Escalante
Image: Archigram’s Walking City, Ron Herron (more).
Base camp for these explorations is science fiction, as always. Let my cross-breed my two topics so far – sci-fi, and hiking – and read to you from the opening paragraph of Philip Reeve’s 2001 book Mortal Engines.
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea. [...] How frightened they must be, with London bearing down on them and nowhere to hide! But he knew he mustn’t feel sorry for them: it was natural that cities ate town, just as the towns ate smaller towns, and smaller towns snapped up the miserable static settlements. That was Municipal Darwinism, and it was the way the world had worked for a thousand years.
It’s beautifully evocative!
Walking cities have quite a heritage. This slide is Archigram’s Walking City, of course…