron Orfield in American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (2002).
In a larger framework, geographers Rob Kitchin and James Kneale have suggested that the everted metropolis is the natural product of information-age capitalism. Reversing the suburban flight of the first post–World War II generation, those with resources follow information and economic power toward the metropolitan center. In positive terms, this concentration of energy and real estate demand involves the heralded renewal of the city by the middle class, but that trend supports increasing bifurcation: “The edges of these concentrations and the sprawl are predominantly home to the disenfranchised [and] those on the outside of the information economy.”8
The devalued and recycled suburb makes brief appearances in David Brin’s Existence (2012). In the mid-twenty-first century, the United States has recovered from Awfulday, which has left behind nuclear contamination from radiation plumes. The upper middle class has fled the Washington suburbs of Fairfax and Alexandria, but “those briefly empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants—the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments” (163). Newcomers from Congo and Celebes have turned garages into stores, swimming pools into trash dumps, and old quiet suburbs into new lively (if dangerous) communities.
The result is the everted—or perhaps reverted—metropolis that has begun to reverse 150 years of suburbanization. As in preindustrial cities, the center is again the favored location, attracting the upwardly mobile young, the successful middle-aged, and the comfortable retirees who have triggered an outpouring of celebratory writing about the “return to the city.” The flip side of celebration, however, has been a counter-explosion of newspaper opinion and blogging about the rise of “slumburbia,” stoked by an Atlantic article by Christopher Leinberger that appeared at the height of the housing crash of 2008.9 Older suburbs in the Rustbelt and brand-new suburbs in the Sunbelt are both described as losing the middle class; falling into abandonment and disrepair; attracting vandals; becoming homes to drug gangs. The urban crisis rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s has thus been transferred part and parcel to the suburbs of the new century, with Escape from New York being reimagined as “Escape from Nassau County.” Here is Timothy Egan in the New York Times, describing the very recent suburb of Lathrop, near Stockton, California: “Drive along foreclosure alley, through new planned communities that look like tile-roofed versions of a 21st century ghost town, and you see what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips. Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future.”10
This trend is background for John Scalzi’s vision of future St. Louis in “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis” (roughly, “use everything but the squeal”), his contribution to the original anthology Metatropolis (2009). The story combines a satirical take on the carceral city with a painfully realistic vision of feral suburbia. New St. Louis is an independent, freestanding, and ecologically self-sufficient zero-footprint city that recycles everything. It shares “open borders” with the Portland Arcologies, the Malibu Enclave, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Helsinki Collective, but it is physically closed to the surrounding suburbs. Like a medieval European city it confers its own citizenship and uses walls and guarded gates to control access and commerce. In the “managed employment economy” of New St. Louis, all adults work. Vacancies are filled as residents in their later teens take a battery of tests (the Aptitudes) that match them up to appropriate jobs. The protagonist is a privileged wiseass slacker whose mom is on city council. He keeps putting off the Aptitudes until he has only one chance (too late for retakes) and finds that his only job is tending genetically modified pigs. His alternative is to lose his citizenship and be ushered out of the city with sixteen ounces of gold as a grubstake.
Benjamin Washington is no rebel. Tending pigs in a tightly regimented society is not a fun job, but it beats being tossed out into the “banged-up ring of suburbs” that NSL residents call “The Wilds.” Nevertheless, he borrows the piggery’s lorry and ventures outside as a favor to an ex-girlfriend whose new boyfriend is looking for his brother who has deliberately left NSL. “That’s not a trip I’d want to take these days,” his boss says when passing over the keys. On the way to St. Charles, they can manage I-70 if they don’t go too fast (there is still a U.S. federal government, but it is stretched too thin to repair highways). They find the brother but run into angry locals who don’t like their looks and punch the daylights out of Benji. A security guard pulls him out and tells him as he regains consciousness, “You got beat on is what happened. You New Louies are dumb as hell, you know that? Go out to a rave in the middle of The Wilds, and then you’re surprised when the kids out there start taking a crowbar to your heads. Let me give you a little tip, townie: The kids out here in The Wilds, they don’t like you. If you give them a chance to crack open your skull, they’re going to do it” (200).
