Has hard scifi ever treated the city itself as the thing that fails?
I've been involved in construction since I was a kid—literally stealing blueprints off my dad's desk to "inspect" them. Something about those lines on paper felt like a secret language nobody was teaching me. So I became an architect.
Almost 40 rounds around the sun later, I'm still pulling that thread.
Here's what it revealed: a city isn't a place. It's a dependency stack. Each layer made the next one possible, and also made it impossible to undo.
The car is the cleanest example. People think we chose it. We didn't. The car was legible to a petrochemical and steel infrastructure that already existed and needed somewhere to go... the car was downstream of decisions nobody voted on. And now we can't imagine life without it, not because it's good, but because three generations of concrete were poured around the assumption that it's permanent.
That's what I want to see explored in hard scifi—not collapse as backdrop, nor the war or the plague that ends civilization. The city as the main character. Failing in real time. Its own feedback loops eating it.
What's the most rigorous treatment of urban systems failure you've encountered? Not aesthetically, but mechanically.