The Concentration City

"The Concentration City" is a dystopian short story by British author J. G. Ballard, first published (as "Build-Up") in the January 1957 issue of New Worlds.

It has been reprinted in the Ballard collections Billennium and Chronopolis, and - under its revised title - in The Disaster Area.^[1] It appears in volume one of The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.^[2]

The story is set in the City, an apparently-endless, densely-inhabited urban space: essentially, an arcology with no outside. In terms of infrastructure and culture, it resembles a large American metropolis of the 1950s, with streets, businesses, apartments, and mass transit; the key differences are its size and its three-dimensionality, with the urban landscape vertically stacked in Levels spaced every eighty feet. Humans aside, that landscape is almost entirely artificial; a few scattered remnants of nature are preserved in small gardens and zoos (the protagonist's home County of thirty million can boast a single tree.)

The City's population is vast, but apparently stable; there is no suggestion of population pressure. There is also not much obvious material deprivation, though there are slums (and - more seriously - "dead zones," areas walled off from the rest of the City, where services are disconnected and urban decay is allowed to run rampant.) The status marker of a City neighborhood is the cost of space, with a dollar per cubic foot considered a "respectable" valuation. The City's citizens live with a deep-seated fear of deliberate arson by deranged individuals, a phenomenon mentioned throughout the story but never explicitly confirmed to actually exist. Nonetheless, pyromaniacs are considered the enemies of civilization and are the subject of widespread paranoia, in a clear analogy to fear of communist infiltration current as of Ballard's writing. Suspected pyromaniacs are regularly lynched by mobs in plain sight of the City authorities (though this is implied to often be a pretext, with the true goal being the preservation of a neighborhood's cubic-foot valuation by liquidating undesirables and the poor.)

Despite the obvious artificiality of their environment, the inhabitants of the City take their surroundings for granted, and are mostly concerned with the mundane details of day-to-day existence. It is considered eccentric to speculate on philosophical topics, such as whether the City has an edge, and what might lie beyond it; even the well-educated simply assume that the urban expanse must go on forever. The only ontological detail offered in the story is that the City is commonly believed to date from an otherwise-unelaborated-upon "Foundation," some three hundred billion years ago; in turn, the only independent implication of the City's true age is the fact that animals in its zoos have spent enough time in the City to have been evolutionarily reshaped by its physical environment (with birds that are not only flightless, but have lost their pectoral girdles, the attachment point for wings.)

The narrative follows Franz M., a twenty-year-old physics student who has become obsessed with the concept of "free space" - the idea that the City must have an end, followed by some sort of void (a concept which his best friend Gregson has a difficult time even visualizing.) Franz experiences recurring dreams of flight or levitation in such a void, and experiments with building crude gliders propelled by fireworks, though he is handicapped by the relative underdevelopment of the theory of aerodynamics, a field with no practical applications. Franz eventually concludes that this approach is a dead end, as there is - aside from restricted construction zones - no empty space large enough to trial a device large enough to carry a human. He resolves to physically discover if the City has an edge, by traveling for as long as possible in a single direction; to this end, he boards a Supersleeper, the City's long-distance rail service, whose extremely high-speed trains are propelled by rocket through evacuated tubes. In the course of ten days of westbound travel, the train exits Franz's native 298th Local Union (with its eleven trillion inhabitants) and passes outward through increasingly grandiose political subdivisions, culminating in a "755th Greater Metropolitan Empire" (the total implied total population of the sections of the City mentioned being somewhere on the order of 10²⁷ people.) On day ten, Franz randomly notices that the Supersleeper's direction is now listed as "eastbound," despite the train never having reversed course. His incredulous reaction draws the attention of the railway staff, who revoke his ticket and ship him back to his point of origin. In a police station in his home neighborhood in the 298th Local Union, Franz is questioned by a sympathetic criminal psychologist, who notes that what he did was not strictly illegal, just unusual, and that he will be recommending his release. Franz numbly glances at a wall calendar and discovers that time has also reversed: it is the day of his initial departure on the Supersleeper.

Similar concepts can be found in other works of speculative fiction, in which several distinct types of "infinite cities" appear:

• Trantor - a planet-spanning ecumenopolis from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels
• Diaspar - a sealed, self-contained city-state that endures for a billion years in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
• The City - a finite-but-unbounded megastructure larger than the Solar System in Tsutomo Nihei's manga Blame!
• The Library of Babel - a near-infinite three-dimensional structure containing every possible unique book in Jorge Luis Borges' story of the same name

• The Concentration City title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1950s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e