Emily Gettis
GEOG390: Professor Simpson
Reading Response Week 12
11.11.20
Fortress L.A Mike Davis
This chapter by Mike Davis exposes the war like techniques that city planning produces in Los Angeles to monitor marginalized poor people and in turn, reinforce and instigate the canyon between those who are allowed space, and those who are not. Davis uses architecture to reveal how, rather than being of benefit to the public in a progressive, holistic sense of place, public space has been injected with the purpose of actively violent security. This transformation of the built environment seeps out into the paranoid narratives it creates and the citizens who internalize it, which then recreates itself in private homes and neighborhoods (and the call to privatize deepens). Residential areas are safe only at the expense and violence of other, particularly homeless (and those deemed ‘unsavory’), who Davis claims are caught in a system that perpetuates these symbols to continue manufacturing the outrageous budgets for architectural and technological warfare. Davis identifies public architectural items as simple as benches to more significant such as libraries, and how these spaces are infused with anti-other, intimidation, and control. The produced energy that fills these spaces is key and results in control and corralling of the other in certain spaces. Davis concludes with how these systems not only produce where bodies can be placed, where they are allowed to be, with a healthy dose of what is the ‘right’ way to be, but also produce crowd control. Spaces, experiences, or situations that are inherently not violent, are soured and made violent by war like architectural and technological presence and narratives that start with marginalized groups verses how ‘acceptable’ groups produce their lives.
Of course, I see Foucault and his ideas about power, architectural space, and control in this reading. But I am trying to see how Lefebvre comes in to the narratives about space with mental and perceived space, because I believe that is a large part of what reinforces the abyss between groups of people. And if, for Lefebvre, culture is just as forceful as economy, then is it vital for the L.A.P.D, as Davis describes them, to create and perpetuate culture that the economies for war technology thrives.
I feel like our system is so ineffective but that is the point, we have people who go after those who do harm but just enough to make us feel safe, not enough to stop everyone, we have people fighting for this so called right to freedom but we never accomplish anything, but we still keep fighting, and the way our system is set up is designed to keep us working for the bourgois with a false hope of freedom and achievement but it never comes and may never come.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading this piece I of course also saw Foucault especially with the idea of the modern panopticon. That is a bizarre but rational way to view the plethora of security cameras and measures. This also refers to the internet as an entirely different level of panopticon.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that people act a certain way when they know they are being monitored. They don't act in ways that are "normal" of them, but rather are creatively and socially stunted. I can't imagine how this will affect future generations as the eye of corporations and governments grows larger.
DeleteEmily, Excellent summary here and a great finale pointing to the significance and implications of this analysis. Great connection to Foucault and Lefebvre, who Davis has read closely and applied to a specific location of his home town, Los Angeles. Lefebvre's emphasis on the production of space as a social and political practice is absolutely how Davis reads all the details of this new landscape of power that has developed since the end of the twentieth century. What follows is the absolute destruction of truly democratic space as architecture, planning, and the police (state) apparatus merge to an unprecedented degree. The term "socio-spatial strategy" is an important one and we can look back at our previous essays with this new term as well. For example, Kay Anderson's analysis in the historical changes in the space of the Adelaide zoo was tracing a socio-spatial strategy of nature-culture relations changing over time.
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