The Ultimate City

JG Ballard 

The Ultimate City

James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

Main Characters
Halloway
Olds
Stillman
Mr Buckmaster
Miranda

http://www.ballardian.com/stereoscopic-urbanism-jg-ballard-and-the-built-environment

Summary and Analysis

Halloway, the protagonist in the novella, is at the age of eighteen in the 2000s who lost his parents from fire. Away from the modern metropolis which is the fallen city of New York into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels, he was grown up in 'Garden City' with his grandfather which represents the concept of innocence, calmness, peaceful, leisure, carefree and the future ectopia.

Halloway is dissatisfied with the dulling social and physical enviornment of Garden City with its organic and conformity. He is born again however, his attraction towards the significant noise of the city and the 'raucous light' blinds him with cruel desire and ambition. He sees the 'flood of cheap neon' as something that is 'alive' and beautiful. The 'glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil' cheers him up and brightens him.

Despite the fact the Buckmaster tries to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death within the story, Halloway sees it as another beginning: 'they stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery', and yet, 'the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature's more splendid than any Arcadian meadow'. In his perception, he believes that the fallen city 'unlike nature, there was no death'.

Eventually, his urge, desire and desperateness in having and owning modern power grew too much for him to control. He fails to operate the metropolis to its original condition (which is his central aim); fails to take care of his citizens and community, fails to keep his promise, fails to understand and consider other people's perception and fails to achieve his desire completely.

Ballard's work is about nothing but the built environment and explores the relationship between utopian and dystopian cities. In the end, which is the ultimate city? how do we know and decide what is what? what is the boundary and limitation for each? Rather than the physical architecture, environment, planning, functional and the structural element of the site, the community, society and the people within the site resembles whether the city is a utopia or a dystopia. One might say that a dystopian environment is full of utopian and optimistic culture; and therefore it is a utopia. The other might say that this utopian site only involves witty and selfish persons and therefore it is nothing but a dystopia. Whether a site and place is an utopia or a dystopia depends on the one's perception and how they digest the reality and the truth of the condition.

Images of the 'pyramid' and the 'stacked' up monuments in the story