Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called 'The Machine Stops.' Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of 'the Machine,' a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: 'The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. [...] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky' (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has-in the vocabulary of present-day engineers-'failed badly

Aesthetics · Art · Beehive · Humanity · Mores · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Architecture and Computational Design · Art, Technology, and Culture · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Ecology · History · Law

• Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal

  Open Access•Michaela Schippers, John P A Ioannidis et al.•Frontiers in Sociology•2024

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• Pestered with Inhabitants

  M A Powell•Pacific Historical Review•2014

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• Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

  Michelle Murphy•Sick Building Syndrome and the…•2006

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• Metaphors We Live By

  George Lakoff, Mark Johnson et al.•Metaphors we live by•2003

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• Population Density and Pathology: What Are the Relations for Man?

  Open Access•Omer R Galle, Walter R Gove et al.•Science•1972

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• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

  Jane Jacobs•Readings in Planning Theory•2015

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• Garden Cities Of To-Morrow

  Open Access•Ebenezer Howard•Organization & Environment•2003

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• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

  Arthur T Row, J M Jacobs et al.•The Yale Law Journal•1962

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• Utopia on trial

  Open Access•Robert Home•Cities•1985

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• The New Urbanism

  Open Access•John Delafons•Cities•1994

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• Compact City

  W Russell Ellis, George B Dantzig et al.•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1975

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• The Evolution of Designs

  Nick Bullock, N O A Bullock et al.•Leonardo•1981

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• The Nature of Cities

  Open Access•Chauncy D Harris, Edward L Ullman•The Annals of the American…•1945

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• The Place of Nature in the City of Man

  Open Access•Ian L McHarg•The Annals of the American…•1964

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• The City in History

  Glanville Downey, Lewis Mumford•The Classical World•1961

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• Escaping the Laboratory

  E Ramsden, Jon Adams•Journal of Social History•2009

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• Philosophical Sketches

  Open Access•Andrew Harrison•Philosophical Books•1963

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• The Social Consequences of High Population Density

  Open Access•Halliman H Winsborough•Law and Contemporary Problems•1965

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• The Hidden Dimension

  Edward T Hall•Leonardo•1973

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