Remembering the future: William Gibson's Bridge culture and the propriety of romanticizing temporary human settlements
I just finished re-reading William Gibson's excellent 1993 novel Virtual Light, one of the books I was certain, as a 16-yr old in the 90's, foresaw the contours of post-millennial Pacific Rim society. The book depicts a highly dystopic yet nevertheless engaging 2005 troubled by many of the common tropes of near-future speculative fiction: deadly contagious disease (though HIV/AIDS has, thankfully, been annihilated thanks to the unique blood of a messianic figure in the form of a gay male prostitute), lifestyle-altering pollution, and the collapse of national and state governments and correlative, unchecked rise of evil transnational corporate entities to supplant them. It's not an objectively desirable place to live. Ultimately, these are some of the less interesting points of the book. Its handling, too, of future technology is also only marginally interesting, especially in re-reading it in 2011, given that we now have smartphones with many of the reality-augmenting functions the virtual light glasses in the book provide.
Much more interesting and compelling is the setting of The Bridge and depiction of Bridge culture. Large sections of the book take place on a destabilized Oakland Bay Bridge years after a catastrophic earthquake. The feckless government, either that of NoCal state or the US, is unable to repair the bridge, and it thus lapses into an unplanned community of various sorts of mainstream culture malcontents (Gibson describes the invasion of the Bridge in terms that recall SF's Castro protests of the 60's and 70's). Major groups include low-life hackers and street drug hustlers who settle here mostly because law enforcement avoids The Bridge. However, it is also home to law-abiding D-I-Y enthusiasts and other eccentrics. A distinct culture develops, built upon bartering, good will, and the good offices of certain long-term residents. There are lively, Blade Runner-esque stalls with sundry secondhand goods, streetfood, and, of course, espresso. One of the main characters, Chevette, an expat from Oregon (which Gibson describes as a "cruel" place) who works as a bike messenger in SF, lives in a makeshift tree-house high atop one of the towers with one of The Bridge's earliest residents. From the observation deck of the house, Chevette can see the entire city and hear the vibrations of The Bridge's suspension cables. In the mornings, she descends to the Bridge's second, residential level to transact business (trading her roommate's ancient secondhand gear, buying eggs from an egg vendor, coffee from a coffee vendor, etc.) before heading off to "pull tags" in the city on her paper-framed road bike.
Communal ties are both broad and deep. When a storm besets The Bridge, the slipshod structures of secondhand plywood and corrugated steel of many of the stalls and dwellings collapse. The morning after, the Bridge-dwellers reassemble what they can, and those tasked with managing services, like Fontaine the electrician, get to work repairing what they can with whatever tools and materials they can find. Then, something incredible happens: we bear witness to a ritualized procession, celebrating the life and untimely death of the HIV/AIDS messiah. In this procession, participants dress in costumes to take on roles of the epidemic and its end: emaciated disease-bearers, the doctors who failed to save them, the researchers who discovered the cannibalizing strain of the disease that eradicated it, and JD Shapely, the unlikely hero. At the end of the procession, the bodies of those who died in the storm are solemnly carted through the crowd toward the city.
Link: nxtrFOTO's flickr
This must be the future that I wanted to live in - a San Francisco that, though altered by natural disaster and mired in the interzone of the dissolving state and rising amoral transnational entities, is all the more vibrant and countercultural, home to an intriguing tribal-like fringe culture of low-lifes and eccentrics that, for all that, isn't entirely unwelcoming to outsiders. The Bridge seemed like a great and exciting "neighborhood," a perpetual bazaar of the type Westerners generally have to travel to non-Western places to experience.
The speculativist within me is intrigued by the possibilities of new forms of housing, of the new conceptualizations of post-industrial urban settlements presented by the book. At the same time, this bespeaks substantial yuppy impropriety on my part: who in his right mind finds it acceptable to romanticize what is most plainly and acceptably identified as extremity? The realist within me bristles at the unseemliness. Though I am in league with Gibson and others in speculating about what could happen when America can no longer house its people, wanting to experience it is, perhaps, a questionable outcome of this line of thinking.
Gibson's speculative depiction of course came to fruition to some extent several years later during the Dot-com Bubble. I remember, quite vividly, driving up the 405 from San Jose to San Francisco in the summer of 2000 and seeing, off to either side of the highway, first world shantytowns: large agglomerations of tents and derelict school busses repurposed to house software engineers who, though relatively well-employed at software startups, could not nearly afford Bay Area rents. It was sort of a Wild West for nerds. I was slightly too young and far too unadventurous to join them. Still, I thought it was very cool - a temporary community of dreamers and innovators, architects of the Information Age.
More recently, temporary settlements have sprung up around the country in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis. Much like in Virtual Light, regulatory and governance failures are to blame: put simply, the financing mechanisms and regulatory protections people have relied upon for stability in housing have weakened and failed. As this BBC article on tent cities in LA following the mortgage crisis in 2008 reveals, the current reality of temporary settlements has no room for dilettante escapists and more of a need for innovation than ever.
In 2011, I suppose this leaves us with as much reflecting as speculating. We have already realized large portions of the future we formerly only read about. In order to deal with a future now irredeemably present, we must support those governance structures and technical innovators who can help create a more tenable life for those forced into extremity. Still, market forces might create a future somewhere in the middle of extremity and stability, one in which those who can choose will choose to live in more communal settings in post-industrial sections of American or other Western cities. Shigeru Ban and his progeny can build for them, too, I suppose.
