MIKE DAVIS, nació en Fontana en 1946 y creció en Bostonia, una aldea ahora desaparecida al este de San Diego. Ha trabajado cortando carne y como camionero, y es profesor de Teoría Urbana en el Instituto de Arquitectura del Sur de California. Considerado el padre del pensamiento
ciberpunk, es autor, entre otros ensayos, de
Prisioneros del sueño americano, Ecología del miedo y
Urbanismo mágico.
Su trabajo de captura urbana no solo ha permitido ubicar una serie de lecturas socio-culturales que redibujan, nuestras socioedades en su IDENTIDAD y su PRODUCCION SOCIETAL, instalada en los procesos de re-construccion de lugar y de consumo de escala publica...
La ciudad como paraíso, de Hollywood a Bel Air, y la ciudad como vertedero posmoderno del sueño americano, en sus conflictos raciales, en las guerras de bandas juveniles, en el vagabundeo de los desposeídos del neoliberalismo Reagan-Bush o en la desmedida violencia policial. Ciudad de cuarzo nos muestra Los Ángeles como espejo del capitalismo avanzado, la doble metáfora de nuestra civilización: construcción imaginaria en el cine y la novela negra, en las leyendas empresariales o en la contracultura de los sesenta, frente a la construcción real, con el desarrollo histórico de sus estructuras de poder: las viejas dinastías del Los Angeles Times, los estudios de cine y la industria aeroespacial o la reciente irrupción del capital japonés en un Los Ángeles cada día más hispano, «nuevo supermercado espiritual», en el que las más delirantes sectas de ciencia ficción se encuentran en el mismo estante que los dogmas religiosos clásicos o los alimentos macrobióticos y las cremas bronceadoras, y en el que campea el carácter represivo de arquitecturas monumentales y posmodernas como la de Frank Gehry. Tal vez lo que más sorprenda al lector español sea su vibrante denuncia de la devastación del tejido industrial y la cultura obrera y popular, en lo que constituye un conmovedor elogio fúnebre de la conciencia de clase en Norteamérica. Con todo, lo que ha convertido en imprescindible este clásico contemporáneo de Mike Davis es la novedad radical de su aproximación al fenómeno de la ciudad, al que se enfrenta desde múltiples perspectivas, para ofrecernos una visión poliédrica que se expande en varias direcciones.De
que manera las reformulaciones urbanas, han permitido ver a la ciudad ya no como una estrategia diferenciadora sino como tarjeta postal, cual es el instrumento OPTICO que permite analizar a la ciudad desde su interior, en sus tres dimensiones en movimiento? desde la memoria, desde la historia y hacia el futuro?Comenzaremos a publicar una serie de textos de MIKES DAVIS para dar cuenta ya de su re-lectura posicionla y por que no re-mirar el espacio urbano.
Beyond Blade Runner:
Urban Control The Ecology of Fear
Every American city has its official insignia and slogan, some have municipal mascots,colors, songs, birds, trees, even rocks. But Los Angeles alone has adopted an officialNightmare. Mike Davis, author of Prisoners of the American Dream en City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in LA (1990) shows how this nightmare is slowly becoming real.
In 1988, after three years of debate, a galaxy of corporate and civic leaders submitted to Mayor Bradley a detailed strategic plan for Southern California's future. Although most of LA 2000: A City for the Future is devoted to hyperbolic rhetoric about Los Angeles' irresistible rise as a `world crossroads', a section in the epilogue (written by historian Kevin Starr) considers what might happen if the city fails to create a new `dominant establishment' to manage its extraordinary ethnic diversity. There is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic poly-glotism ominous with unresolved hostilities. Blade Runner - LA's own dystopic alter ego. Take the Grayline tour in 2019: The mile-high neo-Mayan pyramid of the Tyrell Corp. drips acid-rain on the mongrel masses in the teeming Ginza far below. Enormous neon images float like clouds above fetid, hyper-violent streets, while a voice intones advertisements for extra-terrestrial suburban living in `Off World.' Deckard, post-apocalypse Philip Marlowe, struggles to save his conscience, and his woman, in an urban labyrinth ruled by evil bio-tech corporations... With Warner Bros.' release of the original (more hardboiled) director's cut a few months after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Ridley Scott's 1982 film version of the Philip K. Dick story (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) reasserts its sovereignty over our increasingly troubled sleep. Virtually all ruminations about the future of Los Angeles now take for granted the dark imagery of Blade Runner as a possible, if not inevitable, terminal point of the land of sunshine. Yet for all of Blade Runner's glamor as the star of sci-fi dystopias, I find it strangely anachronistic and surprisingly unprescient. Scott, in collaboration with his `visual futurist' Syd Mead, production designer Lawrence Paul, and art director David Synder, really offers us an incoherent pastiche of imaginary landscapes. Peeling away the overlays of `Yellow Peril' (Scott is notoriously addicted, c.f. Black Rain, to urban Japan as the image of Hell) and `Noir' (all the polished black marble Deco interiors), as well as a lot of high-tech plumbing retrofited to street-level urban decay, what remains is recognizably the same vista of urban gigantism that Fritz Lang celebrated in Metropolis (1931).The sinister, man-made Everest of the Tyrell Corporation, as well as all the souped-up rocket-squad-cars darting around the air space, are obvious progenies - albeit now swaddled in darkness - of the famous skyscraper city of the bourgeoisie in
Metropolis. But Lang himself only plagiarized contemporary American futurists; above all, architectural delineator Hugh Ferris, who together with skyscraper designer Raymond Hood and Mexican architect-archeologist Francisco Mujica (visionary of urban pyramids like the Tyrell tower), popularized the coming `Titan City' of hundred-story skyscrapers with suspended bridge highways and rooftop airports. Ferris and company, in their turn, reworked already existing fantasies - common in Sunday supplements since 1900 - of what Manhattan might look like at the end of the century.
