This critique was also heard in dissident Marxist circles. ‘Let us look at what is happening in modern architecture,’ implored Roy Medvedev of his Soviet samizdat audience in the 1970s. It is ‘a field where enormous transformations are taking place, thanks to the use of new materials and construction methods, resulting in a fresh international style’. All well and good. But ‘this, however, is no excuse for building new and completely impersonal residential areas with standardised houses of identical design in Moscow, Baku and Tashkent. What is appropriate for an industrial city may be out of place in the capital of a national republic. And what suits one capital may not necessarily suit another.’22 Notoriously, this was seldom taken into account, and one of the famous – if inadvertent – results of Khrushchev’s 1954 decrees on ‘Industrialised Building’ and ‘Against Architectural Excesses’ was that an international style truly took hold in a way that those who coined that term couldn’t have imagined – precisely the same style, aesthetic and often constructional approach for a transcontinental territory that stretches from the borders of Scandinavia to the edge of Afghanistan to a sea border with Japan.
From the mid-1960s onwards architects and communist thinkers actively tried to solve this problem. Some initial attempts were made to reintroduce the 1920s idea of collective housing, which would dissolve the nuclear family and create districts with individual units for sleep and study but with communal spaces for eating and leisure, but the first communal house built since the early 1930s – the House for the New Everyday Life, not far from Novye Cheryomushki – was turned into a student dormitory just before the building’s completion.23 On the other hand, the construction systems became more extensive – it was now normal to prefabricate entire rooms, not just panels – and new systems also offered the possibility of elaborate skylines and visual drama. More flexible modules were developed, such as the BKR-2, developed in Krasnodar, which in theory offered architects and clients the possibility of creating any facade they wanted on top of the structural module. ‘The lack of structural function of exterior wall elements allowed for the creation of facades of any texture, rhythm or scale,’ points out Dimitrij Zadorin. The Soviet economy preferred simple, ‘factory-ready’ modules, however, such as the massively used 1–464 series, which needed little post-production attention on site, making the jobs of construction institutes and local governments easier. Because of this, ‘practically every ambitious project based on BKR-2 never left the drawing board. What were launched into production instead were residential blocks of nine and 12 storeys. One after another, they filled new developments…making them barely identifiable blood brothers of the cheerless panel outskirts in other cities.’24 An entire ‘third generation’ of what Philipp Meuser calls ‘Tetris’ blocks was launched in the USSR, and most of them faced the problem that ‘any alteration to the product range was stressful’25 for the specialised ‘house factories’ that produced most Soviet housing.
So, while there are thousands of Belyayevos, there is only one Severnoye Chertanovo (see Figures 10.9–10.11). It’s further south, reached via a recent, fiddly Metro interchange that usefully attempts to connect up the mikrorayons rather than link them solely to the centre. You can tell something is different as soon as you get off the Metro; while the stations in Belyayevo and Cheryomushki are as standardised as the housing, Chertanovskaya station is a return to the strange, opulent dreamworld created under Moscow during the Stalin era. Architect Nina Alyoshina’s hall is a moodily lit expressionist cathedral,speaking of arrival at somewhere special, not of departure to the centre. Outside, apartment blocks spread around a large lake. Half of these are standardised in the Belyayevo mould, but the other half are mid-rise buildings arching around artificial hills and valleys, connected by glazed skyways. You can see, looking closely, that they’re also made of standardised panels, but arranged in such a way as to give variety to the buildings; it’s the first of the mikrorayons in which you can really speak of ‘architecture’ (credited to a team of architects headed by Mikhail Posokhin, Abram Shapiro and engineer Lev Dubek) rather than just engineering. The mikrorayon’s centre consists of a square in front of the Metro with two shabby buildings: a rotunda with a bar looking out over the water, and a long, low block (now used as a supermarket) facing the lake. They’re bleak, but bustling; their bleakness comes from their chaotic subdivision and mess of adverts, not from their dereliction or neglect.
