Chaido Kaproulia Department of Architecture University of Thessaly January 2016 A critical study Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear, by Mike Davis
Introduction Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control - The Ecology of Fear 1, was published in December 1992 in New Jersey, in the series of publications of Open Magazine and is a critical reaction of Mike Davis in the new urban and spatial plan of L.A. In Blade Runner, the director, Ridley Scott, focuses on a world of authoritarian, environmental problems and deep social inequality. In L.A. 2020, the anonymous crowd walks in the rain for an uncertain future between android robots and cold professional killers. There are two events that determined the writing of the text: the uprising (riot) during the spring of '92 which transformed Los Angeles into a battlefield causing regular army operations in the city center and the publication of the "Downtown Strategic Plan" spatial study for Los Angeles. In Beyond Blade Runner, Davis examines urban phenomena - the psychosis for personal safety and housing design which is reminiscent of prisons, the social control regions and the architectural practices that try to enhance the feeling of security, leading to abolish basic human rights and create great social inequalities. These phenomena and practices are still applied today and have exceeded the limits of U.S.A.. In Europe of 2016, events such as the privatization of public space and the artificially cultivated hysteria "security", reinforce ghettoization and class polarization more strongly than ever. L.A. according to Mike Davis '' What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about in the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark. From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, 'It's down below there,' and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.’’ 2 The description of this dystopian city of Calvino, in his book Invisible Cities, could fit the image of Los Angeles that M. Davis gives us in Beyond Blade Runner. According to M. Davis, all the rehash on the future of Los Angeles, today take for granted the dark imagery of Blade Runner, as a possible, if not inevitable, terminal point of this sunny state. The Blade Runner in other words, is still another creature of basic modernist fantasy - alternatively as a utopia or dystopia - the future metropolis as monstrous creature. L.A. according to M. Davis is nothing but a dystopia, a fantastic world of absolute misery. Big Brother Only the terror of the middle class for a progressive tax regime can exceeds their modern obsession for personal safety and social isolation. Without the plan for more public investments that restore basic social conditions, societies are forced to increase private and public
Mike Davis, (1992) BEYOND BLADE RUNNER: URBAN CONTROL The Ecology of Fear. New Jersey: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series; 1st edition 1
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Calvino Italo, (1972). Le citta invisibili. Rome: Mondadori, p. 21-25
investment for our physical safety. As city life becomes fiercer, the various social environments adopt strategies and security technologies according to their means. After the uprising in Watts that lasted six days in the homonymous district of Los Angeles in August 1965, which was characterized as a reaction movement against police brutality and racist injustices, that affected blacks of the American state, L.A.P.D. warned that an imminent '' black flooding ‘’ was going to overflow from the city center and convinced the mayor to subsidize the relocation of banks and headquarters of different operations in a new area. Key to the success of this strategy was the physical separation of the new area and the land values in it, behind a rampart of stepped fences and walls of highways. Traditional pedestrian crossings dismantled and pedestrian circulation was raised above the street level, in the form of overhead crossings, access to which is controlled by the security systems of each skyscraper. This was a measure that took place without major reactions. This example indicates that the boundaries between architecture and enforcement of law and order, can become increasingly blurred. Police slowly becomes a central factor of the redesign of L.A. and now has a key role in the architectural design and program. Police removes public toilets, which in their opinion were scenes of crimes and also enforced the presence of itinerant vendors. Whatever riots occurred gave the police a motive to expand its participation in urban and spatial planning issues. Another example of how the police started to involve in spatial planning is that managed to persuade the municipality, to declare side streets outlaw, as a measure for crime prevention. Prison as a Source of Inspiration '' Railings remind that I am a prisoner in my own home. But sometimes you're forced to do things you don’t like, for safety's sake. '' says a city resident in L.A. Times in 1992. Yet security is nothing more than an illusion. Half of armored town houses have quick release mechanisms to enable the occupants to escape in an emergency. What was the result? An outbreak of fires, where entire families were trapped and incinerated in their homes. This bastions’ esthetic has extended outside of shops and houses, to offices and hospitals. But more surprisingly, schools started resembling to prisons. School courtyards remind trenches and students are daily checked by metal detectors. In Lindbergh Junior, Long Beach managers have raised a 275 m long and 3 m height wall, under the pretext that this would ostracize possible bullets from the neighboring social housing complex. Instead of providing any scarce resources for educational purposes, they were absorbed in the shielding of the school premises and the hiring of armed guards. In some areas the police has direct access to digitized school records and enables students to report their peers who are drug users, by rewarding them with concert tickets and new clothes. Social Control Regions Combining sanctions of criminal or civil code with urban planning, society leads to mold what Michel Foucault would recognize as a superior yet evolutionary step of '' discipline '' in the modern city.Now, laws aimed at specific population groups are enacted and specific locations are criminalized. The prohibition of such behavior is very little from the determination of complete containment regions, which are designed to impose a quarantine potentially epidemic social problems, or more often, social types. Thereby enclosing zones are created, for homeless people for instance, including sidewalks with cushioning zones. On the other hand, rogue groups are formally excluded outside the public space or even the city limits. These strategies do nothing more than to criminalize people, even if they have not committed
any offense, simply on the basis of their participation in gangs. Thus criminalize the personal situation of each person and give further feed the fantasies of the middle class.
