The Obama Administration has pledged to make as much as $13 billion worth of stimulus money available for high speed rail projects, with an aim to bring the US rail system up to par with those in Europe and Asia. Although Amtrak, the US's intercity passenger rail provider, served a record 28.7 million people last year, this number is disproportionately low when compared to other countries, and part of that is how slow most trains are, and how infrequently they run.

This is partially a structural problem - most tracks were never upgraded to meet 1940's-era Federal Railroad Administration standards due to cost concerns, which keeps trains outside the Northeast Corridor operating at under 79 miles per hour. Lowering average speeds still further is the fact that passenger trains are often forced to idle on the tracks for up to an hour while freight traffic is given higher priority and allowed to go ahead.

Since World War II, most of the US's investments in transportation have focused on planes and automobiles, while Europe and Asia have placed their emphasis on trains, which is a big reason for the current disparity. Jalopnik's Sam Smith argued earlier this month for the necessity of high speed trains in the US, and it appears the current administration agrees. President Obama has proposed the creation of "an efficient, high-speed passenger rail network of 100- to 600-mile intercity corridors that connect communities across America." The obvious American model for such a service is the Northeast Corridor's Acela Express, which runs daily between Boston and Washington, DC.

The only high speed train in the United States, the Acela still lags behind its counterparts elsewhere in the world; its maximum speed is only 150 miles per hour and it averages only about half that speed. By contrast, the French TGV averages about 175 miles per hour, and it tops out at a record 357.1 miles per hour. Indeed, even the 13 billion dollars the Obama Administration has pledged is dwarfed by the investments of other countries; the Chinese have already said they will put over 300 billion dollars into expanding their high speed rail network.

The most promising technology for high speed trains — at least if what you care about is the highest possible speed, as I do — is undoubtedly magnetic levitation. The Maglev train that currently connects Shanghai with its Pudong International Airport covers its 18.6 mile distance in just over seven minutes, averaging 160 miles per hour with a top speed of 268 miles per hour, although its average speed would likely be higher if it covered greater distances.

A Japanese Maglev train managed to reach 361 miles per hour in 2003, just edging out the TGV's record. Here's video of the JR-Maglev train operating comfortably at 311 miles per hour or, as they insist on calling it, "500 kilometers per hour." (I know, right? Madness!)

If you feel like going completely crazy, Maglev proponents have claimed the trains could run at nearly 4,000 miles per hour if operated in a vacuum. If that isn't an argument for space trains, I don't know what is. It would only take sixty hours to reach the Moon!

[Scientific American]

The images above, illustrating the limits of the field where the Radio Frequency ID tag is able to interact with the reader, when the tag is held parallel and perpendicular to the reader. A group of researchers at Berg, including io9 contributor Matt Jones, decided to study the patterns an RFID reader makes, as a means of seeing RFID tags the way they "see" themselves.

There are four billion RFID tags in the world, and they'll soon outnumber people — they include your bus pass, the inventory tags embedded in your clothes, your work ID, and many other forms of unique identification that a reader can ping. As people move through cities, carrying these tags around, they create data trails, which linger like ghosts. As Berg's Jack Schultze puts it, referring to the Oyster public transit pass:

Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollenating with data as I travel the city.

[Berg London]

1.) Club Hel

Location: The Matrix's Mega City
What kind of Crowd? Usually the tie-me-and-gag-me types like to hang out in this leather clad-paradise, but it usually seems to have a regular crowd of rogue programs masquerading as werewolves, vampires and other paranormal anomalies.
Why you should give it a shot: Most people might be thrown off by the number of vinyl cows killed to make the fetish gear, but if you were smart enough to take the red pill, this is old hat.

2.) Holoband Clubs

Location: Anywhere you want, as long as your live in Battlestar Galactica's 12 colonies.
What kind of Crowd? The holoband clubs located in the virtual realm of one's mind make Club Hel look like a neighborhood bar. Teens go inside these illegal clubs to indulge in their most deviant desires, which at the very least involve kinky sex and at the very most include human sacrifice.
Why you should give it a shot: Should you meet an unfortunate demise, this is the best place to hide a virtual replica of yourself.

3.) The Snake Pit

Location: Blade Runner's Los Angeles in the year 2019.
What kind of Crowd? The world's social elite all cooped up together, smoking opium.
Why you should give it a shot: You can have fun spotting the replicants posing as bar patrons. Why stay at home, when you can witness an existential struggle over what it means to be human take place in your neighborhood bar.

4.) The Genetic Opera

Location: Repo! The Genetic Opera's Central entertainment featuring the Blind Mag.
What kind of Crowd? If you think that Los Angeles has a bad reputation for fake people, you obviously haven't been to a city where augmenting your body is as simple as going in for a haircut.
Why you should give it a shot: It's an opera, which is hardly a bar, but when you're high on the painkiller that everybody's hooked on, Zydrate, you don't really need a Rum and Coke to tickle your fancy.

New York

Los Angeles

Chicago

Washington, DC

San Francisco

Tokyo

London

Paris

Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Elizabeth Bear, DJ Chaotica, Larry-Bob Roberts, Zack Stentz, Daphne Gottlieb, Paul McEnery, James McGirk, Jessy Randall, Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Susie Kay, Kat Page and David Fraser for the suggestions!

The Mayor In City Of Ember
He's the textbook example of a corrupt mayor who's only interested in saving his own skin. He knows the underground city of Ember is on its way out, and soon it'll be uninhabitable due to power failures and dwindling supplies. But instead of trying to cope with the problem, the mayor tries to hoard as much stuff for himself as possible, in a secret room — and puts together meaningless commissions to study the problem. Here he is in this video, eating sardines in the grossest possible manner.

Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not good city planning at all. And then after Vader has demolished half the city in his battle with Luke Skywalker, Lando takes off and leaves his city behind. Call that leadership?

Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
She does keep the city of Bartertown humming along — except when she gets stuck into an idiotic power struggle with Master/Blaster, and everything grinds to a halt. Plus she rules with an iron fist, and forces people to fight to the death in a deadly arena. That's not the kind of leadership our post-apocalyptic cities need!

Mayor in RoboCop 2
He makes deals with drug dealers and criminals. And then he mismanages the city's finances and winds up handing the entire city over to the evil OCP. This clip pretty much says it all. And when he's in a tight corner, he just loses his shit.

Mayor Wilkins, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, season 3
Your average terrible mayor may let the city fall apart, or make deals with drug lords, or bulldoze your house for no reason. But a really awful mayor, like Wilkins, makes cozy arrangements with vampires and tries to kill off the town's only protector. And then tries to turn into a demon so he can eat the high-school graduating class. Now that's bad leadership.

Vilos Cohaagen, in Total Recall.
He's an evil administrator of the Mars settlement, keeping the mutants down and ruling with an iron grip. He uses mind-control and brainwashing to keep his minions in line. And worst of all, he won't give the people air. WTF, Cohaagen?

Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
He's always described as sitting "regally on his throne," or sitting "behind his desk with an air of utter command." He rules over New Crobuson, with its corruption and oppression — and he's not averse to making deals with the city's crime syndicates as well as its demons. He systematically rounds up dissidents and has them tortured, and he's not above imposing martial law if the situation gets out of hand.

Father in Equilibrium
Father rules over the city-state of Libria and outlaws all human emotion, even the love of a small puppy. To this end, he keeps the people doped up on a drug called Prozium, and keeps everyone under constant surveillance. (Similar to other figureheads like Big Brother in 1984, or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World — except that Father just rules over one city.) The only good thing "Father" has going for him is his kick-ass gun-centric martial art, gun-kata. Woo hoo!

Judge Cal, In Judge Dredd
This character, closely based on the Roman emperor Caligula, seized power after he had the Chief Judge of Mega-City One assassinated. In Mega-City One, the Chief Judge has absolute authority — an arrangement that's caused some problems on several occasions. So Judge Cal goes completely nuts, making it a crime to criticize him and appointing a goldfish as his deputy. He even shoots Judge Dredd! Dude!

Mayor Prentiss in The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
Prentisstown is not a nice place to begin with — there are no women, and the males can all hear each other's thoughts all the time, whether they want to or not. But Mayor Prentiss makes matters worse, by figuring out a way to control men's minds. He declares himself President and invades the neighboring settlement of Haven, where there are some women. And that's just the beginning of his reign of terror. Runner up: The mayors in Truancy by Isamu Fukui.