Figure 10.9 Chertanovskaya Metro station
Figure 10.10 Severnoye Chertanovo
Figure 10.11 Avenue 77
When writing about the district for The Guardian, I spoke to photographer Yuri Palmin, who has lived in Chertanovo for 18 years, first in what he calls the ‘bad’, standardised blocks and then in the more prestigious, bespoke blocks opposite, which still have a more stable population than is the suburban norm. He pointed out to me not only that the area looks unlike the other mikrorayons but that it has a totally different layout. Rather than the interchangeable units for nuclear families, there are ‘42 different kinds of single and double level flats, with winter gardens in the ground floors’ within these long complexes. This was a late attempt under Leonid Brezhnev to show that ‘developed socialism’ could have room for different kinds of families and lives, ‘a sign of hope, a training ground and a lab’.26 That is, they come closer than most to the promises of futurology such as Life in the Twenty-First Century or The Ideal Communist City. After the question of solving an urgent problem, one of basic need – getting the population out of overcrowded, subdivided communal flats and into purpose-built apartments with their own front doors, not to mention heating and sanitation – the planned economy could finally move from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’. Except that transition never happened on a large scale, and the standardised blocks were rolled out to the edges of Moscow right until the end of the 1980s.
The mistake often made is to assume that standardisation ended with the capitalist ‘shock therapy’ applied to the planned economy in the early 1990s. The new blocks built into the interstices of the mikrorayons are still industrialised and still pieced together from concrete panels, albeit with silly decorative roofs to give a shallow impression of individuality. Even the Orthodox church built near the lake in the late 1990s is standardised in its thin, tacky application of old Russian details. What has changed is two things: space, with communal areas considered parcels of land ripe for development; and speculation, with a vibrant property market in the capital generating fortunes for a few and insecurity for most. Dominating Chertanovo today is a 40-storey monolith, called ‘Avenue 77’. According to Palmin it limits light for many Severnoye Chertanovo residents for much more than ‘a few hours in summer’. It tries to break up its enormous grid of standardised flats via a Koolhaas-like ‘iconic’ shape, but nobody could be seriously fooled; this is form following speculation, an image of public space and equality being crushed by speculation.
In the 1990s, when looking at the apparently interchangeable districts produced by ‘Communism’, critics didn’t see, or ignored, the libraries, the childcare centres, the polyclinics, the schools, the parks, the treatment of housing as a basic and free human right, but saw merely those huge, inescapable, interchangeable monoliths – the slabs upon slabs that always strike the casual viewer driving from the airport to the centre. In his attempt to create a Marxist analysis of the economics of the USSR, Hillel Ticktin used housing as a useful example of the problems that its professed socialism caused for the Soviet economy. ‘The same problem,’ he writes, ‘that may appear as one of many difficulties in capitalism is of crucial moment in the Soviet system. The production of poor quality housing under capitalism is a fact of life that may increase the profits of the construction companies. In the USSR, it leads to enormous costs of repair, problems of replacement, and to an absorption of resources that the system cannot afford…at all times the poor quality of the Soviet product constitutes a contradiction of the system.’27 In other words, the Soviet economy was incredibl
y wasteful, but, unlike capitalism, the planners hadn’t figured out how to make waste and failure profitable. The endemic low productivity and low quality of goods were explained by Ticktin as a consequence of the bureaucrats’ fear of the workers. They would not push workers as hard as they would be pushed in the West, and, with full employment an intrinsic part of the system, they were not threatened with the sack; but, there again, they could not offer workers the consumer goods or the dream of social advancement as incentives to coax them into raising productivity. Automation had not reached the level at which these sorts of problems would become irrelevant, though it may have had some role in the poor quality of goods.
