URBAN PLANNING, BUILT ENVIRONMENT, AND THE STRUCTURE OF CITIES

This chapter analyzes a group of comics in which the large-scale machinations of urban planning culture have negatively impacted the life of city dwellers. Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City indulges in the social alienation that results from the linear monotony of the metropolis. The tyranny of urban planning is dramatized in Samaris by Belgian creators Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten. Dead Memory by French creator Marc-Antoine Mathieu takes the spontaneous appearance of walls in the city as an impetus to play with themes of spatial form, memory, and language loss. Two final comics juxtapose the top-down method of urban planning with the experience of the city’s built environment at the scale of the individual: Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City by French author and illustrator Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez and American Ben Katchor’s collection Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay.