Cyberpunk – Urban spaces of the future?

Source  Cyberpunk City – Urban Spaces

Cyberpunk is a genre that is receiving increasing academic interrogation, particularly around the representation of the urban cities central to the Cyberpunk settings. The near future setting of Cyberpunk stories and the portrayal of the urban landscape which closely follows current formal urban theory inspires academic conjecture about what our own future urban spaces may look like.

“Cyberpunk’s virtual and urban grid-like spaces are ordered by a Foucauldian logic of the panoptic and social control. They also resonate strongly with de Certeau’s idea of an abstract ‘place’ or Concept-city governed and shaped by powerful interests rather than the needs and lives of its users. This impulse shares much with de Certeau’s formulation of everyday spatial practices as tactics, as everyday arts of ‘making do’. As tactics, these ways of operating manipulate and divert those spaces organised and imposed by strategies that seek to create places out of abstract models.” (Natalie Collie).

Since Sci Fi has been the inspiration for many of the technologies that we see today, it’s not hard to imagine that this newest genre of science fiction/ fantasy could  also provide a frame by which we can prefigure social theory.