As J. Nicholas Entrikin writes this preface, helicopters drone overhead and sirens blare as firefighters work on a nearby hillside to contain a brushfire. They labor to protect my neighborhood and community, and I continue to work at my computer. Fire is not an uncommon occurrence in this natural environment. Except for the individuals fighting the fire and those whose homes are endangered by it, life goes on as usual in the local community, interrupted occasionally by a glance toward the hills.
Rather than demolish the old world to build a radiant city; rather than build a Garden City on greenfield sites, Constant cantilevers new spaces up above, leaving both city and countryside untouched. post 
Automated factories would be underground, the surface level is for transport, while up above stretches a new landscape for play, a massive superstructure of linked sectors, within which everything is malleable, changeable at whim. Considered vertically, as an elevation, New Babylon makes literal Marx’s diagram of base and superstructure. Its airy sectors are literally superstructures, made possible by an infrastructure below ground where mechanical reproduction has abolished scarcity and freed all of time from necessity. It is an image of what Constant imagines the development of productive forces has made possible, but which the fetter of existing relations of production prevents from coming into being.
~
New Babylon, [no date]. Versobooks.com. Online. [Accessed 18 January 2023]. Available from: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1879-new-babylon
If there was a high point for the radical imagination of a future for the planet, perhaps it was Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon.
Alita: Battle Angel imdb
