This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Step away from your spreadsheets, ye staid urban planners: Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling and an all-comers association of madcap technologists and researchers are designing an experimental city. Under Tomorrow's Sky began last August in Eindhoven as a discussion between writers, designers, architects, filmmakers and more. "We looked at emerging research in technology and biology -- research that is typically locked away behind the wall of an institution," says Liam Young, the architect who created the project. "Then we started to exaggerate those processes."
The result is a fictional future city that will exist as ebook short stories, films, comics, concept art and even a physical scale model, to be shown at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in September. "The idea is that this city becomes a stage set where authors, illustrators and filmmakers would have a model -- physically and conceptually -- to tell the stories of life in the city," says Young. "What are the social networks, who lives there, why, what are their lives like?" It's less science fiction, more design fiction. "The process is about co-opting traditional formats of science fiction -- films, comics, video games, the mediums that people readily associate with the future. But rather than some fantasy filmmaker view, we want to build it into a critical investigation of emerging technologies and biologies. Is this a future we want to be moving towards, or is it a cautionary tale?"
The city has only recently been founded, but Young wants to scale it up so that people "can inhabit it at a one-to-one scale", then take it around the world. "Just like any city, it's never fixed or finished -- it's always added to, demolished, rebuilt. I want this to be an evolving experiment."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
