Posted by Bruce Sterling to Beyond the Beyond.

FERAL CITIES

Richard J. Norton

Naval War College Review, Autumn 2003, Vol. LVI, No. 4

https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=733339

FERAL CITIES

Richard J. Norton

Naval War College Review, Autumn 2003, Vol. LVI, No. 4

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital  component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a  vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both  ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been  replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that  which is attained through brute power.1 

Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, (((yo!))) where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s  Alley.2 Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess  at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants 

would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing  technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

Admittedly, the very term “feral city” is both provocative and 

controversial.

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