The underlying problem is economic disparity. Outside the walls, drought has created near-famine conditions. NSL is willing to provide some food assistance but won’t share its technology, preferring to keep the outsiders dependent in their external ghetto. The city hires private security to deal with mounting protests outside the gates but sits smugly until “the battle of New St. Louis” takes places a week after Benji’s adventure. Outsiders outfox the city’s electronic identification system and steal genetically modified plants and seeds, leading to the start of a rapprochement between city and surroundings. Benji, meanwhile, is not much of a rebel—no Kuno or Alvin he. After his brief experience in the Wilds, he decides that escape is not worth the trouble and settles comfortably into the NSL equivalent of middle-class contentment.
The walls of New St. Louis are vulnerable to an angry suburban proletariat, but not the ramparts of Todos Santos in Oath of Fealty (1981) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. After a massive super-Watts riot has devastated South Central Los Angeles, European money has funded the construction of a vast city under a single roof. Modeled on the arcologies proposed by Paolo Soleri, Todos Santos is two miles square and rises a thousand feet from the ground. At the time of the story, sections of the framework are still being filled in with apartment modules. Its population stands 247,453, close to the design goal of 275,000. The arcology functions under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles, but just barely, using its huge economic clout to fend off most rules and regulations. It has made itself an integral part of the metropolitan economy through its purchases and by building its own subway that makes its three-mile-long shopping mall the downtown for all of LA.
So far, so good, but Todos Santos is also a virtual city-state and fiercely defended territory. Outsiders can spend their money at the mall, but they can’t penetrate any farther without passing thick security checks. A wide surveillance zone where grass has grown over the bones of the old neighborhood reaches out from its walls. Beyond the green moat stretches block after block of “shabby houses and decaying apartments … a mockery to city government … houses filled with families without hope living on welfare—and on the leavings from Todos Santos” (22). Service entrances bear large signs reading “IF YOU GO THROUGH THIS DOOR YOU WILL BE KILLED,” warnings that are enforced (reluctantly) with poison gas.
The plot revolves around efforts by environmental radicals to disrupt and sabotage the “termite hill” and its fierce, successful response. Niven and Pournelle, who have a reputation as extreme right-wingers, are actually more thoughtful than the thimble-size plot suggests. They understand that Todos Santos is a utopian experiment as well as a technical marvel. Because the story is told from the point of view of the capsule city’s supersmart managers, readers want their self-defense to succeed. But the authors also understand that the arcology is like an elite private school that skims off the best, brightest, and most suitable applicants and leaves the rest of Los Angeles outside. The eco-radicals have a point that it consumes far more resources per capita than does a normal city. The idealistic deputy mayor of LA, who serves as the “worthy” antagonist, argues that Todos Santos is inexorably turning its back on common responsibilities, leaving the civic “middle” under more and more stress as fewer resources are available for social equity. He is, in effect, the voice for the Great Society, while Todos Santos epitomizes the privatizing ideology launched in the Reagan years, whose onset coincided with the book.
Todos Santos offers a conception of community that seems antithetical to the values of the libertarian authors. Outside is the world of amoral competition, crooked corporations, corrupt politicians, and ordinary people trying to survive among predators. “Isolation is what we’re selling,” says one of the leaders. People come to get away from crime and bureaucracy, to get independence. Inside is a world of shared values and expectations. “A hundred thousand eyes,” muses an opponent, “but they’re all looking inward. No privacy at all, and no interest in what goes on out here” (323). Todos Santos folks are low-keyed and trusting because they all share the same goals. People are polite. Informal mores and customs are more important than formal rules—a sort of idealization of smalltown solidarity. It is “a city at peace with its police force. Our guards, our police, holding our civilization together.” Is it an anthill, a utopia, or a commune with the petite bourgeoisie in place of hippies (229, 323, 120)?
