Moving Cities of the Future : The Power of Anticipation Fiction Over Our Modern Social Imaginaries

Abstract: The future is constantly growing as a more and more significant matter of interest, both in the academic fields and in everyday conversations. This thesis focuses on a specific perspective of the future: what if cities were no longer static by nature, but cruising across the world? By analysing three works of literary fiction, the aim is to illustrate how fiction, and more specifically ‘anticipation fiction’, can participate in shaping our social imaginaries, the understanding we have of the world, both when it comes to our present and our future. If the influence of future fiction has been shown before, this thesis will focus on the specific imaginary of moving cities in the future, to highlight how those authors imagine the future, covering the historical and geographical contexts of those futures, the urban logic of those moving cities, the social implications that follow, and finally the value given to humanity in those ‘realities’. Because of the fundamentally indeterminate nature of the future, future studies such as this one do not aim for a fixed answer, but rather for a deeper understanding of the relation of influence between present and future, of how the future shapes us just as we shape it.