The Concentration City

"The Concentration City" is a dystopian short story by British author J. G. Ballard, first published (as "Build-Up") in the January 1957 issue of New Worlds.

It has been reprinted in the Ballard collections Billennium and Chronopolis, and - under its revised title - in The Disaster Area.^[1] It appears in volume one of The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.^[2]

The story is set in the City, an apparently endless three-dimensional urban space (essentially an arcology with no outside.) In terms of infrastructure and culture, the City resembles a large American city of the 1950s, but with streets and buildings stretching indefinitely in all directions and stacked on Levels spaced every eighty feet. Its population is vast, but apparently stable, with no suggestion of serious material deprivation, though there are slums (and - more seriously - "dead zones," which have been walled off from the rest of the City and where urban decay is allowed to run rampant.) The status marker of a City neighborhood is the cost of space, with a dollar per cubic foot being a "respectable" valuation.

The structure is densely-built, with very few open areas, such as arenas and stadiums; remnants of nature are scattered in small gardens and zoos, with a few examples of plants and wildlife (the protagonist's home County of thirty million can boast one tree.) The City supposedly dates from an unspecified "Foundation," three hundred billion years ago; the only independent confirmation of its age is the fact that the animals in its zoos have been evolutionarily shaped by their environment (such as birds that are not only flightless, but have lost their pectoral girdles, the attachment point for wings.) The City's general population take their surroundings for granted, and are mostly concerned with the mundane details of their day-to-day existence. It is considered unusual to speculate on what might lie beyond the City; even educated people generally assume that the urban expanse simply goes on forever.

The narrative follows Franz M., a twenty-year-old physics student who has come to fixate on the concept of "free space" - the notion that the City must have an edge, to be followed by some sort of void (a concept which his best friend Gregson has a difficult time even conceptualizing.) Franz experiences recurring dreams of flight or levitation in such a space, and experiments with building crude gliders propelled by fireworks, though he is limited by the relative absence of a theory of aerodynamics, a field with no application. Franz concludes that this approach is a dead end, as there is - aside from closed construction zones - no empty space large enough to trial a device large enough to carry a human. He resolves to discover what is beyond the City by traveling in one direction for as long as possible, to which end he boards a Supersleeper, a long-distance train propelled by rocket through an evacuated tube. After ten days of westbound travel, Franz passes from his native 298th Local Union (with its eleven trillion inhabitants) through increasingly grandiose political subdivisions, which culminate in a "755th Greater Metropolitan Empire" (the total implied total population of the part of the City he has transited being at least 10²⁷ people.) On the tenth day of his excursion, Franz suddenly notices that the Supersleeper's direction is now - without ever having reversed course - listed as "eastbound." His incredulous reaction draws the attention of the railway authorities, who revoke his ticket and ship him back to his point of origin. Back in his home neighborhood, during an interrogation by a sympathetic police psychologist, Franz idly glances at a calendar and numbly discovers that time has also reversed, and that it is the day of his initial departure on the Supersleeper.

Similar concepts can be found in other works of speculative fiction, in which several distinct types of "infinite cities" appear:

• Trantor - a planet-spanning ecumenopolis from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels
• Diaspar - a sealed, self-contained city-state that endures for a billion years in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
• The City - a finite-but-unbounded megastructure larger than the Solar System in Tsutomo Nihei's manga Blame!

• The Concentration City title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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