American writer and political activist, Mike Davis, lays out how Los Angeles uses design, surveillance and architecture to control crowds, isolate the poor and protect business interests, and how public space is made hostile to unhoused people. He argues that recent attempts to “revitalize” fading downtowns rest upon a stark desire to construct militarized spaces designed to terrorize non-white, non-wealthy populations. In cities like Los Angeles, on the hard edge of postmodernity, architecture and the police apparatus are being merged to an unprecedented degree. The militarization of city life is increasingly visible everywhere in the built environment of the 1990s.
Davis explained to the London Review of Books’ US editor that Quartz is “something that looks like diamond but is really cheap, translucent but nothing can be seen in it.” Which is ultimately symbolic of the essence of the Los Angeles Davis had excavated.
Luxury developments outside the city limits have often been able to be incorporated as “fortress cities,” complete with security walls, guarded entries, private police, and even private roadways. The essence of security was a site plan clearly derived from Jeremy Bentham’s proposed Panopticon—the eighteenth-century model prison to be constructed radially so that a single guard in a central tower could observe every prisoner at all times. In Los Angeles, once a paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and “cruising strips,” genuinely democratic space is virtually extinct. The pleasure domes of the elite Westside rely upon the social imprisonment of a third-world proletariat in increasingly repressive ghettos and barrios.
We live in cities with market-driven treatment of housing, in which developers and political forces join to plan new urban projects. They support these projects in the name of economic “growth” (that nobody in said zip code ever sees), “jobs' ' and property gains, rather than an actual provision of shelter.
As a result, our governments marginalize the right of all people to live lives of dignity in an era of global housing crisis. Likewise, they politically encourage the fear of poor foreign immigrants and people of color.
Mike Davis told the history of L.A. without sentiment and how the intersection of race and class created a lot of the political, economic and environmental problems we have today. Especially in this chapter, how others wanted a "military occupation force" not a police department.
In other works I’ve read by him he forecast inner city revolts against a brutal police force, prophesied regularly occurring wildfires, anticipated a global pandemic, rued the worsening forecasts of climate change and urban despair, and was right about almost every single one of them. One of the lines that most haunts me from his other works is about how the future of warfare will be in the streets… meaning our recent military history is more punctuated with city names than ever before but that these encounters have been but a prologue.