Blade Runner, in other words, remains yet another edition of this core modernist vision - alternately utopia or dystopia, v
ille radieuse or Gotham City - of the future metropolis as Monster Manhattan. It is a fantasy that might best be called `Wellsian' since as early as 1906, in his
The Future in America, H.G. Wells was already trying to envision the late twentieth century by
enlarging the present (represented by New York) to create
a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything swollen up to vast proportions and massive beyond measure. Ridley Scott's particular `gigantesque caricature' may capture ethno-centric anxieties about poly-glottism run amock but it fails to imaginatively engage the real Los Angeles landscape - especially the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, dingbats and ranch-style homes - as it socially and physically erodes into the 21st century. In my book on Los Angeles (
City of Quartz, 1990) I enumerate various tendencies toward the militarization of this landscape. Events since the uprising of Spring 1992 - including a deepening recession, corporate flight, savage budget cuts, a soaring homicide rate (despite the black gang truce), and a huge spree of gun-buying in the suburbs - only confirm that social polarization and spatial apartheid are accelerating. As the Endless Summer comes to an end, it seems quite possible that Los Angeles 2019 could well stand in a dystopian relationship to any ideal of the democratic city.
But what kind of cityscape, if not
Blade Runner, would this malign evolution of inequality produce? Instead of seeing the future merely as a grotesque, Wellsian magnification of technology and architecture, I have tried to carefully extrapolate existing spatial tendencies in order to glimpse their emergent pattern. William Gibson, in
Neuromancer and other novels, has provided stunning examples of how realist, `extrapolative' science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an anticipatory opposition politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the next horizon. In what follows, I offer a `Gibsonian' map to a future Los Angeles that is already half-born. Paradoxically, the literal map itself, although inspired by a vision of Marxism-for-cyberpunks, looks like nothing so much as that venerable
combination of half-moon and dart board that Ernest W. Burgess of the University of Chicago long ago made
the most famous diagram in social science. For those unfamiliar with the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology and their canonical study of the
North American city, let me just say that Burgess' dart board represents the five concentric zones into which the struggle for the survival of the fittest (as imagined by Social Darwinists) supposedly sorts urban social classes and housing types. It portrays a `human ecology' organized by biological forces of invasion, competition, succession and symbiosis. My remapping of the urban structure takes Burgess back to the future. It preserves such `ecological' determinants as income, land value, class and race, but adds a decisive new factor: fear.
Scanscape The current obsession with personal safety and social insulation is only exceeded by the middle-class dread of progressive taxation. In the face of unemployment and homelessness on scales not seen since 1938, a bipartisan consensus insists that the budget must be balanced and entitlements reduced. Refusing to make any further public investment in the remediation of underlying social conditions, we are forced instead to make increasing private investments in physical security. The rhetoric of urban reform persists, but the substance is extinct. Rebuilding LA simply means padding the bunker.
