For April 9

From MIKE DAVIS, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 223-229, 232-237, 25

In this excerpt from his book on Los Angeles, published 2 years before the riots that accompanied the Rodney King riot, journalist Mike Davis describes the new “barricaded” city profoundly structured by class, race, and ethnicity.

The carefully manicured lawns of Los Angeles's Westside sprout forests of ominous little signs warning: "Armed Response!" Even richer neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides isolated themselves behind walls guarded by gun-toting private police and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Downtown, a publicly-subsidized "urban renaissance" has raised the nation's largest corporate citadel, segregated from the poor neighborhoods around it by a monumental architectural glacis.... In the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley the Los Angeles Police barricade streets and seal off poor neighborhoods as part of their "war on drugs:' In Watts, developer Alexander Haagen demonstrates his strategy for recolonizing inner-city retail markets: a panoptican shopping mail surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower...

Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement undergirded by the ubiquitous "armed response:' This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating "postmodern space," or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan "galaxies:' has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level. Hollywood's pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive, in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface in the wake of the social polarizations of the Reagan era. Images of carceral inner cities (Escapeftvm New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner),

sentient buildings (Die HaA, urban bantustans (They Live!), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends.

Such dystopian visions grasp the extent to which today's pharaonic scales of residential and commercial security supplant residual hopes for urban reform and social integration. The dire predictions of Richard Nixon's 1969 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence have been tragically fulfilled: we live in "fortress cities" brutally divided between "fortified cells" of affluent society and "places of terror" where the police battle the criminalized poor. Tne "Second Civil War" that began in the long hot summers of the 1960s has been institutionalized into the very structure of urban space. The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle class as a zero-sum game. In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of post- modernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort.

This epochal coalescence has far-reaching consequences for the social relations of the built environment.... the market provisions of "security" generates its own paranoid demand. "Security" becomes a positional good defined by income across to private "protective services" and membership in some hardened residential enclave or restricted suburb. As a prestige symbol-and sometimes as the decisive border- line between the merely well-off and the "truly rich”---"security" has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from "unsavory" groups and individuals, even crowds in general....

...The neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers. n many instances the semiotics of so-called "defensible space" are just about as subtle as a swaggering white cop. Today's upscale, pseudo-public spaces-sumptuary malls, office centers, culture acropolises, and so on--are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass "Other." Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the bat environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups-whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females-read the meaning immediately.

The universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure the city is the destruction of accessible public space. The contemporary opprobrium attached to the term "street person" is in itself a harrowing index of the devaluation of public spaces. To reduce contact with untouchables, urban redevelopment has converted once vital pedestrian streets into traffic sewers and transformed public parks into temporary receptacles for the homeless and wretched. The American city, as many critics have recognized, is being systematically turned inside out--or, rather, outside in. The valorized spaces of the new rnegastructures and super-malls are concentrated in the center, street frontage is denuded, public activity is sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation is internalized in corridors under the gaze of private police.

The privatization of the architectural public realm, moreover, is shadowed by parallel restructurings of electronic space, as heavily policed, pay-access "information orders," elite data-bases and subscription cable,services appropriate parts of the invisible agora. Both processes, of course, mirror the deregulation of the economy and the recession of non-market entitlements. The decline of urban liberalism has been accompanied by the death of what might be called the "Olmstedian vision" of public space. Frederick Law Olmsted, it will be recalled, was North America's Haussmann, as well as the Father of Central Park. In the wake of Manhattan's "Commune" of 1863, the great Draft Riot, he conceived public landscapes and parks as social safety-values, mixing classes and ethnicities in common (bourgeois) recreations and enjoyments. As Manfredo Tafuri has shown ip his well-known study of Rockefeller Center, the same principle animated the construction of the canonical spaces of the La Guardia-Roosevelt era.

This reformist vision of public space--as the emollient of class struggle, if not the bedrock of the American polis--is now as obsolete as Keynesian nostrums of full employment. In regard to the "mixing" of classes, contemporary urban America is more like Victorian England than Walt Whitman's or La Guardia's New York. In Los Angeles, once-upon-a-time a demi-paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and "cruising strips:' genuinely democratic space is all but extinct. The Oz-like archipelago of Westside pleasure domes-a continuum of tony maus, arts centers and gourmet strips-is reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third- world service proletariat who live in increasingly repressive ghettoes and barrios. In a city of several million yearning immigrants, public amenities are radically shrinking, parks are becoming derelict and beaches more segregated, libraries and play- grounds are closing, youth congregations of ordinary kinds are banned, and the streets are becoming more desolate and dangerous.

... Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles....

This conscious "hardening" of the city surface against the poor is especially brazen in the Manichaean treatment of Downtown microcosms. In his famous study of the "social life of small urban spaces," William Whyte makes the point that the quality of any urban environment can be measured, fiat of all, by whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit. This maxim has been warmly taken to heart by designers of the high-corporate precincts of Bunker HiE and the emerging "urban village" of South Park. As part of the city's policy of subsidizing white-collar residential colonization in Downtown, it has spent, or plans to spend, tens of millions of dollars of diverted tax revenue on enticing, "soft” environments in these areas. Planners envision an opulent complex of squares, fountains, world- class public art, exotic shrubbery, and avant-garde street furniture along a Hope Street pedestrian corridor. In the propaganda of official boosters, nothing is taken as a better index of Downtown's "liveability" than the idyll of office workers and up- scale tourists lounging or napping in the terraced gardens of California Plaza, the "Spanish Steps" or Grand Hope Park.

In stark contrast, a few blocks away, the city is engaged in a merciless struggle to make public facilities and spaces as "unliveable" as possible for the homeless and the poor...

... The city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the "containment" (official term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighborhood into an outdoor poorhouse. But this containment strategy breeds its own vicious circle of contradiction. By condensing the mass of the desperate and helpless together in such a small space, and denying adequate housing, official policy has transformed Skid Row into probably the most dangerous ten square blocks in the world-ruled by a grisly succession of "Slashers:' "Night Stalkers" and more ordinary predators. Every night on Skid Row is Friday the 13tb, and, unsurprisingly, many of the homeless seek to escape the "Nickle" during the night at all costs, searching safer niches in other parts of Downtown. The city in turn tightens the noose with increased police harassment and ingenious design deterrents.

One of the most common, but mind-numbing, of these deterrents is the rapid Transit District's new barrelshaped bus bench that offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting, while making sleeping utterly impossible. Such "bumproof" benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. Another invention, worthy of the Grand Guignol, is the aggressive deployment of 'outdoor sprinklers. Several years ago the city opened a "Skid Row Park' along lower Fifth Street, on a comer of Hell. To ensure that the park was not used for sleeping--that is to say, to guarantee that it was mainly utilized for drug dealing and prostitution--the city installed an elaborate overhead sprinkler system programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times during the night. The system was immediately copied by some local businessmen in order to drive the homeless away from adjacent public sidewalks. Meanwhile restaurants and markets have responded to the homeless by building ornate enclosures to protect their refuse. Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as happened in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag-lady-proof trash cage: made of three-quarter inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless moldering fishheads and stale french fries.

Public toilets, however, are the real Eastern Front of the Downtown war on the poor. Los Angeles, as a matter of deliberate policy, has fewer available public lavatories than any major North American city. On the advice of the LAPD (who actually sit on the design board of at least one major Downtown redevelopment project), the Community Redevelopment Agency bulldozed the remaining public toilet in Skid Row. Agency planners then agonized for months over whether to include a "free- standing public toilet" in their design for South Park. As CRA Chairman Jim Wood later admitted, the decision not to include the toilet was a "policy decision and not a design decision." The CRA Downtown prefers the solution of "quasi-public rest- rooms”--meaning toilets in restaurants, art galleries and office buildings-which can be made available to tourists and office workers while being denied to vagrants and other unsuitables. The toiletless no-man's-land east of Hill Street in Downtown is also barren of outside water sources for drinking or washing. A common and troubling sight these days are the homeless men-many of them young Salvadorean refugees- washing in and even drinking from the sewer effluent which flows down the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River on the eastern edge of Downtown.

Where the itineraries of Downtown powerbrokers unavoidably intersect with the habitats of the homeless or the working poor, as in the . .. zone of gentrification along the northern Broadway corridor, extraordinary design precautions are being taken to ensure the physical separation of the different humanities. For instance, the CRA brought in the Los Angeles Polite to design "24-hour, state-of-the-art security" for the two new parking structures that serve the Los Angeles Times and Ronald Reagan State Office buildings. In contrast to the mean streets outside, the parking structures contain beautifully landscaped lawns or "microparks:' and in one case, a food court and a historical exhibit. Moreover, both structures are designed as "confidence-building" circulation systems-miniature paradigms of privatization-which allow white-collar workers to walk from car to office, or from car to boutique, with mini- mum exposure to the public street. The Broadway Spring Center, in particular, which links the Ronald Reagan Building to the proposed "Grand Central Square" at Third and Broadway, has been warmly praised by architectural critics for adding greenery and art (a banal has relief) to parking. It also adds a huge dose of menace-armed guards, locked gates, and security cameras-4o scare away the homeless and poor.