Much more interesting and compelling is the setting of The Bridge and depiction of Bridge culture. Large sections of the book take place on a destabilized Oakland Bay Bridge years after a catastrophic earthquake. The feckless government, either that of NoCal state or the US, is unable to repair the bridge, and it thus lapses into an unplanned community of various sorts of mainstream culture malcontents (Gibson describes the invasion of the Bridge in terms that recall SF's Castro protests of the 60's and 70's). Major groups include low-life hackers and street drug hustlers who settle here mostly because law enforcement avoids The Bridge. However, it is also home to law-abiding D-I-Y enthusiasts and other eccentrics. A distinct culture develops, built upon bartering, good will, and the good offices of certain long-term residents. There are lively, Blade Runner-esque stalls with sundry secondhand goods, streetfood, and, of course, espresso. One of the main characters, Chevette, an expat from Oregon (which Gibson describes as a "cruel" place) who works as a bike messenger in SF, lives in a makeshift tree-house high atop one of the towers with one of The Bridge's earliest residents. From the observation deck of the house, Chevette can see the entire city and hear the vibrations of The Bridge's suspension cables. In the mornings, she descends to the Bridge's second, residential level to transact business (trading her roommate's ancient secondhand gear, buying eggs from an egg vendor, coffee from a coffee vendor, etc.) before heading off to "pull tags" in the city on her paper-framed road bike.
Communal ties are both broad and deep. When a storm besets The Bridge, the slipshod structures of secondhand plywood and corrugated steel of many of the stalls and dwellings collapse. The morning after, the Bridge-dwellers reassemble what they can, and those tasked with managing services, like Fontaine the electrician, get to work repairing what they can with whatever tools and materials they can find. Then, something incredible happens: we bear witness to a ritualized procession, celebrating the life and untimely death of the HIV/AIDS messiah. In this procession, participants dress in costumes to take on roles of the epidemic and its end: emaciated disease-bearers, the doctors who failed to save them, the researchers who discovered the cannibalizing strain of the disease that eradicated it, and JD Shapely, the unlikely hero. At the end of the procession, the bodies of those who died in the storm are solemnly carted through the crowd toward the city.
Link: nxtrFOTO's flickr
This must be the future that I wanted to live in - a San Francisco that, though altered by natural disaster and mired in the interzone of the dissolving state and rising amoral transnational entities, is all the more vibrant and countercultural, home to an intriguing tribal-like fringe culture of low-lifes and eccentrics that, for all that, isn't entirely unwelcoming to outsiders. The Bridge seemed like a great and exciting "neighborhood," a perpetual bazaar of the type Westerners generally have to travel to non-Western places to experience.
The speculativist within me is intrigued by the possibilities of new forms of housing, of the new conceptualizations of post-industrial urban settlements presented by the book. At the same time, this bespeaks substantial yuppy impropriety on my part: who in his right mind finds it acceptable to romanticize what is most plainly and acceptably identified as extremity? The realist within me bristles at the unseemliness. Though I am in league with Gibson and others in speculating about what could happen when America can no longer house its people, wanting to experience it is, perhaps, a questionable outcome of this line of thinking.
Gibson's speculative depiction of course came to fruition to some extent several years later during the Dot-com Bubble. I remember, quite vividly, driving up the 405 from San Jose to San Francisco in the summer of 2000 and seeing, off to either side of the highway, first world shantytowns: large agglomerations of tents and derelict school busses repurposed to house software engineers who, though relatively well-employed at software startups, could not nearly afford Bay Area rents. It was sort of a Wild West for nerds. I was slightly too young and far too unadventurous to join them. Still, I thought it was very cool - a temporary community of dreamers and innovators, architects of the Information Age.
More recently, temporary settlements have sprung up around the country in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis. Much like in Virtual Light, regulatory and governance failures are to blame: put simply, the financing mechanisms and regulatory protections people have relied upon for stability in housing have weakened and failed. As this BBC article on tent cities in LA following the mortgage crisis in 2008 reveals, the current reality of temporary settlements has no room for dilettante escapists and more of a need for innovation than ever.
Most residents live in tents, some in mobile homes in various states of disrepair, their possessions crammed in with them or spread out on the ground.
Amenities are basic - no mains electricity, no plumbing, no drainage. Portable showers offer a chance to wash, but there is nowhere to prepare food, apart from makeshift tables in the open air.This is just not good enough. Fortunately, innovators such as Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect who builds incredibly stable and inexpensive temporary housing structures out of paper, can help to bridge the gap between speculation and the cold-hard reality of extremity.
As Architizer reports:
His latest partitions, a simplified version of his original system, are made from paper tubes of three different diameters — large for columns, medium for beams, and small for joints — that fit together without any additional parts, aside from tape to seal the connections. White canvas sheets attached to the frame and held together with safety pins provide coverage. Though adjustable, each unit easily conceals the 161-square-foot area typically allotted per family.These units cost $300 each - it's not an insubstantial amount, but it's manageable and worth the expense to give people the best quality of life possible in the most harrowing of circumstances.
In 2011, I suppose this leaves us with as much reflecting as speculating. We have already realized large portions of the future we formerly only read about. In order to deal with a future now irredeemably present, we must support those governance structures and technical innovators who can help create a more tenable life for those forced into extremity. Still, market forces might create a future somewhere in the middle of extremity and stability, one in which those who can choose will choose to live in more communal settings in post-industrial sections of American or other Western cities. Shigeru Ban and his progeny can build for them, too, I suppose.
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