Presumably this will be greatly affected by what you think actually happened to Detroit

[james_davis_nicoll]

What would a Detroit-style urban bankruptcy IN SPACE! look like?

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, of course, in space unproductive people i.e. the retired who aren't billionaires would be returned to Earth because they'd be taking up valuable space :)

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Some segments of the station stop paying for air; the doors are sealed and their supply is cut off.

[arkessian.livejournal.com]

Grim. I wouldn't expect it to be reported. Just silence. Eventually.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

Failure to build a space elevator in good times collapses space industry in bad times.

(I believe Detroit's problem is voting down subway construction in an early 20th century plebiscite.)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Well, they'd have to be fairly self-sufficient in consumables, or bad shit would happen. Are they autarks, or do they run more like the ISS, relying on a Progress ship every 3 months or they run out of air?

Positing near-Autarky, they might be able to cope by defaulting on their debt and turning into Godless Commie culture-niks for a few decades while they try to build up some credit based on a trade surplus. But if they need to import essentials things could turn very unpleasant. Very unpleasant indeed.

[dsrtao]

Do they have a large number of factories suited to produce space-car-equivalents?

Bankruptcy schmankruptcy

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

The decay of Detroit's infrastructure has been underway for decades--streets flood when it rains, traffic lights haven't worked for a long time, cops take literally hours to respond, etc. etc. I assume that the version of this in space would be, by the time the emergency manager declares bankruptcy, everybody's been dead for years.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

"Down and Out on Ellfive-Prime" was a hobos-on-a-space-station story with tramps roasting guinea-pigs rather than sparrows on curtain-rods. Think "Elysium" with fewer explosions and more technocracy. I think it was published in Omni Google Google ah Dean Ing was the perpetrator, 1979.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Well, Detroit's bankruptcy is largely due to depopulation. Basically, half of the city moved out, but the city didn't shrink.

If the space-hab were reasonably close to self-sufficient in basic supplies (air, food, water recycling) half the population moving out might be a non-event, or at least not a dramatic event.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. You can't have shoddy infrastructure in space. Everyone would die.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Kevin J. Anderson's fourth (or fifth) book, "Lifeline", had this situation. When resources got tight, the station manager had to let some staff go, to balance the budget. Oddly, he just had Security escort the ex-employees to the airlock, wasting literally tons of water and nutrients.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Ah, fuckit. Here, let me autoplagiarize:

Centris Magna was part of the Septagon system, a loosely coupled cluster of brown dwarf stars with no habitable planets, settled centuries ago. It was probably the Eschaton’s heavy-handed idea of a joke: a group called the space settlers’ society had found themselves the sole proprietors of a frigid, barely terraformed asteroid, with a year’s supply of oxygen and some heavy engineering equipment for company. After about a century of bloodshed and the eventual suppression of the last libertarian fanatics, the Septagon orbitals had gravitated toward the free-est form of civilization that was possible in such a hostile environment: which meant intensive schooling, conscript service in the environmental maintenance crews, and zero tolerance for anyone who thought that hanging separately was better than hanging together.

(From "Iron Sunrise".)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

You can tolerate shoddy infrastructure, to a point, if a lot of redundancy was designed in. Some wiggle room for authors there.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the choice is 'put up with deficient infrastructure' and 'greatly inconvenience people for a surprisingly long time'. I was musing that I was happy the chunk of Queen being dug up wasn't dug up when I opened my store there (unlike a friend down the street, who had his sidewalk removed) and then it occurred to me the stuff under Queen from Charles to King was pretty damned old in 1984, so the stuff currently under Queen Charles to Courtland is probably the same age plus almost 30 years.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Would it look anything like the, I think, second-last Venus Equilateral story, the one with the snowstorm inside?

--Dave