The cold war on the streets of Downtown is ever escalating. The police, lobbied by Downtown merchants and developers, have broken up every attempt by the homeless and their allies to create safe havens of self-organized encampments. "Justiceville," founded by homeless activist Ted Hayes, was roughly dispersed; when its inhabitants attempted to find refuge at Venice Beach, they were arrested at the behest of the local council person (a renowned environmentalist) and sent back to the inferno of Skid Row. The city's own brief experiment with legalized camping--a grudging response to a series of exposure deaths in the cold winter of 1987-was ended abruptly after only four months to make way for construction of a transit repair yard. Current policy seems to involve a perverse play upon Zola's famous irony about the “equal rights" of the rich and the poor to sleep out rough. As the head of the city planning commission explained the official line to incredulous reporters, it is not against the law to sleep on the street per se, "only to erect any sort of protective shelter." To enforce this prescription against "cardboard condos," the LAPD periodically sweep the Nickle, confiscating shelters and other possessions, and arresting resisters. Such cynical repression has turned the majority of the homeless into urban bedouins. They are visible all over Downtown, pushing a few pathetic possessions in purloined shop- ping carts, always fugitive and in motion, pressed between the official policy of containment and the increasing sadism of Downtown streets....

This comprehensive urban security mobilization depends not only upon the inibrication of the police function into the built environment, but also upon an evolving social division of labor between public- and private-sector police services, in which the former act as the necessary supports of the latter. As Police Chief magazine notes, "harsh economic realities of the 1980s”---for instance, the tax revolt, rising rates of crime against property, and burgeoning middle-class demands for security-have catalyzed "a realignment of relationships between private security and law enforcement." The private sector, exploiting an army of non-union, low-wage employees, has increasingly captured the labor-intensive roles. . . while public law enforcement has retrenched behind the supervision of security macrosystems (maintenance of major crime date bases, aerial surveillance, jail systems, paramilitary responses to terrorism and street insurgency, and so on). The confusing interface between the two sectors is most evident in the overlapping of patrol functions in many neighborhoods and in the growing trend to subcontract jailing (with the privatized supervision of electronic home surveillance as another potentially lucrative market).

In many respects this division of labor is more elaborated in Los Angeles than elsewhere, if only because of the LAPD's pathbreaking substitutions of technological capital for patrol manpower. In part this was a necessary adaption to the city's dispersed form; but it has also expressed the department's particular definition of its relationship to the community. Especially in its own self-perpetuated myth, the LAPD 's seen as the Progressive antithesis to the traditional big-city Police department with its patronage armies of patrolmen grafting off the beat. As reformed in the early 1950s by the legendary Chief Park" (who admired above all the elitism of the Marines), the LAPD was intended to be incorruptible because unapproachable, a "few good men" doing battle with a fundamentally evil city. Dragnet's Sergeant Friday precisely captured the Parkerized LAPD's quality of prudish alienation from a citizenry composed of fools, degenerates and psychopaths.

Technology helped insulate this paranoid esprit de corps. in doing so, it virtually established a new epistemology of policing, where technologized surveillance and response supplanted the traditional partolman's intimate "folk" knowledge of specific communities. Thus back in the 1920s the LAPD had pioneered the replacement of the flatfoot or mounted officer with the radio patrol car--the beginning of dispersed, mechanized policing. Under Parker, ever alert to spinoffs from military technology, the LAPD introduced the first police helicopters for systematic aerial surveillance. After the Watts Rebellion of 1965 this airborne effort became the comerstone of a policing strategy for the entire inner city. As part of its "Astro" program LAPD helicopters maintain an average nineteen-hour-per-day vigil over "high crime areas," tactically coordinated to patrol car forces, and exceeding even the British Army's aerial surveillance of Belfast. To facilitate ground-air synchronization, thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transformiing the aerial view of the city into a huge police-grid.

