Both this week and last, images of the city as a place of apocalypse are ideas which have been perhaps most provocative to me.  In both Watchmen and Children of Men, the city is the site of the apocalypse at its greatest (worst?) expression; it is in the confines of the urban environment that these secular apocalypses are to be most feared, and it is the escape from the city that can provide an escape from apocalypse, or at least the worst conditions of it.  Why the urban space is the place best fitted for a secular apocalypse is something that has troubled me: is it because the urban space is inherently crowded, or perhaps because technology, and the use of such, seems at its greatest presence in the city?  Or does it play on notions of the person of the city dweller, as already occupying the role of the other, the modern who has strayed too far from tradition (in whatever context that may be). Continue reading →