'Projections of Megalopolis' in J.G. Ballard's The Concentration City & Billennium (original) (raw)

2021, Literary Voice Journal

J.G. Ballard's The Concentration City and Billennium are both short stories that depict an utterly dystopian vision about the future of urban development. The Concentration City provides a glimpse of an overgrown, gigantic city with no limits whereas Billennium presents a perspective of the burden of living in an overpopulated society. Both stories are projections of the megalopolis as coined by philosophers Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. These thinkers have outlined the notion of megalopolis as the final stage of development before necropolis, city of the dead. This paper explores how and in what ways Ballard's vision of megalopolis is reflected in The Concentration City and Billennium. To that end, the effects of megalopolis on the individual, nature, society and government institutions are revealed. In addition, the paper also demonstrates that human liberty is restricted on all accounts as a consequence of the conditions created by the megalopolis. Finally, as put forward by Geddes and Mumford, regionalism is proposed as an alternative to prevent excessive urban development which is destined to lead to megalopolis and ultimately, collective downfall.

The Fictional Representation of Modern Urban Concentration in the Work of J.G. Ballard

The main aim of the study is to describe new approaches to the understanding of the consequences of modernism, which will be constructed through a unique reading of fictional media with regard to architectural discourse. In this respect, the work of J.G. Ballard, a British New Wave writer, has been selected as a fruitful dystopian source. The urban concentration, a distinguishing principle of modern architecture, is one of the prevailing themes in the construction of Ballard's New Wave novel. The scope of this study is to analyze three science fiction stories by J.G.Ballard in order to convey this modernist urban principle. The Concentration City (1957) displays the dystopia of an over-populated city in which there is an absence of open space. Chronopolis (1962) displays the dystopia, in which city dwellers' use of the city is restricted through legal procedure. Billenium (1961) is another Ballardian story which conveys the restriction on living space to cells of 3 m2, imposed by the 'Residential Committee' when the population exceeds 20 million. In conclusion, the study has the potential to contribute to the discussion on the theme of modern urban concentration within a modernist critique. Thus, reading Ballard's work helps to develop an original perspective revealing his over-exaggerated view of urban concentration.

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“Megacity as a Problem of History” by Wolfgang Schwentker

Hardly anyone would disagree with Schwentker's argument that the urbanization is one of the most prominent characteristics of the development in the modern world. Large urban agglomerations, referred to as " megacities " , have played a crucial role in reshaping demographies around the world, especially in the second half of twentieth century onwards. Although being a trend that can be observed in nearly every corner of the world, Schwentker rightly argues that it is very difficult to elaborate a single theory explaining the phenomenon of urban growth globally. The reason behind is the fact that the processes of urban development, especially when it comes to the emergence of big cities as we know them today, have enfolded in very different political, economic, cultural and historical contexts.

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"Modern Wasteland: The Psychogeographical Dystopia of J.G. Ballard's High Rise". In: More after More: Essays Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia, Kraków, 2016

This paper aims to identify the spatial framework on the basis of which modernist dystopia is defined and then realized in fiction, especially in reference to subjectivity, as well as to present the ideological function of architecture and landscapes in representing a dystopian development of modern urban society. To this end, this paper will focus on Ballard’s High-Rise, an urban version of Lord of the Flies, where the architectural assumptions underlying the tower block are brought to bear on the psychopathological effects suffered by the tenants. This ideological debate will be cast in reference to the works of Le Corbusier and Martin Heidegger, whose divergent conceptions of modernist architecture will constitute the axis of this paper – a utopian project of social engineering, on the one hand, and a slightly reactionary stance encapsulated in Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling” on the other.

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Foundations Of Evil: The Urbanism Of Power Architecture: A Coercive Story

From the ancient scriptures, reporting the destruction of the sinful Sodom and Gomorrah, to the profound hate that Hitler expressed for the cosmopolitan Berlin, through the repulsion the intellectual elite (with Haussmann in the forefront and Le Corbusier on the cutting edge) felt towards the “dirty and crowded”19th-and 20th-century cities, urban space seems to represent a symbolic commanding height for the struggle between individuals’ freedom and centralized power that nowadays continues more discretely. This long-lasting fight among disperse acting units and central governments has shaped, built and destroyed cities all across the globe, whether they are spontaneous-origin or designed-from-scratch urban conglomerates. In this unbalanced confrontation, tools vary from complete designs, urban projects, municipal codes, crony capitalism developments, specific buildings and demolitions emanating from a central authority, to individual constructions, people’s daily lives and some private enterprise’s development projects carried out by ordinary citizens. Because of human action and the emerging essence of cities’ order, the more coercive plans are applied to control and improve urban life, the worst results are obtained.

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The Ordinary City Trap

2013

The paper is a critique of a critique; it explains why the most salient and influential critiques of the neo-Marxist world city and global city concepts, made by those arguing to further postcolonialize urban studies through such suppositions that all cities are ‘ordinary’, are misguided. First, it is explained how the charges of economism and ethnocentrism against the world city and global city concepts are ignoratio elenchi: they do not even begin to address or critique their neo-Marxist argument that, across the difference and diversity of the world’s cities, a few major cities have the necessary economic specialization and therefore extraordinary function of commanding and controlling neoliberal globalization. Second, the error made by advocates of ordinary cities of supposing that world systems analysis and the world city concept are forms of developmentalism is understood as the source for a wider postcolonial mistake of conflating the neo-Marxist world city and global city literatures with the very neoliberal practices toward urban development that they have long attempted to disclose and counter. Finally, the charges against the world city and global city concepts as paradigmatic, peripheralizing, and normative are also rebutted, not only to highlight how those critiques are consequentialist and dependent on the respective charges of economism, ethnocentrism, and developmentalism having veracity, but to demonstrate how an acceptance of the ordinary cities argument for an idiographic, provincial, nominalist, and comparative approach to urban studies, as an alternative to the two neo-Marxist concepts, is only to fall into the trap of making the mistake of confusing evidence of absence for absence of evidence.

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Urbanism and dictatorship: Perspectives from the field of urban studies

Urbanism and Dictatorship. A European Perspective, 2015

I propose to use dictatorial urbanisms as an analytical opportunity to delve into some concealed features of modern urban design and planning. The chapter explores the political-spatial nexus of totalitarianism from a theoretical standpoint, focusing on the development of totalitarian planning mentalities and spatial rationalities and drawing links to other historical episodes in order to inscribe the former in a broader genealogy of urbanism. Needless to say, I don’t suggest that we use dictatorships as mere templates to understand modern productions of space. Instead, these cases provide a crude version of some fundamental drives in the operationalization of urbanism as an instrument of social regulation, showing how far the modern imagination of sociospatial orderings can go. Totalitarian urbanisms constituted a set of experiences where many dreams and aspirations of modern planning went to die. But not, as the conventional account would have it, because the former were the antithesis of the latter, but rather because they worked as the excess of a particular orientation of modern spatial governmentalities — namely, their focus on calculation, social engineering and disciplinary spatialities, and their attempt to subsume a wide range of everyday practices under institutional structuration by means of spatial mediations. Keywords: totalitarian urbanism, European dictatorships, urban order, national-socialism, fascism, stalinism, Francoism

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