Niccol, was also responsible for S1m0ne and The Truman Show, is writing and directing The Cross, which features Orlando Bloom, Vincent Cassel, John Goodman and Olga Kurylenko as residents of a grim, future city from which they cannot escape:

Mylar (Bloom) and his younger brother Castro come to a town to cross the border in search of a better life. The two travelers, full of hope, all too quickly realize that their journey leads them to an inescapable world full of doom. The enigmatic border is strictly enforced under the command of a guard, Guideon, who prohibits anyone from ever leaving. Castro doesn't make it alive past two weeks, but Mylar defies all odds and becomes the first to successfully cross the border. And he also becomes the first to come back… all for the love of a woman, Vera. Mylar must now devise a plan not only to set himself free, but all of his fellow citizens as well. But perhaps crossing the border is not the answer. Perhaps the key lies in altering the border and whatever it may represent…

You can check out more concept images by artist Jean-Vincent Puzos at Quiet Earth.

What's your city got?

Additional reporting by Julia Carusillo.

History and the Unknowable

For every piece of city magic, there is some kind of real-world analogue. Take, for example, the urban vampire. She eats aspiring actresses in the show Angel; he stalks prey through every city in Europe and America in Anne Rice's vampire book series. They run their own goth clubs in the Underworld movies, and manage to find really nice Bristol flats in UK serial Being Human. Even Dracula wanted to move to London from the lonely Carpathians.

Why are vampires' mythical, bloodstained faces hidden in trashed alleyway shadows in your city? Because most cities aren't just packed with people. They are layered with history - sometimes many thousands of years of it. Even in relatively new cities like San Francisco or Toronto, several dead generations have walked the streets before you. They've lived in your houses, and gone to your favorite shops.

Like vampires, these unknowable phantoms of history are hidden. But their influence lingers in the present. When you go into the buildings they built, buy their used clothing at the Goodwill, and eat in the dining rooms where they once did, you brush shoulders with the dead.

Emergent Formations and Conspiracies

Cities are also packed with strange secret societies and conspiracies. Fritz Lieber's novel of city magic, Our Lady of Darkness, is a classic in this regard. He invents the term megapolisomancy - the magic of big cities - to describe a strange hex that has been cast on the entire city of San Francisco. A mystical triangle emerges when the Transamerica Pyramid is erected, forming the dark symbol with the toothy peak at Corona Heights and the apartment of a sorcerer. Cities that turn into mystical symbols occur in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell, where London has been laid out in a secret pentagram. In both stories, secret societies are responsible for both creating and reading these symbols, in order to gain power or destroy other people.

In "The Horror At Red Hook," H.P. Lovecraft imagines that the city of New York sits atop a vast underground series of rivers and caverns where foreigners consort with devils and threaten the whole stucture of civilization.

These conspiracies hold a fantastical mirror up to a true characteristic of urban life: Emergent formations. Out of many chaotic parts, neighborhoods and subcultures form in cities - seemingly without any design or plan. More frightening than a conspiracy is a coherence that comes out of nothing except random parts connecting. Immigrant neighborhoods come into being without design; corporations ooze into other corporations; riots erupt; artist subcultures take over buildings intended for general use. Indeed, in Our Lady of Darkness, the Transamerica Pyramid has replaced one such building subculture - a true urban historical fact that bleeds easily into city magic.

Surveillance and Doubling

Cities are covered in a million eyes - and they all watch each other. Windows look into windows; crowds are a morass of furtive glances; and surveillance cameras adorn every surface. We pretend we have privacy in cities, but always doubt it. There is something uncanny about this feeling. You split into two selves: The self you perceive yourself to be, and the self you perceive other people are always watching. Who are you? Are you what the elevator camera sees, or the person you see in the (possibly two-way) mirror?

If there are two versions of you, it makes sense that there is a secret other city beneath the surface of the one you inhabit. Or perhaps existing in the same space as your city, as the characters discover in China Mieville's haunting noir fantasy novel The City & The City. Or perhaps your city is riddled with passageways to another one, which you can enter only through mirrors. This is one of the many intriguing details in Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, where the newly-revived field of sorcery has revealed that magicians can get around England using a series of roads reached via mirrors. The roads themselves seem to lead through a vast and abandoned city.

And in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, another city lurks literally beneath London's feet – a city of magic and monsters, whose citizens share with London only a series of landmarks: the Tube stops. Even the Harry Potter series plays with this idea, creating an invisible train platform in King's Cross station that can only be reached by people with magic.

Population Density and Hallucination

Cities can be so vast that walking through them is akin to hallucinating. The road we just went down seems to have disappeared. There are three streets with almost exactly the same name, running parallel to one another. People in strange costumes are congregating on a street corner for no reason. Elsewhere, a sea of people in matching business suits fill the streets with a freakishly uniform charcoal grey.

The constantly-morphing city in Dark City, where our hero without memories awakens to discover himself the victim of a vast conspiracy, is a literal version of the everyday surrealism of city life. And so is the urban landscape in City of Lost Children, a steamy, mechanical world where a monster who cannot dream tries to extract the dreams of children. In Wicked City, the world of magics that spreads across comic books and an amazing live-action movie, is the ultimate hallucination. People merge into buildings – at one point, a demon turns into an elevator, and then a motorcycle.

The very fabric of our bodies becomes permeable in the hallucinatory city. Something about the incredible population density in cities makes this possible. We are surrounded by human-made objects as we wander the forests of buildings. Human dreams spray across the walls in the forms of murals, art, advertisements. We exist in the dreamscape of our own species. It is not a natural place. It is the place we built out of our own fantasies.

Gilded Cages

The Axiom (WALL*E): The luxury liner Axiom has taken humanity on a multi-generational space cruise so successful that humans have lost the drive to even contemplate leaving. But when the Axiom's marginally more self-aware captain gets it into his head that it's time to return to Earth, he learns that the ship's robots have standing orders to keep the population trapped on board — for their own good, of course.

The Community (The Giver by Lois Lowry): In the tightly regulated Community, everything is carefully structured and everyone is provided for. Most residents would never dream of leaving, but believe that if they break some of the Community's more serious rules, they'll be "released" and live outside the Community. As it turns out, however, "release" is less exile than execution.

Tally's City (The Uglies Series by Scott Westerfeld): The denizens of Tally Youngblood's post-scarcity community want for nothing. Food is plentiful, entertainment is readily available, and people are peaceful. And, once sixteen year-olds move from Uglyville to New Pretty Town, they get fresh, attractive faces and life becomes an endless series of parties. Of course, the price is a couple of intelligence-numbing lesions on your brain, and that any attempts to leave will be blocked by the fearsome Dr. Cable and her team of surgically-enhanced Specials.

The City of Domes (Logan's Run): After a population explosion resulted in disaster, it was decided that people within the City of Domes would live a life of pleasure until age 21 (or 30, depending on whether you're reading the book or watching the movie). You can try to escape before your fatal birthday, but then you have to deal with Sandmen, people employed to kill the people who run.

The Capital of Panem (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins): In Panem, geography is destiny. Those born in the North American nation's twelve districts must endure the harsh conditions set by the Capital. But in the Capital, where citizens live lives of pleasure and ease, they're no more free. Escaping from the Capital means execution, or a life of servitude as a mute and mutilated Avox.

The Urban Monoliths (The World Inside by Robert Silverberg): The Urbmons are not actually a single city, but a series of enclosed, thousand-story buildings bursting with an ever-growing human population. People have no privacy and may never go outside, instead living hedonistic lives indoors ruled by rampant sex, prepackaged entertainment, and happiness-inducing drugs. Anyone who contemplates stepping outside the ant farm is termed a "flippo" and risks a trip down a shaft that leads into the power generator.

The Village (The Village): A less scifi example comes from M. Night Shyamalan's film about an isolated rural village. The village elders created what they believed to be a utopian society free from violence, and agreed to remain by compact, but force their children to stay inside the village limits with spooky stories of "Those We Don't Speak Of" and the occasional dose of animal mutilation.

Labor Camps

One State (We by Yevgeny Zamyatin): Perhaps the prototypical inescapable city, One State is made entirely of glass, a megacity where work and sex are under state control. When D-503 awakens to the oppression imposed by the Great Benefactor, he begins to dream of rebellion. But D-503 finds that even a mental escape from the city is temporary at best.

The Electronic Labyrinth (THX 1138): As in One State, the underground city of THX 1138, workers are completely controlled, albeit with drugs and mindless entertainment instead of indoctrination and sex. Most of the city's workers, even those in prison, can't even contemplate escape, but those that do have to face the city's police force.

City-Wide Prisons

The Village (The Prisoner): Men and women who know the secrets of the world are captured and sent to the surreal Village, a place that might be idyllic if you could ever leave it. Although there are no clear boundaries preventing escape, Rover, the Village's eerie white balloon, will be sure to nudge (or drag) an potential escapees home again.

