There’s a place, very far away, in which no-one lives beneath the sun. The only place that is hit by the outside air is atop a concrete block, the only view of the sky come from craning your neck directly upwards. Alleyways are surrounded by metal bars and broken stone. To reach other buildings you need only keep on walking; everything is connected. The place about which I am talking is not a prison, nor it is a place from a science-fiction nightmare. Kowloon Walled City was a place which really existed in a distant part of Hong Kong, already the most overdeveloped place on earth. Originally a Chinese fort, Kowloon became a city of sorts after the second world war and in its height, housed over 30,000 residents within its 2.6 hectare vicinity.
It is only when you see photos of the living conditions that the sheer horror of the place unfolds. Stacked atop one another into the sky, the concrete blocks of the city resemble rusty television sets. The scenes which flicker across the screens in the night mimic a million tiny television programmes except that, in this case, you cannot change the channel. In 1987, the city was officially shut down by government forces; living in such close quarters, the inhabitants of the city had turned it into a moral free-for-all, with drug taking and prostitution high on the menu. The Kowloon Walled City was, at its worst, straight out of a futuristic nightmare movie.
Viewed at from the fear-mongering present, the city of the future is predominantly a place to be feared, a place in which the individual loses their individual and the sheer geography of the urban landscape will swallow you up and digest you into tiny bits and pieces. From the very first films and even before that, there has been an overwhelming sense of dread and doom attached to cities and the places to which they lead. Essays by Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe fretted about the sheer size and expansion rate of the city. Whilst Baudelaire troubled about over-stimulation and decreased brain activity, Poe likened the average city dweller to a sickly, ageing stranger, obsessively tracing circles through the city’s streets. The city, whilst the hub of global change and growth, was a place to be feared, an area in which man was no longer all-powerful.
Cinema didn’t fare much better. If we think about early films such as Metropolis, Sunrise or The Crowd, it’s clear that the social consciousness was thinking one thing: The city was a bad thing. Endless motifs of the individual lost in the crowd, the ant’s nest cross section of the city’s living quarters, the dizzying rows of identical desks pervaded cinema screens. The audience came to fear the city, too. Even comedic approaches to the city were punctuated with a sinister undertone. Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character is subjected to the terrors of contemporary city life in Modern Times. Placed in front of a conveyer belt, which seems to represent the stressful monotony of urban existence, the Little Tramp is subjected to ever increasing peril. As items start to break and smoke, the city seems, at its core, fractured. It seems that nothing works and, try as we might, human beings are not hard-wired to compete with the menacing mechanisation of the city.
Whilst we have created the city, there is a general uneasiness towards its persistent expansion. Adding more roads, building further airports and skyscrapers, we constantly push urban spaces to their very limits. And whilst we do so, urging for change and expansion, there is another voice which tells us to be careful, to moderate our unquenchable thirst for more. Pretty soon, it says, the city will take over and we will be the first to go.
Except, that isn’t the case. We looked at cities as places of overbearing terror because we didn’t understand them. Encased by unfamiliar, artificially blended materials, the very body of the urban space seemed entirely at odds with the world in which we lived before. The landscape shifted from glittering green to muted grey, our faces and our bodies changed within the confines of the city. We had not adapted and therefore, we couldn’t be sure about the reasoning behind the city.
In Spike Jonze’s recent release Her, we are plunged into a vague and distant future. The people who inhabit the screen seem somewhat familiar and yet slightly, imperceptibly different. The clothes they wear are not quite the same, the homes in which they live are slightly altered, the technology which adorns their lives is slicker. This is the future and not as we know it. Gone are the sky cars, the shiny jumpsuits and the looming skyscrapers. The city is softly lit, it emits light from every angle, its colours are neutral and gentle. Glass populates the skyline, homes are constructed with warm materials and highly functioning technology. The speed at which people live is undeniably faster and yet, the city dwellers seem happy. Talking with one another, connecting to various portable devices, people live as they always have done; by the sides of each other. And whilst direct contact varies from day to day, the streets are not a place to be feared.
Jonze shows us the city of the future, as it is. Whilst we move forward at speeds unthinkable to those from past generations, we are fundamentally the same. We do not create the city of science fiction films because we do not want to live within places like that. Cities are built for humans and, even though we are made to feel otherwise, are incredibly malleable places. We adapt cities around our needs; they function in order for us to function, too. The future is coming and we probably can’t anticipate it. But, if it is created by us, then it will continue to be a place of wonder, imagination; somewhere we can call home.