As city life, in consequence, grows more feral, the different social milieux adopt security strategies and technologies according to their means. Like Burgess' original dart board, the resulting pattern condenses into concentric zones. The bull's eye is Downtown. In another essay I have recounted in detail how a secretive, emergency committee of Downtown's leading corporate landowners (the so-called Committee of 25) responded to the perceived threat of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Warned by law-enforcement authorities that a black inundation of the central city was imminent, the Committee of 25 abandoned redevelopment efforts in the old office and retail core. They then used the city's power of eminent domain to raze neighborhoods and create a new financial core a few blocks further west. The city's redevelopment agency, acting virtually as their private planner, bailed out the Committee of 25's sunk investments in the old business district by offering huge discounts, far below market value, on parcels in the new core. Key to the success of the entire strategy (celebrated as Downtown LA's `renaissance') was the physical segregation of the new core and its land values behind a rampart of regraded palisades, concrete pillars and freeway walls. Traditional pedestrian connections between Bunker Hill and the old core were removed, and foot traffic in the new financial district was elevated above the street on pedways whose access was controlled by the security systems of individual skyscrapers. This radical privatization of Downtown public space - with its ominous racial undertones - occurred without significant public debate or protest. Last year's riots, moreover, have only seemed to vindicate the foresight of Fortress Downtown's designers. While windows were being smashed throughout the old business district along Broadway and Spring streets, Bunker Hill lived up to its name. By flicking a few switches on their command consoles, the security staffs of the great bank towers were able to cut off all access to their expensive real estate. Bullet-proof steel doors rolled down over street-level entrances, escalators instantly stopped and electronic locks sealed off pedestrian passageways. As the Los Angeles Business Journal pointed out in a special report, the riot-tested success of corporate Downtown's defenses has only stimulated demand for new and higher levels of physical security. |
In the first place, the boundary between architecture and law enforcement is further eroded. The LAPD have become central players in the Downtown design process. No major project now breaks ground without their participation, and in some cases, like a debate over the provision of public toilets in parks and subway stations (which they opposed), they openly exercise veto power. Secondly, video monitoring of Downtown's redeveloped zones has been extended to parking structures, private sidewalks, plazas, and so on. This comprehensive surveillance constitutes a virtual
scanscape - a space of protective visibility that increasingly defines where white-collar office workers and middle-class tourists feel safe Downtown. Inevitably the workplace or shopping mall video camera will become linked with home security systems, personal `panic buttons', car alarms, cellular phones, and the like, in a seamless continuity of surveillance over daily routine. Indeed, yuppies' lifestyles soon may be defined by the ability to afford
electronic guardian angels to watch over them.
Thirdly, tall buildings are becoming increasingly sentient and packed with deadly firepower. The skyscraper with a computer brain in Die Hard I (actually F. Scott Johnson's Fox-Pereira Tower) anticipates a possible genre of architectural anti-heroes as intelligent buildings alternately battle evil or become its pawns. The sensory system of the average office tower already includes panoptic vision, smell, sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection, and, in some cases, hearing. Some architects now predict the day when the building's own AI security computer will be able to automatically screen and identify its human population, and, even perhaps, respond to their emotional states (fear, panic, etc.). Without dispatching security personnel, the building itself will manage crises both minor (like ordering street people out of the building or preventing them from using toilets) and major (like trapping burglars in an elevator).
When all else fails, the smart building will become a combination of bunker and fire-base. When the federal Resolution Trust Corporation seized the assets of Columbia Savings and Loan Association they discovered that the CEO, Thomas Spiegel, had converted its Beverly Hills headquarters into a secret, `terrorist-proof' fortress. In addition to elaborate electronic security sensors, a sophisticated computer system that tracked terrorist incidents over the globe, and an arms cache in its parking structure, the 8900 Wilshire building also has Los Angeles' most unusual executive washroom: Tom Spiegel's office, in addition to the bullet-proof glass, was designed to have an adjoining bathroom with a bullet-proof shower. In the event an alarm was sounded, secret panels in the shower walls would open, behind which high-powered assault rifles would be stored.
Free Fire Zone
Beyond the scanscape of the fortified core is the halo of barrios and ghettos that surround Downtown Los Angeles. In Burgess' original Chicago-inspired schema this was the `zone in transition': the boarding house and tenement streets, intermixed with old industry and transportation infrastructure, that sheltered new immigrant families and single male laborers. Los Angeles' inner ring of freeway-sliced Latino neighborhoods still recapitulate these classical functions. Here in Boyle and Lincoln Heights, Central-Vernon and MacArthur Park are the ports of entry for the region's poorest immigrants, as well as the low-wage labor reservoir for Downtown's hotels and garment sweatshops. Residential densities, just as in the Burgess diagram, are the highest in the city. (According to the 1990 Census, one district of MacArthur Park is nearly 30% denser than Midtown Manhattan!)