Critics from both the left and right argued that the monumental uniformity of housing was the greatest possible indictment of the system: a rigid plan that assumed everyone wanted the same thing, while giving them a mass-produced product that few really desired, but had to accept for want of anything better. The assumption was that the free market would result in variety, liveliness and complexity. What actually happened was a property boom that took over the three or four biggest cities, and a grim decline everywhere. In the centre, some specially commissioned edifices spoke of the rarefied or outré tastes of the new elite, but in the suburbs, where many more people had to suffer the consequences, the main change was that blocks became bigger, longer and much more careless of public space, but were still built via the methods that the newly privatised construction companies had learned well in the good old days.28 As Bee Flowers pointed out in 2006, ‘[W]ithin the monolithic construction sector remarkably little has changed. The sector has no internal stimuli for change, and in the absence of alternatives there are no effective market pressures. Moreover, now that the vast majority of Russians live in system-built housing blocks, these have come to define the urban experience – the expectation of things being any other way has died.’29 The ideals of Novye Cheryomushki died as much more than fond or ironic nostalgia, but its methods and techniques remained, and managed to make some people very wealthy. What the Soviet prefabrication programme promised, and failed to deliver, was at best something more than simply lots more housing. Instead, it suggested that mass production could actually create a society that was both communal and differentiated, industrialised and green and placid. The end of the USSR finished much hope of the first of these, and the infill of green spaces in large cities is currently obliterating the second. Whether mass housing could achieve greater things in more propitious circumstances, and in a very different kind of society, with less dominance of patriarchy, bureaucracy and Fordist labour, is another question entirely.
1M. Vassiliev & S. Gouchev (eds.) (1959 [1961]) Life in the Twenty-First Century. London: Penguin Books, pp. 162–3.
2B. Flowers (2006) What’s Wrong with This Approach, Comrades?, Architectural Design, 76(1): 62–3.
3P. Meuser & D. Zadorin (2016) Towards a Typology of Mass Housing in the USSR. Berlin: Dom.
4K. Snopek (2013) Belyayevo Forever. Moscow: Strelka Press, p. 13.
5Ibid., p. 77.
6A. Baburov, G. Djumenton, A. Gutnov, S. Kharitonova, I. Lezava & S. Zadovskij (1968) The Ideal Communist City. New York: George Braziller, p. 153.
7Ibid., p. 156.
8Ibid., p. 145.
9Ibid., p. 34.
10A. Merkulov (1964) Automation Serves Man. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, p. 149.
11Baburov et al., The Ideal Communist City, p. 87.
12Ibid., p. 158.
13L. Attwood (2010) Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 170.
14Ibid., p. 155.
15Ibid., p. 157.
16This statistic is proudly stated in the propaganda pamphlet ‘USSR – Welfare’ (1973, Moscow: Novosti, unpaginated), and attacked as an example of the idiocy of Soviet economics in sundry Western analyses.
17Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia, p. 207.
18See here A. Bronovitskaya, L Pavlova & O. Kazakova (2015) Leonid Pavlov. Florence: Electa, p. 198.
19Snopek, Belyayevo Forever, pp. 48–9.
20B. Lubetkin (1932) The Russian Scene – the Development of Town Planning, Architectural Review, May.
21V. Havel (1992) Stories and Totalitarianism, in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990: 328–50. New York: Vintage Books, p. 343.
22R. Medvedev (1977) On Socialist Democracy. New York: Norton, p. 85.
23On this building, see the volume in Reaktion Books’ ‘Modern Architectures in History’ series: R. Anderson (2015) Russia. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 226–8.
24Meuser & Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Mass Housing, p. 434.
25Ibid., p. 345.
26Interviews with the author, April 2015.
27H. Ticktin (1992) Origins of the Crisis in the USSR. Armonk, NY: M. E Sharpe, p. 11.
28For a comprehensive and, rightly, heavily critical analysis of this construction boom, largely reliant on the sweated labour of central Asian migrants rather than automation (people are cheaper), see The Russian Reader, A Home For Every Russian, 3 May, https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/a-home-for-every-russian, accessed 31 August 2016.
29Flowers, What’s Wrong with This Approach, Comrades?
