On a recent trip to Japan, I had the opportunity to stroll through some of Tokyo's residential districts. Through a combination of war, natural disasters and economics, modem Tokyo is a sprawling high tech megalopolis. However, within this city of skyscrapers and gleaming trains, vestiges of the older city remain.
Many temples, shrines and even single family houses in Tokyo take the form of small walled compounds. From a functional standpoint these walls are not really designed to deter a determined intruder, but they generally provide the boundaries of the particular homestead or site of importance.
Importantly, whole communities exist with within arms length of these compounds and one another. Sometimes, the less then 7 feet separate one walled home compound from another.
While the gate in the picture is not likely stopping a contingent of alien invaders, it might prevent the wandering, shuffling type of zombie featured in most fiction.
All of this leads this leads to an interesting thought experiment about the suitability of different cultural architectural styles to resist an encroaching disaster.
American architectural preferences led to wide suburban sprawl. Large homes are placed on large tracts of land, usually without significant walls or fences encircling the property. The same is true from churches is most of the western world. Americans, it is often remarked, like their space. However this abundance might work to their detriment.
Isolated homesteads can be overrun or worse, subject to siege. Suburban occupants could easily be cut off from resources, eventually running dangerously close to starvation while an ever growing inhuman horde gathers outside. You can not eat bullets and gold bars. Eventually, by desperate act or carelessness, the hordes will eventually find entry through a broken window or a battered screen door
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In contrast, it is easy to imagine a network of makeshift bridges spanning the short distances between Japanese homesteads, temples and shrines. Resources and skills sets could be combined to colonize abandoned neighborhood homes. Eventually a network of homes, roof-top gardens, protected construction sites, fenced athletic fields, and sundry stores could be maintained, cultivated.
Eventually a new city would build itself over the infested ruins of the old, spreading itself out along ribbons of past density. The inhabitants of this new city would use and adapt the machinery of inherited urbanity; the sewers, canals, underground infrastructure, to short circuit the dangers and maintain living standards.
This new city and others like it would resemble Venetian cities crafted over zombie seas.
Most apocalyptic fiction focuses on a return to wilderness; man as an inherently rural being. This, I think, is a uniquely American fantasy.
However, it might be that cities, as they always have, retain their role as the epicenters of human civilization after the fall of man.
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