I have no idea what the city of the future will look like, but I hope Mitchell Joachim is going to be part of the planning team.  If the name sounds familiar, he appeared on the Colbert Report last week, carrying pictures of future tree houses and people movers shaped like sea life:

What does it have to do with poetry?  Everything or nothing, I suppose.  I’m fascinated by poets who produce work under the (specific) influence of their environment.  It’s impossible to picture someone like Auden without the influence of the industrial structures of English coalworks.  Who knows which strange machines and structures will become commonplace, working their way into the world of letters without much notice?

From Bruce Sterling comes precarity, “the condition of existing precariously.” Sterling uses the concept as one of the main themes in a strangely optimistic essay about the solidarity we might discover on a planet where the formerly wealthy find themselves just as ruined by the global economic crisis as the poor. It’s written under the guise of his alter ego, Bruno Argento.

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity? We should discover that there is no objective need for such precarity; the planet Earth should not be run as a fire sale. Precarity was supposed to be for the little people; when it is for everybody, its absurdity is manifest. Precarity cannot make us a cleaner, better, or more just society. Precarity is not sustainable. It has nothing to do with economic productivity. It does not help us sustain our precious cultural heritage or our natural heritage, the planet’s priceless biodiversity. It is the mayhem of a disturbed ant’s nest.

It’s best read alongside his earlier, much more pessimistic piece, 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic.