chapter 19 The Empty Cities of Urban Apocalypse Nick Yablon Whatever their efficacy in mitigating COVID-19, the lockdowns imposed by national and state governments effected a strangely familiar phenom- enon, captured by numerous journalists, photographers, and sound recordists in cities around the world: avenues and plazas rendered almost completely silent and motionless, even during rush hour. While auguring economic hardships, this emptying afforded opportunities for exploration. Urbanites described brief, solitary excursions through neighborhoods stripped of traffic, tourists, and pollution. They noted how the becalming of the built environment brought other things – both comforting and disquieting – to their senses: birdsong, wind, or the clicking of bicycle gears; the previously obscured details of architectural structures; and perhaps even a preview of the city’s posthuman destiny. Yet the most frequent observation was that these temporarily unpeopled spaces uncan- nily evoked the desolate cityscapes of recent apocalyptic television and cinema. This chapter will offer a cultural history of the empty city. It is a chronotope that straddles, and thus problematizes, the boundary between the apocalyptic and the postapocalyptic, and between the dystopian and the utopian. Much has been written about fantasies and spectacles featuring the apocalyptic destruction of American cities or their postapocalyptic after- math. There has even been a kind of reverse boosterism regarding whose city has suffered the most, with critic Mike Davis pointing to 138 novels and films imagining the devastation of Los Angeles, as against historian Max Page’s claim that “no city has been more often destroyed” visually or verbally than New York. 1 Other scholarship has focused on utopian visions of the American city, from the peaceful, equitable Boston in Edward Bellamy’s 1 Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1999), 276; Max Page, City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 14. See also Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1979), 209–225. 252 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108663557.020 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The University of Iowa, on 21 Dec 2020 at 16:29:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms