[Reader-list] William Gibson: Cities in Fact and Fiction interview (Scientific American)

[Patrice Riemens]

(bwo Wietske Maas on Twitter)

The September issue of The Scientific American is a special on cities:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/cities/

There is a piece by William Gibson: Life in the Meta-City
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=life-in-a-meta-city
(subscribers only)

and a 'web exclusive':

Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson

Author of the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson talks about the
relationship between his fiction and the contemporary urban landscape

interview by By Aaron Shattuck and Gary Stix


The city looms large in the fiction of author William Gibson. In the
September issue of Scientific American, Gibson's essay, "Life in the
Meta-City," details how cities increase "the number and randomization of
potential human and cultural contacts" and how they serve as "vast,
multilayered engines of choice." Cities that cease to provide choice—or
which try to overcontrol their denizens—lose their spark and sometimes
perish. In the interview that follows, Gibson shares his perceptions about
existing cities and their links to his fiction.



Scientific American (ScAm):
There is a well-known quote from you: "The future is already here—it's
just not very evenly distributed." When you said that in 1999, were you
thinking of cities, or perhaps certain cities? Do you think that is the
case now to a lesser or greater extent?

William Gibson (WG):
It's a very scalable observation. We can see it from orbit, as electric
light versus its absence. We can see it in the differences in
infrastructure in various neighborhoods of a city. I can see it in my
house, which was built in 1927 and is in process of having its original
wiring replaced. We can see it in a human skeleton: where there's been a
joint replaced, the future's arrived.

ScAm:
Your fiction has depicted wide class gulfs in which "lowlifes" co-exist
with the rich and feudallike corporations that concentrate mind-boggling
amounts of wealth. Can the "vast squatter conurbs" that you mention in
your article in the September issue be seen as a symptom of such widening
income disparities? If so, do you think that this disparity will continue
to greater extremes as they develop further, and could they potentially
restructure the current social order somehow?

WG:
I depict those socioeconomic gulfs because they exist and because most of
the imagined futures I grew up with tended not to depict them. Migration
to cities is now so powerful, so universal, that people will create
cities, of sorts, simply through migration—cities that literally consist
mainly of the people who inhabit them on a given day.

ScAm:
An early theme in your work was that "the street" finds uses for
technology beyond what it was originally developed for. Do you see
examples of this in places such as Rio, Mumbai, Nairobi, Istanbul, Mexico
City?

WG:
In less-regulated environments, people may improvise a little more freely,
but a perfect example of what I mean would be a detailed technical history
of how British tabloids came to discover what could be done with the
infrastructure of cellular telephony.

ScAm:
You have focused quite a bit on branding and marketing, particularly in
your recent novels. The phrase "building one's brand" is used constantly
today in common parlance. Do you think that the "Disneylanding" of major
cities, as you call it, is part of the same phenomenon? Many people have
talked about a revival for New York and other cities. But do you think
these endeavors, often meant to attract tourists, undercut the vitality of
these places?

WG:
It seems to me that they must, inevitably. Paris, as much as I love Paris,
feels to me as though it's long since been "cooked." Its brand consists of
what it is, and that can be embellished but not changed. A lack of
availability of inexpensive shop-rentals is one very easily read warning
sign of overcooking. I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to
have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable
retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to
buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant
market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and
allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best. London,
after the Olympic redo, will have fewer affordable retail slots, I
imagine.

ScAm:
Do you think some of China's de novo cities—and some other
built-from-scratch examples, such as Masdar in Abu Dhabi—have any chance
of achieving the eclectic mix of people and experiences that foster the
type of creative ferment needed to make a city thrive?

WG:
Necessity being one of invention's many mothers, I have a certain faith in
our ability to repurpose almost anything, provided it becomes sufficiently
necessary. Then again, I suspect we've abandoned cities in the past
because they were too thoroughly built to do some specific something
that's no longer required.

ScAm:
Has the pace of changing technology made the purpose or meaning of
particular cities, or cities in general, different for new generations, or
is their essential character as places of concentrated choice something
that you think remains relatively constant?

WG:
The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it
possible for people who don't live in cities to master areas of expertise
that previously required residence in a city, but I think it's still a
faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.