Metropoesis: semiotics, fictional cities and speculative urban design

This chapter investigates the semiotics related to speculation and depictions of urban futures. Urban representations contain and display a series of assumptions and perspectives both in regard to how the future is conceived and the role that cities will have in it. In this chapter we construct two semiotically oriented tools for systematising and analysing fictional, imaginary and speculative cities. First, we present a model for the analysis of different layers of urban semiotics (authorship, actor-network assemblages and semiospheric relations) both for real and fictional cities - and for their interrelations and translations. Then we propose a typology of different kinds of fictional cities, based on the means of the representations and the effects they aim to evoke in their readers. Finally, we operationalise these tools in an analysis of three case studies: the fictional London of Immortal engines, General Motors’ Futurama and the Amsterdam described in a paper speculating on non-human actors.