Sunday, November 30, 2008

Homo Ludens: ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR: "I am reading Mike Davis’s magnificently detailed Planet of Slums. \Davis describes two trends which have defined how people have lived in the last 30 or so years. The first is the inexorable movement of the world’s population from country to city. In 1950, there were 86 cities in the world; there are now more than 400. The urban workforce has more than doubled in my lifetime. Given the extraordinary numbers of people in every part of the world required to shift these percentages, this is one of the most extraordinary and exponential developments in human history. The second, which Davis iterates and reiterates in Planet of Slums, is as fundamental: the rate at which the richest in the world have got richer and, by consequence, the poorest have got poorer."
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The writer of that blog is a Mike Davis fan. Urban theorist Mike Davis is a Marxist who believes the world is in the late stages of capitalism. This means an increasingly intolerable division between rich and poor, and that in turn will lead to revolution by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Cities are the place for that to happen because that's where the contrasts between rich and poor are the most intense. Gated communities are the perfect example of fortified wealth, from his perspective. Not being a Marxist myself, I find him a bit overwrought, but he puts together the best examples of the worst situations.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Inexorable movement of the world's population from country to city"? As if expanding city boundaries is called moving...

Todays cities are financial black holes. They cannot sustain themselves and must rely upon growing a tax base without providing any services outside the "urban boundary" in order to survive. As the black hole grows, so must the urban boundary and the population outside of it in order to continue feeding the city which then grows to hit the urban boundary and the process repeats itself.

Hasn't this become apparent when the "sprawl" came to a grinding halt due to the housing market crises, cities found themselves in trouble when the hand they despised couldn't feed them anymore. Just desserts.