In Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis tracks how fear is transforming the urban landscape. This 22-page pamphlet examines Los Angeles's intense social polarization, the city stratifying into isolated zones and gated citadels.
(Hot new real estate deal: paranoia-inspired 'burbclaves.)
In trying to glimpse the city of the future, Davis borrows from the urban fictions of Escape from New York, Die Hard, Neuromancer, and especially Blade Runner. Blade Runner is portrayed as a dark flip side of the modern "gigantism" celebrated in such earlier films as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
As Davis casts today's LA into the future, he sees a city of entrenched enclaves walled in by electronic curtains of surveillance technology and by increasing police efforts at containment. He also looks at the downside of Neighborhood Watch programs, the disciplinary order imposed by "social control districts," slumlords with hired guns, security-hyper buildings, and the simulated LAs found in Disneyland, Hollywood, and CityWalk.
There are no happy endings offered here.
Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear: US$3.50, is part of the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, PO Box 2726, Westfield, NJ 07091.
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The Ecology of Fear
