The Space Race It's a small world after all: Mike Davis's crowded look at global urban catastrophe
Mike Davis must be tired of being pegged a disaster groupie. But apocalyptician isn't a bad niche for a lefty cultural historian in these calamity-drenched days. Although his writing spans both natural and man-made disasters, Davis spends most of his time on the overlap between the two—tenuous spots where man has heedlessly taken up habitation, like the desert ecosystem of Los Angeles. Davis made his name there with the splendid 1990 urban history City of Quartz and two subsequent L.A. books, Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism. .... The problem is that bigger populations don't automatically lead to growing economies, and a huge disconnect arises as poor people flood into cities with no infrastructure to support them. Karachi's squatter population doubles every decade, and Davis predicts that black Africa will have 332 million slum dwellers by the year 2015. "The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood," he writes. "Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor." Davis worries about a "fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space" around the world, with the rich often seceding from cities and retreating to the kind of gated communities familiar to Americans—very familiar, in fact, since Davis says they are "often imagineered as replica Southern Californias." Hence an estate on the outskirts of Beijing called Orange County, complete with homes designed by a Newport Beach architect. While the poor have little say in where they live (and so end up atop garbage heaps or in disaster-prone zones), the prosperous can reside in an "elusive and golden nowhere." cont'd... http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0606,press,72046,10.html _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