Heterotopias into a dystopic L.A. At a time digital culture and economy, modern city creates its’ virtual ideal through a complex architecture of information and experiences of media networks. In such a city, social fantasy embodies in a so-called in M. Davis ‘' tourist bubble’' . Historical areas, areas with fun shops, shopping centers and other thematic parks, are cut off from the rest of the city and become heterotopic spaces. Spaces that are actual or spiritual sites and act as otherness places alongside existing sites. Consumers of these heterotopias are the homogenised crowds of rich shoppers and tourists, looking for the minimum '' promiscuity '. Because these landscapes are often exploiting actual or virtual historical places, while competing with each other for their authenticity, lead to a multidimensional dialectic. It is worth mentioning as an example the City Walk, which opened in 1993 and is nothing more than a parallel reconstruction of urban reality. According to its manufacturers, it’s not a shopping center but a revolution in urban planning, a monumental exercise of sociological hygiene that made many wonder like Kevin Starr in L.A. Journal, if L.A. is lost as a real city, that they should need this social control level for anything that resembles a city experience. Architectural Practices In '' The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces ‘’, William Whyte observes: The quality of any urban environment can be balanced, first of all, based on whether there are convenient, comfortable places to sit pedestrians. In the Downtown L.A. the best sustainability indicator is nothing more than the idyllic picture of agency officials and wealthy tourists who stroll and doze in banded parks. In contrast, a few blocks from downtown, the city becomes increasingly '' unbearable '' for the homeless and the poor. The municipality compacts the mass of the poorest residents in a small place and ignores their adequate housing. It is worthwhile to note some practices which enhance the feeling of fear and insecurity in the city, rather than suppressing it. An architectural practice adopted in L.A. is the new benches for bus stops, which offer minimal sitting surface, in order to be uncomfortable and make sleep almost impossible. In Frances Howard Goldwyn Regional Branch Library in Hollywood, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, planning corresponds to a fortress. Five meter tall security walls of solid concrete, protective anti - graffiti grid covered with ceramic tiles and stylized outposts on every side of the building make it probably the most threatening library ever designed. Another cruel practice is an advanced overhead sprinkler system placed in parks, scheduled to splash homeless people while sleeping at irregular intervals during the day. The repeal of public toilets, which led many homeless to be washed and even drink water from waste effluents flowing under the Los Angeles River channel. Those examples still exist many years after M. Davis described them in his book and not only in L.A. Metallic nails placed outside a complex of luxury apartments in London intend to prevent the homeless from finding shelter and sleeping there. This practice is not new and since a decade it can also be found outside restaurants. The logic of urban fragmentation, driven by safety demand finds its most popular expression on the efforts of wealthy neighborhoods to isolate the values of their homes and their lifestyles. San Marino, closes the parks on weekends in order to keep away Latino and Asian families from neighboring communities. These residential areas, have enough strength and are able to privatize public space. When the gates, the walls and the bans are not enough,
the residence redesigns itself to incorporate advanced security that become in some cases excessive, like for example antiterrorist security rooms, with access to hidden doors. Police is still playing an increasing role as an urban designer of the city but operates incessantly to extend the use of land for public order. In the case of L.A. this happened in the form of ‘’ urban regeneration ‘', according to M. Davis. An entire section of Downtown and east L.A. was converted into a vast penal colony. A typical example of this tactic was the plan to add two towers, of 2,400 beds in the County Jail, in the city center opposite to hotels and offices. But how would they conceal such heterotopia, in order to adorn the placement of a prison in the general view? The two towers would look like futuristic hotels, with artistic qualities and interiors designed to implement a sophisticated program of psychological manipulation and control: windows without bars, surfaces with pastel colors, guards dressed in costumes, elaborate public space and anteroom that looks like a hotel reception. Reiner De Graaf in his article '' Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission ‘' 3 says that built environment and particularly that of housing acquires a radically new role. From a mean of accommodation, it becomes a mean to generate economic returns and in this case a mean to enhance the resident’s fantasy for safety. A building is no longer something to be used, but something that ‘’ belongs ''. Through the general development of the term "real estate", the definition of an architect is replaced by that of an economist and the police. This is the moment where architecture is certainly inexplicable (at least according to the criteria to which architects usually explain architecture) and certainly stops being an ideological choice. Conclusion Sixteen years into the new millennium, it’s like the last century never happened. The same architecture in which the social mobility once incorporated now helps to prevent it. Despite increasingly higher poverty and homelessness rates, large housing complexes are being demolished with increasing determination. But what is happening now in Europe? Bernard Henry Levy, in an interview in Frankfurte Allgemeneine says that the soul of Europe, has never been worse than today, hoping the claim of Michael Houellebecq that '' the future of Europe is becoming a theme park and brothel for Asian tourists. ‘' 4would not come true. The architectural practices taking place in L.A. described by M. Davis are now being implemented in Europe. The architects are planning mass consumption buildings, demagogue and convert garbage into luxury products. Modern architecture is always considered to be political, but generally throughout its’ political life turned casually nonetheless, despite the characteristics of its’ left rhetoric.
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Reiner De Graaf, (2015). Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. [online]. Available at: https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/viewpoints/ architecture-is-now-a-tool-of-capital-complicit-in-a-purpose-antithetical-to-its-social-mission/ 8681564.article [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016]. 4
Hans Kollhoff, (2013). Il mestiere dell’ architecto. Milano: Domus, p. 2-3