ABSTRACT
The idea of the city as doomed is one of the common tropes of urban representation, as Mike Davis (2002) has illustrated at length in one of his latest books.1
For Davis, the Western city is rapidly coming unglued. It is a runaway train fuelled by equal parts hubris and fear. It is Roadrunner suspended over the abyss. In tapping in to this anxious tradition of writing on cities, Davis is hardly alone. For example he cites approvingly that rather idiosyncratic Marxist Ernst Bloch, in equally apocalyptic mode, arguing much earlier that, in contrast to the adaptive and improvisatory pre-capitalist city, the capitalist city is in a continual state of radical insecurity and dread. Transfixed by the idea of a totally safe and calculable environment, the capitalist city is fixed and unbending in the face of unexpected events: ‘it has rooted itself in midair’. And so it is heading for a fall; ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately’ (Bloch 1998 [1929]: 307, 309).