Finally, just as in Chicago in 1927, this tenement zone (where an inordinately large number of children are crowded into a small area) remains the classic breeding ground of teenage street gangs (over one-hundred according to LA school district intelligence). But while `Gangland' in 1920s Chicago was theorized as essentially interstitial to the social organization of the city - as better residential districts recede before the encroachments of business and industry, the gang develops as one manifestation of the economic, moral, and cultural frontier which marks the interstice - a gang map of Los Angeles today is coextensive with the geography of social class. Tribalized teenage violence now spills out of the inner ring into the older suburban zones; the Boyz are now in the `Hood' where Ozzie and Harriet used to live.
For all that, however, the inner ring remains the most dangerous sector of the city. Ramparts Division of the LAPD, which patrols the salient just west of Downtown, regularly investigates more homicides than any other neighborhood police jurisdiction in the nation. Nearby MacArthur Park, once the jewel in the crown of LA's park system, is now a free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores with shotguns and Uzis. Thirty people were murdered there in 1990.
By their own admission the overwhelmed inner-city detachments of the LAPD are unable to keep track of all the bodies on the street, much less deal with common burglaries, car thefts or gang-organized protection rackets. Lacking the resources or political clout of more affluent neighborhoods, the desperate population of the inner ring is left to its own devices. As a last resort they have turned to Messieurs Smith and Wesson, whose name follows
protected by... on many a porch.
Slumlords, meanwhile, are mounting their own private reign of terror against drug-dealers and petty criminals. Faced with new laws authorizing the seizure of drug-infested properties, they are hiring goon squads and armed mercenaries to `exterminate' crime in their tenements. The LA Times recently described the swashbuckling adventures of one such crew in the Pico-Union, Venice and Panorama City (San Fernando Valley) areas.
Led by a six-foot-three 280-pound `soldier of fortune' named David Roybal, this security squad is renown amongst landlords for its efficient brutality. Suspected drug-dealers and their customers, as well as mere deadbeats and other landlord irritants, are physically driven from buildings at gunpoint. Those who resist or even complain are beaten without mercy. In a Panorama City raid a few years ago, the Times notes, Roybal and his crew collared so many residents and squatters for drugs that they converted a recreation room into a holding tank and handcuffed arrestees to a blood-spattered wall. The LAPD knew about this private jail but dismissed residents' complaints because it serves the greater good.
Roybal and his gang closely resemble the so-called matadors, or hired gunslingers, who patrol Brazilian urban neighborhoods and frequently, while the police deliberately turn their backs, execute persistent criminals, even street urchins. Their common coda is that they get the job done all else has failed. As one of Roybal's most aggressive competitors explains: Somebody's got to rule and when we're there, we rule. When somebody says something smart, we body slam him, right on the floor with all of his friends looking. We handcuff them and kick them and when the paramedics come and they're on the stretcher, we say: Hey, sue me.
Apart from these rent-a-thugs, the Inner City also spawns a vast cottage industry that manufactures bars and grates for home protection. Indeed most of the bungalows in the inner ring now tend to resemble cages in a zoo. As in a George Romero movie, working-class families must now lock themselves in every night from the zombified city outside. One inadvertent consequence has been the terrifying frequency with which fires immolate entire families trapped helpless in their barred homes.The
prison cell house has many resonances in the landscape of the inner city. Before the Spring uprising most liquor stores, borrowing from the precedent of pawnshops, had completely caged in the area behind the counter, with firearms discretely hidden at strategic locations. Even local greasy spoons were beginning to exchange hamburgers for money through bullet-proof acrylic turnstiles. Windowless concrete-block buildings, with rough surfaces exposed to deter graffiti, have spread across the streetscape like acne during the last decade. Now insurance companies may make such
riot-proof bunkers virtually obligatory in the rebuilding of many districts.Local intermediate and secondary schools, meanwhile, have become even more indistinguishable from jails. As per capita education spending has plummeted in Los Angeles, scarce resources have been absorbed in fortifying school grounds and hiring armed security police. Teenagers complain bitterly about overcrowded classrooms and demoralized teachers on decaying campuses that have become little more than daytime detention centers for an abandoned generation. The schoolyard, meanwhile, has become a killing field. Just as their parents once learned to cower under desks in the case of an atomic bomb attack, so students today are
taught to drop at a teacher's signal in case of ... a driveby shooting - and stay there until they receive an all-clear signal.Federally subsidized and public housing projects, for their part, are coming to resemble the infamous `strategic hamlets' that were used to incarcerate the rural population of Vietnam. Although no LA housing project is yet as technologically sophisticated as Chicago's Cabrini-Green, where retinal scans (c.f., the opening sequence of
Blade Runner) are used to check i.d.s, police exercise increasing control over freedom of movement. Like peasants in a rebel countryside, public housing residents of every age are stopped and searched at will, and their homes broken into without court warrants. In one particularly galling incident, just a few weeks before the Spring 1992 riots, the LAPD arrested more than fifty people in the course of a surprise raid upon Watts' Imperial Courts project. In a city with the nation's worst housing shortage, project residents, fearful of eviction, are increasingly reluctant to claim any of their constitutional protections against unlawful search or seizure. Meanwhile national guidelines allow housing authorities to evict
families of alleged drug-dealers or felons. This opens the door to a policy of
collective punishment as practiced, for example, by the Israelis against Palestinian communities on the West Bank.
