Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-06: Alyson Mabie on cities, machines and the 'future of law enforcement'

"Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law."

That is RoboCop's response when asked by Bob Morton what his prime directives are. This was in the 1987 film directed by Paul Verhoeven.

RoboCop helped cement the science fiction genre in the 1980s that delved into, among other things: dystopia, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, technology gone rogue and future glimpses of urban landscapes. 

On 15 May 2026 at 5:30PM Philippine Standard Time (2:30AM Pacific Standard Time), Alyson Mabie will talk about city futurities in the age of technology using the figure of RoboCop as case study. Titled ‘RoboCop Protects Delta City’: Yesterday’s Urban Dystopic Sci-fi Cinema and the Technofascist Capture of Tomorrow, this online talk is mounted by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) through the Heo/Geo Lecture Series.  

While a fair number of people think they know science fiction, the science fiction (SF) genre is one of cognitive estrangement allowing the audience to imagine a plausible yet strange “newness” within the familiar that occurs in the subjunctive tense of “events that have not happened” (Suvin, 1972; Delany 2009). This speculative invitation enables us to imagine radical change and otherwise futures. However, SF has also been a medium of white supremacist and fascist worldbuilding. The 1970s-90s were a golden age for urban dystopic sci-fi action films in the US, often presenting a bleak future where privatization and carceral state control have melded into an urban hellscape maintained by robotic and automatized systems, and inescapable surveillance technologies. While the heroes of these films pop the ideological balloon and expose the corrupt inner logics, many aspects of the films’ technofascist urban futures are present in our lives today. 

This presentation analyzes the cinematic representation of the future city in the film universe of RoboCop as it intersects with present day technocapitalist narratives of products as ‘science fiction made real,’ framing carceral and automated technologies in urban and state governance as ‘the future’ precluding all others. With the tagline, “The Future of Law Enforcement, ” Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 cult classic, RoboCop, is set in a near future ‘Old Detroit’ where the city has privatized its social services, including its police force, under a single conglomerate. As labor strikes loom, corporate VPs race to produce a law enforcement solution that doesn’t eat or sleep. Enter Robocop, a highly militarized, robotic police officer programmed to detect and eliminate crime. Robocop is the key feature of the “urban pacification” program that paves the way for construction of Delta City, the CEO’s sleek, controlled urban utopia built on the ashes of Old Detroit.

Alyson Mabie is a PhD student in the Geography Department at the University of Washington. Her current work approaches issues of science, technology, and society (STS) through a feminist relational lens. She likes to think about the entanglements of fictional worldbuilding, futurity, visual media and narratives of urban futures in digital spaces such as video games, social media comment sections, and metaverses.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series which is co-sponsored by PGS and the UP Department of Geography continues to challenge conventional notions as to what geography as an intellectual field of inquiry is all about and what range of topics traverses the discipline's multiverse (pun intended). The Heo/Geo Lecture Series was borne out of the need to energize and enrich academic geographers and geography-adjacent scholars' need for exciting intellectual mashups that fuse geographical ideas and provocations with new-ish methodologies and field-based practices. This current Heo/Geo Lecture Series is facilitated by the Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research cluster of the UP Department of Geography and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the event, click this link to register. You can also click this link: https://bit.ly/3QPv1dj

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References:

Delany, Samuel R. (2009). The jewel-hinged jaw: Notes on the language of science fiction. Wesleyan University Press.

Suvin, Darko (1972). On the poetics of the science fiction genre. College English, 34(3), 372-382.