CARDBOARD CITY
THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes,furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the stations airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.
Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed in Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes with an expensive three-wheeled stroller. Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki glimpses the infant passenger through flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a video display winking as its mother trundles determinedly away.
Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He wonders briefly what the passing commuters will think, to see him enter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the height of his chest, longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged white corrugate serving as its door.
Perhaps they will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never
seen anyone enter or exit one of these tidy hovels. It is as though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transaction that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station. lie is a student of existential sociology, and such transactions have been his particular concern.
Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn't even like porting. Software conflict? Faint impression of light through a fluttering of rags. And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog.
[Claimed by both China and Britain but administered by neither, Kowloon Walled City survived as a legal no-man’s-land for nearly 100 years. Through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding – with never an architect in sight – individual buildings gradually homogenized into a single city block. Only at street level did the old grid of public alleyways still exist, but hemmed in and built over: dark, dirty and squalid. Refuse was rarely collected and safe drinking water was supplied by just eight standpipes, only one of which lay within the City’s boundaries. And yet, despite these severe limitations, the City became home to some 35,000 inhabitants, a thriving community complete with its own shops, schools, factories and even clinics. City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City explains how the City came about and how, under the most extraordinary of circumstances, it thrived and endured- HAK-NAM, CITY OF DARKNESS, WATERMARK 1993]
see LEWIS CALL, 'Postmodern Anarchism', Lexington Books 2002 [chapter 4 is devoted to Gibson and Sterling; vast portions can be read via Google Book Search]
and also "PLAGUES OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER": TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES IN WILLIAM GIBSON'S NEUROMANCER- Brent Griffin, University of Maine 2006 -
Tenzin Nanette ha scritto: "Giacomo, when I use to spend time with the Chicago homeless, it impressed upon me those who lived in well kept cardboard boxes. Their shoes lined up outside, well swept sidewalk, and a make-shift door."
RispondiEliminavery laboriously repaired-
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