Seahaven (The Truman Show): Only one person is actually a prisoner inside the domed town of Seahaven: Truman Burbank, unwitting star of The Truman Show. To ensure that he never leaves (or even realizes he's imprisoned in the first place), the show's creator has placed him on an invented island and saddled him with a traumatic fear of water.

The Strangers' City (Dark City): The Dark City is actually a strange urban petrie dish, a city created by the alien Strangers to stage their experiments. Most denizens don't even realize they're imprisoned by the aliens, since, along with the city, their memories are altered each day.

Vault 101 (Fallout 3): When a nuclear attack turns all of Washington, DC into a nuclear wasteland, life in a fallout shelter doesn't sound like a half-bad plan. But Vault 101 wasn't designed as a means for preserving humans to repopulate the Earth; it's rather an elaborate science experiment to test the results of indefinite isolation under an Overseer. Although no one (save the Overseer) is ever supposed to leave the Vault, a couple of folks do manage to get up to the wasted surface.

The Colony (The Island): Residents of the enclosed colony only believe that the Earth has been entirely devastated, leaving them in a comfortable facility and hoping for a ticket to "The Island," the last habitable place on Earth. But when Lincoln Six-Echo does a little sniffing around the facility, he discovers that they're not in a shelter but a prison, and that they're cloned humans made to provide spare parts to the wealthy and unscrupulous.

New York and Los Angeles (Escape from New York, Escape from LA): When crime and moral decay reach a critical mass, Manhattan — and then Los Angeles — are declared maximum-security prisons. Unlike many other urban prisons, New York and Los Angeles are fairly straight-forward, with high walls, moats, and guards keeping criminals inside.

Cities at the End of the World

Diaspar (The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke): For the most part, the denizens of Diaspar feel no compulsion to ever leave their enclosed urban home. As far as they know, there are no other humans on Earth and humanity will encounter a dreaded foe if it ever again spreads into the stars. When Alvin, the first new soul born into Diaspar in seven thousand years, begins to inquire what's outside, the other residents won't even consider his questions, though he does eventually find a passage to a second civilization, and seeks to discover why the people of Diaspar are so afraid of venturing outside.

The Underground Cities (12 Monkeys): When a biological agent wipes out most of humanity, the survivors are forced underground. Until a cure can be found, there's no point in going outside unless you have a death wish. There is one way to enjoy fresh air, however: travel back in time before the virus was released.

Zion (The Matrix): In the realm of The Matrix series, humans are generally either plugged into the Matrix or living in Zion, the last human city. Ships do come and go from Zion to battle the machines or remove more humans from the Matrix, but even that must be done carefully to keep the machines from learning its location — although, in fact, the machines are already well aware of it.

Paradigm City (The Big O): After "The Event," residents of Paradigm City found themselves without memories and without a world outside their own city. Everything outside the city is a wasteland. Some folks claim to come from outside the city, but it's likely their origins are more sinister than that.

Ember (City of Ember): After an unnamed disaster, those living in the underground city of Ember believe they exist in the last inhabitable place on Earth, with no reason to leave as long as the city's generator keeps working and the lights stay on. But when the generator begins to fail, two of Ember's children must find a way to escape the city and spirit the entire community to safety.

There Be Zombies Outside

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Land of the Dead): The survivors of the zombie apocalypse set up a haven for themselves in Pittsburgh, using the city's surrounding rivers and an electric fence to keep the undead outside. But even without the threat of a zombie attack, Pittsburgh has it share of problems, with an emerging feudal system causing tension among the living humans.

ARC Island (The Zombie Hunters): Jenny Romanchuk's zombie comic has its own haven in the form of ARC Island, which serves as a village for survivors and a research lab to find a cure. The only ones who venture into zombie-infested territory are the Zombie Hunters — still-living humans infected with a dormant form of the zombie virus.

Mary's Village (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan): In The Forest of Hands and Teeth, the zombie apocalypse occurred so long ago that people living inside Mary's fenced-in village hardly remember technology or the ocean. The only thing that keeps them safe from the Unconsecrated undead is a chain-link fence, which none but the most desperately suicidal pass.

Raccoon City (Resident Evil): The problem with Raccoon City isn't so much the zombies outside; it's the zombies inside. When an experiment creates a zombie outbreak, the Umbrella Corporation places the entire city under quarantine, forcing anyone who wants out to battle both zombies and private military forces.

