I started watching The Walking Dead recently, based on the comics by the same name, to fill the winter television void that’s expected to last until around the time Parks and Recreation returns. It’s a miniseries (fall run was only 6 episodes) that’s set in the South during a zombie apocalypse. I’m unaware of any other attempts at a television show (and this article confirms my suspicions) with the Zompocalypse as a backdrop. It’s a pretty good show, but I’m not here to write about it. I’m here to write about contemporary urban landscapes and how zombie hordes relate to them.
We assume that we live in a three-dimensional world. To be fair, though, our interactions with it are relatively two-dimensional. When I leave my apartment, I have to go down five floors of stairs (or the elevator if I’m feeling lazy). Say that’s about 50 vertical feet. If I travel only that same distance horizontally away from my apartment, I can hardly get to the nearest apartment building. If I’m going to the grocery store, I have to go probably around 300 or 400 feet. To work, several miles. But the vertical distance is way less significant than that (even in more mountainous areas than Minnesota). This is why even very built-up, crowded cities like New York or Tokyo can still be relatively easily navigated with a road map: the grid is the only way to get around.
The poster for The Walking Dead shows the protagonist riding a horse along an abandoned freeway into Atlanta. Are there other ways for him to enter the city? Sure, but it's not difficult to count them--they are the roads and highways that lead into Atlanta.
Depending on the size of the city, or how close you are, the access points (ignoring sea and air transportation) may vary, but it’s still not difficult to count them.
Similarly, within the city, getting from one point to another is a matter of determining the most efficient way of navigating the roads. There will always be one, and never be more than two, optimal ways of getting from point A to point B (if A and B are on opposite corners of a city block, assume both ways are equally efficient). If zombies are blocking one path, just pick the most efficient one after that. Of course, this is still in the two-dimensional cities that we’re most familiar with. What would happen if zombies began infesting a three-dimensional city? How am I even defining a 3D city? Take, for a completely unbiased example, Minneapolis.
The Minneapolis Skyway System (www.skywaymyway.com, cute) links dozens of city blocks with over seven miles of walking potential. It’s not a fully three-dimensional city by any means, but it comes closer to the concept of one. The Skyway System is like another plane to navigate, parallel to the original two-dimensional city grid. By providing access points between the original (road system) plane and the new (skyway) plane, there are ways to bypass what were previously impossible obstacles. Like, say, a zombie horde running up and down the length of Nicollet Mall. If you need to get from one side to the other, just get on the skyway and go over them. A secondary skyway would allow for even more varied navigation paths, and a tertiary, etc. But this is still considering the city as a series of two-dimensional planes stacked on top of each other, with a few ways to get from one to the other. It could just as easily be a series of plans resting side-by-side, like books on a bookshelf, with hallways that would get you from one column to the next, like Carleton College’s Evans Hall. The building is constructed of a series of columns, and residents identify more by lettered columns (A, B, C) than numbered floors (1, 2, 3). Hallways on the first and ground floors connect each column, but access between the top floors means going all the way down and then up again. In this type of city, superlative heights in architecture would be meaningless, since the most tall buildings would be the farthest away from the city’s core in terms of navigation (analogous to the suburbs). Most impressive would be the longest, most horizontal buildings, that connected the most planes. But in the truly 3D city…
The Interlace (a planned apartment complex in Singapore) offers one example of a near-three-dimensional space. Vertical and horizontal experiences of space are merged and become synchronized. Going up doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve reached your destination’s horizontal coordinates and are approaching the final vertical, it may mean that you’re approaching a new plane of navigation. In a truly three-dimensional city, buildings would never be purely vertical (skyscrapers) or purely horizontal (say, train stations), but would begin to resemble 3D clusters connecting smaller 3D spaces, as opposed to 3D clusters connecting a sequence of planes (floors). The theoretical 3D city would free its population from constraints of the real 2D city: notably traffic jams and other obstacles. And that brings me back to zombies.
A zombie horde becomes a horde not because zombies are social creatures, but because of the limited means of navigation in contemporary cities. In the 3D city, zombie hordes would quickly dissipate, expanding upward, downward, and outward in all directions, all the while losing their power of numbers. They would be much easier to outmaneuver, and becoming trapped and eaten by zombies would be a thing of the past. It is this reason that I am in favor of a more three-dimensional world. I do not wish to become trapped and eaten by zombies.
