Science fiction loves its future cities: utopian visions of gleaming steel and glass, as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and grimly exciting dystopian labyrinths as in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But SF visionaries have rarely specified the materials from which their visions might actually be made.
The original Futurama, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes, wowed audiences with its towering apartment blocks and sweeping automated freeways (it was sponsored by General Motors). But though the design was mind-boggling, the proposed materials were still concrete and steel. New visions, but old materials.
SF magazines of the 1950s and 1960s were filled with features on the city of the future: high-tech metropolises under transparent domes, giant platforms hovering high in the atmosphere on anti-gravity pads, cities under the sea. Rarely was any part of this pegged to practicality.
This week Guardian Cities investigates the shocking impact of concrete on the planet, to learn what we can do to bring about a less grey world.
Our species is addicted to concrete. We use more of it than anything else except water. Like that other manmade wonder material, plastic, concrete transformed construction and advanced human health. But, as with plastic, we are only now waking up to its dangers.
Concrete causes up to 8% of global CO2 emissions; if it were a country it would be the world's worst culprit after the US and China. It fills our rubbish dumps, overheats our cities, causes floods that kills thousands of people – and fundamentally changes our relationship to the planet.
Can we kick our addiction, when it's so hard to imagine modern life without it? In this series of articles, Concrete Week will explore the impact of the material on our environment and us, and look at alternative options for the future.
Chris Michael, Cities editor
Occasionally, though, SF vision has been matched with speculation about the materials that might underpin construction. Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (1979) proposed building structures out of a super-thin, super-strong material called hyperfilament, “a continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal”. This could be used as a transparent coat to preserve old buildings, or assembled into structures of its own, supporting towers tall enough to reach into orbit on which could be mounted space elevators. The huge quantities of diamond required could be sourced, he said, from space, where he suggested it was plentiful – the core of Jupiter, he posited, was a single Earth-sized diamond.
More practically, Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant novel Pacific Edge (1990) imagines a utopian green California of small-scale communities prioritising environmentally sustainable building materials. Wooden walls are roofed with “cloudgel”, a kind of fabric that is transparent when the temperature is low, to let the sunlight in, but becomes opaque to reflect away sunlight when things get hotter.
Yevgeny Zamiatin’s surveillance-state dystopia We (1921) influenced the likes of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Set a thousand years into the future, the citizens of Zamiatin’s Worldstate live in apartment blocks entirely constructed of glass, so that everybody can be watched at all times. The elimination of privacy might not be appealing, but a city in which every structure was built of filament-reinforced glass would at least be more environmentally sound than one made of concrete. And we could always fit curtains.
The prospect of colonising other planets has often concentrated the science-fictional mind. Materials scientists at Northwestern University have recently suggested Martian colonists might take the sulphur abundant on that world, liquify it by heating it to 240C, mix it with the red planet’s soil as an aggregate and cool it to create concrete. This has the advantage of convenience, for space colonists at any rate, and would be more environmentally friendly than common-garden concrete. According to the MIT Technology Review, “Martian concrete can be recycled by heating it, so that the sulphur melts. So it can be reused repeatedly. It is also fast-setting, relatively easy to handle and extremely cheap compared to materials brought from Earth.”
New worlds provide new possibilities. Mars’s lower gravity would allow taller and slimmer towers to be built: the possibilities for elegant and sustainable urbanisation are endless.
It is puzzling that other famous props and tropes of SF have yet to be recruited to the projects of imaginary architecture. Force fields, for example, common in space stories, could fruitfully be repurposed to provide the structural rigidity and shelter of conventional houses without needing building materials at all. Think of Star Trek’s holodeck, in which 3D holographic projection gives force fields the appearance of anything you like, from landscapes to cityscapes, interiors and exteriors. Imagine an entire city generated purely from force fields and light, accommodating millions in whatever structures they chose, that could be “recycled” simply by switching the field off. The problem is that neither 3D holograms nor projected force fields actually exist. But we can imagine a future in which they do, in which humanity does away with the need for old-fashioned building materials altogether.
Another approach could be called Man Plus, after Frederick Pohl’s 1976 novel of Martian colonisation. Rather than terraforming the entirety of Mars to make it habitable to human beings, Pohl asks: why not adapt human beings so that they can live on Mars? A similar approach to future architecture could be imagined: instead of vast construction projects that utterly alter the environment to make it convenient to mankind, why not rewild the globe and provide every human being with a high-tech shell, like a cybersnail or techwinkle, light enough to be easily portable, but expandable and comfortable into which we can bed-down for the night? Or perhaps we could genetically alter human skin to make every person their own house, with expandable bio-hoods to cover our heads and fur, feathers or something else to cover our bodies.
Yet another future might invoke the Tardis principle. The Doctor Who spacecraft is, of course, much larger on its inside than its outside. A city built of such structures could have a tiny exterior footprint, allowing vast swaths of the world to be rewilded, while not stinting human inhabitants of spacious interiors for palatial bedrooms, indoor gyms and anything else we might want.
That sounds impracticable, but it needn’t be. I’m not talking about actual interdimensional portals, but virtual reality. We are not far away from achieving an immersive, topographically endless VR in which people’s minds can frolic, explore, work and play to their heart’s content whilst their bodies lie doggo in a facility dedicated to keeping them safe and healthy.
Build the facility out of whatever environmentally friendly materials is preferred: it needs to be functional, not fancy, and provided their bodily needs were attended to, and bedsores avoided, each person would happily occupy a space considerably smaller than the Doctor’s Tardis. Environmentally friendly, space-saving and (we can be honest) more than a little nightmarish to contemplate. Could this be the future?
Guardian Concrete Week investigates the shocking impact of concrete on the modern world. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use the hashtag #GuardianConcreteWeek to join the discussion or sign up for our weekly newsletter
