ABSTRACT
Soon after the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, the Los Angeles Times published an article by Robin Wright entitled “Riots Called Symptom of Worldwide Urban Trend.” The article focused on a recently issued United Nations report on world urbanization trends and argued that what happened in 1992 was the outgrowth of “an urban revolution taking place on all six inhabited continents, brought about by conditions very similar to those in Los Angeles: crime; racial and ethnic tensions; economic woes; vast disparities of wealth; shortages of social services; and deteriorating infrastructure.” Expanding on the UN report, it was bluntly stated that the U.S. had the largest gap between wealth and poverty in the developed world, that this gap was widest in New York and Los Angeles, and that the urban polarity characterizing the country’s two largest cities is now comparable to that found in Karachi, Bombay, and Mexico City. Pointedly, the report went on to predict that “urban poverty will become the most significant and politically explosive problem of the next century.”1