11
Megastructures, Superweapons and Global Architectures in Science Fiction Computer Games
Mark R. Johnson
Introduction
In Halo 5, a first-person shooter computer game released in 2015, players find themselves walking through a planet surrounded by technologies of almost unimaginable complexity and power. These are ‘guardians’, vast angel- or eagle-like mechanical devices that, we are told, could each subdue an entire solar system. They were manufactured (like much in the Halo series) by the ‘Forerunners’, an ancient and now extinct galactic race of incredible technological advancement. They built artificial planets, manufacturing plants large enough to manufacture the artificial planets, and – one might suppose – manufacturing plants for the manufacturing plants. Such giant constructions – megastructures – and the varied societies that produce them can be found with remarkable regularity across far more games than just Halo. From Half-Life to Killzone and from Mass Effect to Destiny, titanic structures abound, with different economic models underpinning their construction. In some cases these are only backdrop, but in many cases the player gets to explore and navigate these megastructures first-hand.
In this chapter I look over the many different futuristic economies that games have portrayed, the structures and architectures that emerged from them and what they show us about the potential of the computer game – as opposed to the film, the novel, and so forth – not just to present visions of the future but to make those visions playable and open to exploration. This will start with an overview of some of the most visible megastructures in contemporary games, with a particular focus on the specific representations of future societies and economies they represent. We then move on to explore the importance of these being specifically in-game constructions, and how games are serving as the site for experimenting with possible techno-economic futures, and specifically playable futures. In doing so I will argue that games are a particularly rich medium for examining science fiction economies and the physical structures they produce, and that in the future we should expect to see these imaginaries becoming more popular, more varied and more notable.
Games are a particular kind of fiction: they are interactive, they change with the player’s/reader’s actions and they give a tremendous amount of freedom for the player to approach them in a range of different ways. In a traditional literary sense, games are inevitably closest to the choose-your-adventure novel (and, to a lesser extent, the literature of authors such as Italo Calvino or Jorge Borges). In adventure novels the reader is a player and navigates their own way through a text that branches and weaves with many options; in the works of Calvino and Borges, the reader is often spoken to directly, or an active
participant in the narrative. Similarly, games rarely if ever imagine a passive reader; the player is always caught up in the action, and, in almost all cases, leads that action. Science fiction consequently finds a good home in games: players can lead the action and drive the exploration of worlds whose rules do not conform to our own, and which offer the players things – technologies, places, ways of being – whose use is entirely alien. Games are also, of course, ‘science fictions’, in the sense that they are fictions produced by science – or, at least, by technology. When playing an SF game that explores computer software, for instance, or that contains a section of gameplay in which the player character enters cyberspace, it can be hard to avoid an amused smile when your avatar walks around within computer hardware, within computer hardware. The inescapable importance of science and technology to computer games as a whole adds another layer of science fiction to the computer game; and the games we explore in this chapter have taken full advantage of their computer software and hardware in the creation of the economic fictions, or extrapolations, that we consider.
Megastructures: Definitions and Depictions
First, however, we must ask: what exactly is a ‘megastructure’? The term is used more commonly in science fiction than in scholarly work examining the real world, but the term ‘megaproject’ is extremely close to that of megastructure (and is sometimes used interchangeably), so it is there we should first look. There is no single definition of a megaproject, but various factors have been considered important to their identification. In monetary terms, megaprojects are understood as multi-million-1 or -billion-2 dollar investments. They have also been defined in terms of the attraction of public attention;3 as sources of ‘high degree[s] of uncertainty’4 and technical and financial risk; and as sources of collaboration between large numbers of individuals or groups.5 The length of the construction or implementation process is often considered vital; Adnan Haider and Ralph Ellis argue for a time frame of at least five years to ‘qualify’ as a megaproject,6 and consider it a fundamental part of a megaproject’s definition, while Nils Bruzelius, Bent Flyvbjerg and Werner Rothengatter instead suggest that the lifetime of the project is the better measure,7 suggesting ‘50 years and more’ as a metric. Others have simply defined a megaproject as a construction or engineering undertaking that is ‘huge by virtually any measure’,8 be it in terms of cost, people involved, management, resources involved or whatever, and that the label is a flexible one.
Economic Science Fictions Page 20