Apocalyptic Desire and Our Urban Imagination

This paper seeks to explore the role of the apocalyptic trope in popularculture and its influence on our ideas of future urbanism. For nearly thelast three millennia, some portion of the world’s population has subscribedto the notion that the world as we know it is going to be destroyed by thewrath of nature, the will of God, or, more recently, by humankind itself.While many apocalyptic references relate back to conservative (often religious)traditions, a great number in circulation today are being promoted byalternative (non-religious) entities with equal veracity. As eco-theorist GregGarrard has written, not only has the apocalypse as an idea been presentsince the beginning of Judeo-Christian time, but more recently the apocalypsetrope has “provided the green movement with some if its most strikingsuccesses,” with publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, PaulEhrlich’s The Population Bomb and Al Gore’s Earth in Balance.Whether within Alan Weisman’s bestseller The World Without Us (2007),Pixar’s blockbuster Wall-e (2008) or any number of the many post-apocalypticAsian anime films produced over the past twenty or so years, thereare no shortages of references to life after the fall of industrial-capitalismin today’s media. While some post-apocalyptic representations such as theanime work Akira (1988) or the History Channel’s Life After People (2008)might remain fairly nihilistic in their future projections of urban life, themajority of these post-apocalyptic narratives provide some glimmer of hopethat, with some exact changes to certain western traditions, a new type ofsustainable balance is possible. In terms of architecture, this desire hasbegun to register itself in contemporary urban planning projects such as TheHigh Line in NYC (2011), which provides a certain poetic vision for a futurewith a greater sense of nature’s presence and nostalgic remembrance of theindustrial age now passed.This paper builds on my own past research on how the now-ubiquitous metaphorof the apocalypse might inform our current discourse about futurecities, sustainable technologies and the role of nature in urban planningtoday. Relating a number of post-apocalyptic anime films to a number ofrecent urban/natural disasters, the paper extends itself to engage UlrichBeck’s theory of reflexive modernism, and attempts to connect his theorieson social agency to the theme of this conference regarding ‘change’ and ourrole as architects in imagining the future. While many of the threats thatfuel today’s apocalyptic imagination are real, I argue in the end that the realcrisis of the future is first and foremost that of time— or more precisely ourcurrent out-of-date concept of historical time.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1