Ballardian

San-Zhr Pod Village. Photograph: Craig Ferguson.

The Tomorrow Museum is a new blog that I have really been enjoying. It’s curated by Joanne McNeil, a freelance writer on science and technology, and Jerry Brito, an academic researcher. Their brief is to ‘explore how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts’ and the tendency is towards longer, thoughtful posts.

Joanne has just posted a great piece on ‘the world’s strangest housing communities’, an overview of micronational estates the world over. Joanne includes Alphaville in Brazil, patterned after Godard’s film and a place where the residents watch TV Alphaville, a 24-hour telesurveillance channel composed of nothing other than people coming and going into and out of the estate. This is my idea of heaven.

Joanne opens the piece with a riff on Super-Cannes:

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.” Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction…

In addition to Alphaville, Joanne goes on to detail the mythical Midgetville in Virginia; the quasi-religious compound Auroville in India; the peopleless pod city of San-Zhr in Taiwan (very Ballardian — to paraphrase JGB, a ‘city designed not for man but for man’s absence’); and the fake Orange County in China.

San-Zhr is amazing. It’s an SF-tinged housing project, a network of multicoloured pods that was abandoned in the 1960s just before completion due to a number of unexplained deaths. According to photographer Craig Ferguson, the ghosts of these dead workers haunt the site:

As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

Craig managed to persuade some locals to get him into the site and he’s published a series of remarkable images detailing his visit. In my former life as a travel writer, I myself might have spent a night there.

One further remark about Joanne’s article. She says that the fake Orange County, rather than patterning itself after the US gated community, should model itself on Melbourne instead, referring to a Treehugger article that lauds Melbourne’s pro-pedestrian and bicycle culture. Yes. As a Melbourne resident I’d love to visit overseas simulacra of my home town. I think then my mind would finally explode in an inverted subjective/objective feedback loop overload. But the Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.

But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.

Oh I don’t know. You decide.