Other Cities:

Bregna (Aeon Flux): Much like the totalitarian labor camps and gilded cages is Bregna, one of two cities in the Aeon Flux universe. In order to preserve order and keep the Breen population separate from its anarchist Monican neighbors, Trevor Goodchild has erected a small, but heavily booby-trapped Berlin Wall.

Alixus' Colony (Deep Space Nine "Paradise"): Alixus is the leader of a small human colony stranded on an Earth-like planet. With all of technology on the planet suppressed, the colonists have been unable to summon rescue, but have happily adapted to a luddite existence. But when Sisko and O'Brien find themselves trapped on the planet, they learn that Alixus has deliberately suppressed the colony's technology and isolated the planet without her neighbors' knowledge or consent.

Kandor (Superman): Once the capital city of Krypton, Kandor was miniaturized and stolen by Braniac, who kept the entire city in a bottle, lit by an artificial red sun. Superman eventually recovered the city, and it sits in the Fortress of Solitude, with city life going on until the day Superman can restore it to its original size.

Local architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello hit upon this idea after considering what was about to happen to the Bay Bridge. Here is an aerial view, showing the abandoned side of the bridge on the right. This span of the bridge is still very sturdy, and could easily bear quite a bit of weight. Why dismantle and waste it when you could turn it into a unique neighborhood?

In a detailed proposal for what they call The Bay Line, the architects suggest the bridge could be a series of public parks with neighborhoods hanging beneath the bridge. This is a more suburban version of what happens in William Gibson's novel Virtual Light, where squatters take up residence on the bridge after it is partly destroyed.

Rael and San Fratello also point out that other cities have successfully built bridge neighborhoods, including Florence, Italy's Ponte Vecchio (pictured below) and the London Bridge in London. Over at BLDG BLOG, Geoff Manaugh meditates on this possible bridge community, and writes:

While, on one level, this simply side-steps the immense financial implications associated with structurally maintaining these bridges . . . it does also kick-start a conversation about what we might be able to do with the massive pieces of civic infrastructure that dot the U.S. and are currently scheduled for replacement and demolition.

Read Rael and San Fratello's full proposal for the Bay Line [PDF], via BLDG BLOG

Top image via Constant's New Babylon.

The son of an architect, Schuiten grew up fascinated by architecture and horrified by the increasing destruction of historic buildings in Brussels in favor of more generic modern structures. This sense has greatly influenced his most famous work, the ongoing Les Cités Obscures (often translated as Cities of the Fantastic), a collaboration with writer Benoît Peeters.

Les Cités Obscures is set on a "counter-Earth," a planet similar to our own that exists on the exact opposite side of the sun. The Obscure Cities are versions of Earth cities, but are ruled by architects, and so architecture is the world's driving force. Jules Verne is a recurring character in the series, and a key influence on the comic's technology and aesthetics.

In addition to Les Cités Obscures, Schuiten created Les Terres Creuses (The Hollow Grounds) with his brother Luc Schuiten, and designed the Arts et Métiers Métro station in Paris (inspired by Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea), and the Hallepoort station in Brussels.

[Urbicande]

Arts et Métiers
Arts et Métiers
Hallepoort
Hallepoort

One of the most haunting images from recent science fiction is the garbage city where trash-compacting robot Wall-E has lived for hundreds of years. Abandoned by the humans who polluted it, the Earth has become a planet of skyscrapers made of compact blocks of garbage created by Wall-E and his cohort. But now even Wall-E's fellow robots have become garbage, their bodies good for nothing but scavenging spare parts.

The garbage cities of Wall-E represent a classic fear expressed in both fiction and public discussion about human civilization. Put simply, we fear that the good parts of our cities - the culture and science and progress - will be unable to outrun the waste, crime, and greed spawned by urban decay.

But the city is also utopian, representing the very best that human civilization has to offer. Cities tease us with the possibility of living in a place where clean energy and scientific progress have released humans from the realm of necessity. No longer forced to squabble over scarce resources to survive, the humans in these cities are free to explore ideas, creating new technologies and art.

