This provocation first started me thinking about planned and unplanned cities, and how planning interventions shape the future. There is a rich seam here. I then started thinking about Sci Fi representations of order and disorder in the future city. Here are images from four films.
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The Ordered City – The Handmaid’s Tale

Filmed in Toronto. An ultra-conservative social order mediating urban interactions. The existing urban form remains and is made even more symmetrical by the lines, ranks, queues through which the citizens populate the public realm.
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The Ordered City Disordered – Clockwork Orange

Filmed in Thamesmead Estate, a 1960s utopian Brutalist housing development; sickening violence undermines the order, and the narrative raises questions about whether the state can and should impose order and perfection on the individual.

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The Disordered City – Akira Battle Angel

The cyberpunk movie aesthetic launched by Bladerunner, often has Asian (or Asian influenced) cities, frequently with an oppressed underclass scrabbling in recognisable variations of street-scapes (Mars in Total Recall), with the corporate wealth residing high above.
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The Disordered City Ordered - Judge Dredd

A terrible film with the awful Silvester Stallone, Judge Dredd is set in Mega City One, a sprawling megapolis covering much of the eastern seaboard of the US. Many Sci Fi movies (Robocop, Minority Report) have a combination of technology and heroic individuals (like characters from American Westerns) imposing law and order on a disintegrating city.

Peter Madden
Bristol, March 2021

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