ABSTRACT
Introduction As Western society embarks on a new millennium, the quasi-apocalyptic vision of late 20th century Los Angeles offered by Mike Davis in the compelling City of Quartz (1990), and developed in his more recent monograph Ecology of Fear (1998), has been read by many as prophetic of the future of industrialised cities. His central thesis concerns the privatisation of public space in Los Angeles and the use of architecture, urban planning and excessive police force to ‘militarise’ whole swathes of the city, alienating and criminalising large sections of the ethnic poor in the process. Davis’s work is undeniably powerful and emotive, a high-octane account of metropolitan meltdown, self-interest and corporate greed in late modern urban society. For a whole host of sociologists, urban geographers and (to a lesser extent) criminologists,1 the Davis ‘model’ points towards a dire urban future of increasing polarisation and social and economic exclusion in the segregated ‘dual city’, yet, in a countermove, more recently there has emerged a growing backlash against Davis’s fast and loose sensationalism.