The density of human life in cities breeds what Fritz Lieber dubbed "megalopolisomancy," or city magic. With so many lives interconnected by time and space in one small area, you're bound to start seeing ghosts. There's something dark and mystical about urban life, where possibility shades into probability without much warning. Spasms of weath generate surreal structures and events; vast communities of artists build imaginary worlds in the middle of the street. If mirrored buildings can disappear into clouds, and shop windows promise perfect bodies draped in gold, why can't vampires lurk in alleys and mutants live in storm drains?

All week long, io9 will take you into the breathtaking, bizarre, and mysterious world of the city. We'll cover everything from great science fictional cities, to cities of the future that already exist today. In art and in stories, we'll explore urban fantasy, urban reality, and urban science. Cities are humanity at its highest concentration. As they stand or fall, so does humanity.

Images, from top to bottom, via:
Viktor Antonov
Wall-E
Tomorrow's Thoughts Today
Audic at Deviant Art

The SharedWorlds project sends teens on a two-week camp focusing on science fiction and fantasy, at Wofford College in South Carolina. Assistant director and instructor (and io9 contributor) Jeff VanderMeer curated the discussion, asking the authors, "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

Those four authors listed above, plus Elizabeth Hand, weighed in, and the evocative descriptions will make you want to dust off your passport and go traveling. The five chosen cities couldn't be more different from each other — some (like London) are shiny and high-tech, others (like Venice) are ancient and crabby.

In the process, you learn a lot about what each author considers fascinating about cities. Le Guin and Moorcock both seem to find the weight of history, settling onto a city or driving it into the ground, compelling and fecund with storytelling possibilities. Miéville seems to find London's lack of planning, its crazed ad-hoc development, exciting. Nalo Hopkinson finds Kingstown's mix of high and low technology, cobbled together, to be futuristic in a William Gibson-esque way. And then there's Hand's forceful argument that Reykyavik is like an outpost on an alien world.

Most fascinating of all? No cities in the United States — and none in Asia, either. I would have expected somebody to reach for Shanghai or Mumbai, which are being touted as the most "futuristic" cities by many observers. My personal pick? Hong Kong. I lived there for many years, and its crazily shifting landscape (buildings constantly being torn down, put up, torn down again, and tons of bizarre business schemes blossoming all over) felt like a future megacity at times.

The full list, with each author's comments, is well worth checking out. [Shared Worlds]

Here's the bleak post-Judgment Day version:

It's pretty striking to see the exact same shot as portrayed in two very different movies, and it underscores how different the two films' views of the future (and of technology) really are. And just for good measure, Protohiro also posted almost the same view, as it looks today:

[Protohiro on Flickr]

[SFIst]

These concept designs are by TROPICOOL @ KL, and emulate the several layers of a tropical forest, with the canopy flying high over the rest of the damp flora and fauna. The idea is that cities of the future might create mini-ecosystems based on ones found in nature. According to Inhabitat:

The structure's circular tops are composed of miniature solar panels that provide a power source while mimicking the process of photosynthesis that takes place in rainforest canopies. Scattered throughout the branches of the mushroom tops are dwellings modeled after the Malaysian [style].

These energy-generating skyscraper neighborhoods look like high-density housing for a future world of high performance buildings that generate their own power - and their own food supplies too.

via Inhabitat

Harvard design grad students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner explain how this would work:

Housing plats and roads are marked by solar-powered lighting poles. Individual dwellings bob, tethered with RV-type umbilical cords through which potable water, electricity, sew-age, and telephone connections continue uninterrupted. When the water subsides, depositing the city in a new arrangement.

Sure, it's Utopian, but I need Utopianism on Monday. Really, I do.

Floating in a Sinking City [Harvard via Inhabitat]

Interesting article, this idea has been written about in many SF stories-of course ;-)  I believe Larry Niven wrote one about a self sustaing arcology.

Here are some of the highlights of this proposed city:
- No cars
- No taxes
- Small streets
- Constant streams of efficiency maximizing data
- Photovoltaic farms
- Transparent laws
- Full intellectual property protection

Sounds awesome, right? Although I'm not sure I'm willing to give up my car just yet. When and if completed, Masdar City will occupy six square kilometers of land near Abu Dhabi's international airport. No word yet on the world's first zero-G city.

The Masdar Initiative main page via Techpin

The secret to making this shiny building work in extreme hot weather is angles. The facade is angled to minimize glare, and the roof is slanted with the winds so that cool air currents can pass through the building.

Construction starts this summer.

Foster + Partners main page via Dezeen