ABSTRACT
One of the most striking writers on the ills of the contemporary urban condition is Mike Davis, whose City of Quartz (1990) dazzled the academic world (criminology aside!) with its postmodern parables of metropolitan meltdown, social polarisation and the militarisation of vast swathes of public space in ‘Fortress LA’. Offered from a Marxist (or at least Marxisant!) position, his account is a political critique of selfinterest and corporate greed in late-millennial Los Angeles. Davis’s work is the subject of Chapter 4. Whether LA offers a blueprint for the future – indeed, whether he has even correctly depicted Los Angeles – has generated much controversy, as the chapter documents. Moving on from these debates, the core interest of Davis’s work remains the way in which he (sometimes almost incidentally) opens up the importance of emotions and the link to consumerism and urban space. In Davis’s reading, the importance of the fear of crime lies in the way that it is redrawing the contours of the urban landscape and the built environment, yet in my version, safety is only part of the story. The chapter describes the growth of an entire industry of ‘security as prestige’, with the ‘feel-safe’ factor constituting a new form of urban conspicuous consumption and lifestyle desire. In this ongoing mutation of urban experience, society’s current fascination with security and auto-surveillance has become yet another incitement to consume. In a second inspiration from Davis, the chapter elaborates his overly crude vision of a polarised city – a hyperbolic version of Manuel Castells’s (1994) ‘dual city’ – to reflect on the physicality of boundaries and the feelings and emotions within the zone(s) of ‘exclusionary space’.