From Los Angeles we can return to the heartland city of Detroit in Tobias Buckell’s story “Stochasti-City” and Elizabeth Bear’s story “The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood,” both also set in the overlapping future of Metatropolis. Buckell’s protagonist lives alone in the Wilds on the outskirts of Detroit, a suburbscape whose abandoned blocks are being reclaimed by nature. The high-rise core still functions as a business center, surrounded by some abandoned warehouses and a few nice suburbs within very short driving distance. “I didn’t live there, though,” says the narrator. “The further out you got, the longer it took to drive, the more gas it cost out where battery cars … and bikes couldn’t easily get to, the rougher it got” (74). Tract houses have been abandoned, slumping slowly into the earth like old barns dragged down by blackberries or kudzu. The handful of people who are left can claim abandoned lots and buildings for mini-farms in an extralegal rearrangement of property. Buckell’s Wilds are empty but not dangerous, with clusters of squatters who keep to themselves. Bear’s heroine Cadie, on the run from the Russian mafia and a newcomer to Detroit, has avoided the Wilds. She has heard stories of “grocery stores and homes sacked and occupied,” and she knows that people avoid surface streets in the Wilds if at all possible: “There were gangs out here, packs of the disenfranchised, squatters, and petty warlords” (145).
Buckell’s and Bear’s Detroit is no long stretch from the real thing. Since the urban crisis of the 1970s, the idea of planned shrinkage or urban triage has been on the table for policy makers to consider (although seldom to implement). It has been revived in recent years with “shrink to survive” proposals for cities like Flint, Youngstown, and Detroit that would mean complete clearance of largely abandoned neighborhoods that have already been devastated by people whom urbanist George Galster calls “skippers” (those who scare people into selling cheap), “strippers” (who prey on empty buildings), “rippers” (who cheat desperate renters by claiming ownership of abandoned houses), and “burners” (who finish things off for fun or insurance payments). Urban planner Margaret Dewar has analyzed the changing neighborhood of Brightmoor in Detroit’s northwestern corner. Once a fully populated neighborhood of blue-collar workers, it was more than half empty by 2010. Residents have appropriated the vacant lots for gardens, car parks, and buffer zones. They have carved hundreds of new pathways and dirt tracks across the empty landscape—essentially re-ruralizing in the twenty-first century a landscape that was urbanized in the twentieth.11
Both Bear and Buckell offer the depopulated Wilds as a setting for social experiment and reconstruction. In Buckell’s version, the suburbs are peppered with Slumps, abandoned mid-rise apartment and office towers that were once Edge City nodes. Grassroots eco-revolutionaries liberate one of the buildings and turn it into a multistory self-sustaining garden-greenhouse and prepare at the end to take their vision of radical social change to other cities. Bear’s eco-activists work on a smaller scale, mining trash piles and landfills (“giant plastic mines,” 141) for materials to turn abandoned houses into small farms and miniature factories. They are not the ones who commandeer the skyscraper, but work for parallel goals as they develop cooperative low-visibility communities in the interstices of dying global capitalism.
Science fiction aside, there is an active subfield of planning for shrinking cities. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where national populations are stable or declining, there is wide interest in how to turn abandoned brownfield industrial lands into green space and how to preserve walkable cores, even with the continued development of low-density “suburban” corridors that one German geographer has designated the Zwischenstadt, or “city in between.” In the United States, shrinkage has been a harder sell, even in the Great Lakes Rustbelt and in housing-bubble-blasted fringes of Sunbelt boom cities. Suburban areas do indeed house more and more poor people, but they are also vibrant centers for assimilating the millions of immigrants who keep the United States a growing nation. Most suburb rings balance poverty with polyglot progress.
Although forty- and fifty-page novelettes are not the place for extended exposition of post-capitalism and post-petroleum economies, Metatropolis may suggest an end point for traditional crabgrass chaos stories and a new beginning that spans rhetoric and reality. Scalzi, Buckell, and Bear are a generation younger than Mike Davis and Octavia Butler, and a decade or two younger than Neal Stephenson. In their hands, the future of middle-class suburbia is neither disaster nor an occasion for satirical glee. Theirs is not a complete vision by any means, with the multiple ethnicities and races of actual suburbs conspicuously absent, but it does suggest that we challenge rather than accept slumburb imagery. Instead, suburban collapse and abandonment is a necessary stage in social change, the winter that opens physical and institutional space for the spring of economic and environmental innovation.