From Wired News.

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Read more at Wired.

Via ongoing.

In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, a William Gibson elegy (probably to vanish behind the paywall), lamenting cities crushing their history and our memories without even noticing.

The experience taught me something about the past, how it moves into and inhabits the future. Or rather, about how it should, ideally. Because it doesn’t, always. When I first saw London, and Paris, I understood that (though, they too would find their own regoodings, further along).

Posted to Economist.com News Analysis.

Our Asia editor compares China's satellites

Read more at Economist.com News Analysis.

Via cityofsound.

Wreck-diving London [BLDGBLOG]
"London will become a city of canals – before it is lost to the sea entirely. It is a new Atlantis, sinking deeper each day into the oceanic embrace of hydrology."

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blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both  ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been  replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that  which is attained through brute power.1 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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