MINIBREIF: Tower Blocks, Districts, and Displacement: Dystopian trends and “Utopianising” embedded sustainable ideas.
So the other day I came across this article:
https://theconversation.com/vertical-cruise-ships-heres-how-we-can-remake-housing-towers-to-be-safer-and-better-places-to-live-142381
It discusses the promising process of retrofitting old tower blocks to provide new social housing, rather than demolish and build new. Great idea and much better in terms of sustainability but it got me thinking.
The title of the article referred to ‘verticle cruise ships’ but of course, cruise ships arent solely residential like the tower block, i began to think, what if instead of retrofitting purley for residential, what would be the effect of integrating retail/commercial/agriculture - a variety of functions into the tower block, creating ‘vertical communities’. It made me think of the film ‘High Rise’ which featured a tower block like this (with some heavy handed class metaphors) but eventually the social order collapses and it becomes defunct.
I recently started watching a show called Snowpiercer - the premise of which is everyone lives on a giant 1000 carriage train that circumnavigates the globe after a calamity that froze the world. In the show, the train carriages are multi-functional, some residential, some house vertical farms, etc. So again, we have this premise of mixed use environments portrayed in a dystopian setting.
Now, all of this is very tangential to what my project is focussed on which is communication. What i began to notice was that ideas that potentially have value and could be solutions to many problems are introduced to us through the lens of dystopian films. I would argue this taints the public/mass perception of these concepts before they are even proposed. As good as science fiction is at inspiring us to dream up incredible futures, it can be equally as harmful if we hide valuable ideas inside negative storytelling. This isnt to say we shouldnt stop exploring dystopia as a genre but it’s worth noting that it could be having an impact on how we view the legitimacy of certain ideas.
Which brings me to my self-assigned mini brief: to collect and identify potential sustainable solutions embedded within dystopian narratives. The second stage would then be to re-design the film posters to highlight these notions in a more positive context. The goal is to show how film as a medium has incredible power in translating big ideas to a mass audience, and how through ‘utopianising’ these films we can explore how the context within which an idea is introduced to us can impact how that idea is perceived.
I will post a portfolio once completed
