City Blocks
Blocks are huge and can be considered to be a small town in themselves. Each one will typically possess a hospital, gymnasium, school, and shopping district. A citizen can quite literally live their whole lives without leaving their block. Due to the high unemployment rate, boredom is rife among citizens — this, coupled with the high loyalty citizens develop to their blocks, along with a city-defence militia for most city blocks, leads to many "Block Wars", riots (more like small wars) between two or more blocks.
Blocks are named after famous or historical figures, often with current events in mind. A typical example — shortly after the Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise separation there was an episode with block war breaking out between the "Kidman" and "Cruise" Blocks. A proposed crackdown on civil rights in Britain led to a block being named David Blunkett Block in one story.
Read more about this topic: Mega-City One
Famous quotes containing the words city and/or blocks:
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)