The Half-Moons of Repression In the original Burgess diagram, the `half-moons' of ethnic enclaves (Deutschland, Little Sicily, the Black Belt, etc.) and specialized architectural ecologies (`residential hotels', `the two flat area', etc.) cut across the `dart board' of the city's fundamental socio-economic patterning. In contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles, a new species of special enclave is emerging in sympathetic synchronization to the militarization of the landscape. For want of a better generic appellation, we might call them `social control districts' (SCDs). They merge the sanctions of the criminal or civil code with land-use planning to create what Michel Foucault would undoubtedly have recognized as further instances of the evolution of the `disciplinary order' of the twentieth-century city. As Christian Boyer paraphrases Foucault: Disciplinary control proceed[s] by distributing bodies in space, allocating each individual to a cellular partition, creating a functional space out of this analytic spatial arrangement. In the end this spatial matrix became both real and ideal: a hierarchical organization of cellular space and a purely ideal order that was imposed upon its forms. |
Currently existing SCDs (simultaneously `real and ideal') can be distinguished according to their juridical mode of spatial `discipline'.
Abatement districts, currently enforced against graffiti and prostitution in sign-posted areas of Los Angeles and West Hollywood, extend the traditional police power over nuisance (the legal fount of all zoning) from noxious industry to noxious behavior. Because they are self-financed by the fines collected or special sales taxes levied (on spray paints, for example), abatement districts allow homeowner or merchant groups to target intensified law enforcement against specific local social problems.
Enhancement districts, represented all over Southern California by the `drug-free zones' surrounding public schools, add extra federal/state penalties or `enhancements' to crimes committed within a specified radius of public institutions. Containment districts are designed to quarantine potentially epidemic social problems, ranging from that insect illegal immigrant, the Mediterranean fruit fly, to the ever increasing masses of homeless Angelenos. Although Downtown LA's `homeless containment zone' lacks the precise, if surreal, sign-posting of the state Department of Agriculture's `Medfly Quarantine Zone', it is nonetheless one of the most dramatic examples of a SCD. By city policy, the spillover of homeless encampments into surrounding council districts, or into the tonier precincts of the Downtown scanscape, is prevented by their `containment' (official term) within the over-crowded Skid row area known as Central City East (or the `Nickle' to its inhabitants). Although the recession-driven explosion in the homeless population has inexorably leaked street people into the alleys and vacant lots of nearby inner-ring neighborhoods, the LAPD maintains its pitiless policy of driving them back into the squalor of the Nickle.
The obverse strategy, of course, is the formal exclusion of the homeless and other pariah groups from public spaces. A spate of Southland cities, from Orange County to Santa Barbara, and even including the `Peoples' Republic of Santa Monica', recently have passed `anti-camping' ordinances to banish the homeless from their sight. Meanwhile Los Angeles and Pomona are emulating the small city of San Fernando (Richie Valens' hometown) in banning gang members from parks. These `Gang Free Parks' reinforce non-spatialized sanctions against gang membership (especially the recent Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act or STEP) as examples of `status criminalization' where group membership, even in the absence of a specific criminal act, has been outlawed.
Status crime, by its very nature, involves projections of middle-class or conservative fantasies about the nature of the `dangerous classes'. Thus in the 19th century the bourgeoisie crusaded against a largely phantasmagorical `tramp menace', and, in the 20th century, against a hallucinatory domestic `red menace'. In the middle 1980s, however, the ghost of Cotton Mather suddenly reappeared in suburban Southern California. Allegations that local daycare centers were actually covens of satanic perversion wrenched us back to the seventeenth century and the Salem witch trials. In the course of the McMartin Preschool molestation case - ultimately the longest and most expensive such ordeal in American history - children testified about molester-teachers who flew around on broomsticks and other manifestations of the Evil One.
LINK
MIKE DAVIS / mediamaticwww.mediamatic.nl
Jose LlanoArquitecto, Diseñador de Delitos & Coreografo del Deseoeditor aparienciapublica www.aparienciapublica.org http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com/
