Tribune. Thanks to the multiplication of mission projects to the Moon and to Mars, in recent years, development plans of a particular kind: cities in space. These borrow from science fiction and seek to imprint the sensation of a desirable future. One would believe it already, especially since, in cities on Earth, the future is not always so bright, especially in the era of pandemics and climate emergency.
What is striking about these grandiose projects is the absence, or at least the neglect of democratic deliberation as to their viability and relevance. Whether today it is Martian projections by Elon Musk or fictions of orbital cities by Jeff Bezos, the elected officials of the cosmic adventure are users more than citizens, who cannot escape from these platform cities where everything is smooth, accessible and euphonic.
This urbanistic imagination teleported into space has a long history. Scientists, engineers and futurists are inventive and think big. The sky is the only limit. In this area, two trends are emerging: on the one hand, itinerant cities, traveling in outer space. On the other hand, cities transplanted to other planets in the solar system, starting with Mars.
A repackaging of industrial civilization
In the first category, station views have abounded since the 1950s. The most daring were those proposed by Gerard K. O’Neill (1927-1992), visionary physicist and professor at Princeton University, in his bestseller from 1977, The High Frontier (translated into French by Space Cities, Robert Laffont, 1978). These cities are encapsulated in gigantic cylinders powered by solar energy and being in permanent rotation in order to create an artificial gravity similar to that which we know on Earth.
Built in situ from the raw materials of space – in particular asteroids – these “islands” (according to the vocabulary used by O’Neill) offer a repackaging of industrial civilization and ofAmerican way of life : lawns and green parks, flower-filled residences, private swimming pools, over-equipped interiors, giant television screens. One of them, 10 kilometers long and having a diameter of 1000 meters, completes the concept.
Calculations predict that this reproduction of a rural New Jersey, dreamed of and imaged by artist Rick Guidice, could accommodate up to 2 million settlers. We find a recent update in the film Interstellar (2014), by Christopher Nolan, or in the aspirations of the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon and the space company Blue Origin, who is in tune with this vision of “The humanization of space”, with which he became familiar with O’Neill.
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