The fifty-pilot LAPD airforce was recently updated with French Aerospatiale helicopters equipped with futuristic surveillance technology. Their forward-looking infra-red cameras are extraordinary night eyes that can easily form heat images from a single burning cigarette, while their thirty-rnillion-candlepower spotlights, appropriately called "Nightsun”, can literally turn the night into day. Meanwhile the LAPD retains another fleet of Bell Jet Rangers capable of delivering complete elements of SWAT personnel anywhere in the region. Their.training, which sometimes includes practice assaults on Downtown highrises, anticipates some of the spookier Hollywood images (for example, Blue Thunder or Running Man) of airborne police terror. A few years ago a veteran LAPD SWAT commander (apparently one of the principals in the infamous SLA holocaust in Southcentral Los Angeles) accidentally shot his own helicopter out of the sky while practicing a strafing run with a machine-gun.

But the most decisive element in the LAPD's metamorphosis into a technopolice ha been its long and successful liaison with the military aerospace industry. Just in time for the opening of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the department brought on line ECCCS (Emergency Command Control Communications Systems), the most powerful, state-of-the-art police communications systems in the world. First conceptualized by Hughes Aerospace between 1969 and 197 1, ECCCS's design, was refined and updated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, incorporating elements of space technology and mission control communications. After the passage of a $42 million tax override in May 1977, the City Council approved Systems Development Corporation of Santa Monica as prime contractor for the system, which took more than seven years to build.

The central hardware of ECCCS is encased in security comparable to a SAC missile silo in Montana. Bunkered in the earthquake-proofed and security-hardened fourth and fifth sublevels of City Hall East (and interconnecting with the Police pentagon in Parker Center), Central Dispatch Center coordinates a the complex itineraries and responses of the LAPD using digitalized communication to eliminate voice congestion and guarantee the secrecy of transmission. ECCCS, together with the LAPD's prodigious information-processing assets, including the ever-growing databases on suspect citizenry, have become the central neutral system for the vast and disparate, public and private, security operations taking place in Los Angeles.

... Having brought policing up to the levels of the Vietnam War and early NASA, it is almost inevitable that the LAPD, and other advanced police forces, will try to acquire the technology of the Electronic Battlefield and even Star Wars. . . . Ex-Los Angeles police chief, now state enator, Ed Davis (Republican-Valencia) has proposed the use of a geosynclinical space satellite to counter pandeniic car theft in the region. Electronic alarm systems, already tested in New England, would alert police if a properly tagged car was stolen; satellite monitoring would extend cover- age over Los Angeles's vast metropolitan area....

The image here is ultimately more important than the practicality of the proposal, since it condenses the historical world view and quixotic quest of the postwar LAPD: good citizens, off the streets, enclaved in their high-security private consumption spheres; bad citizens, on the streets (and therefore not engaged in legitimate busi- ness), caught in the terrible, Jehovan scrutiny of the LAPD's space program....

... It is necessary to recall that the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s was sustained by the real promise of reformiism. . . . Moreover in the superheated summit of the Vietnam boom, young Black men at last began to find their way, in some substantial number, into factory and transportation jobs, while Black women thronged into the lower levels of the pink-collar workforce. And, for teenagers and the younger unemployed, the federal government supplied a seasonal quota of temporary "weed-pulling" jobs and bogus training schemes to cool out the streets during the long summers.

But the illusion of economic progress was shortlived. By 1975---the tenth anniversary of the Watts Rebellion ... a special report by the Times found that the "the Black ghetto is not a viable community ... it is slowly dying' " In the face of double- digit unemployment (1975 was a depression year for Southland Blacks), over-crowded schools, high prices, and deteriorating housing, "the fighting mood of the 1960s has been replaced by a sick apathy or angry frustration." With rebellion deterred by the paramilitarization of the police and the destruction of the comrnunity's radical fringe, Times writer John Kendall described despair recycled as gang violence and Black-on-Black crime.

Seen from a perspective fifteen years further on, it is clear that the Times, and other contemporary observers, did not fully appreciate the complexity of what was happening in Southcentral Los Angeles. Although the image of overall community demoralization was accurate enough, a sizeable minority was actually experiencing moderate upward mobility, while the condition of the majority was steadily worsening. In simplified terms-, Los Angeles's Black community became more internally polarized as public-sector craftworkers, clericals, and professionals successfully entrenched themselves within city, county, and federal bureaucracies, while the semi- skilled working class in the private sector was decimated by the dual impact of job suburbanization and economic internationalization....

... Working-class Blacks in the flatlands-where nearly 40 per cent of families live below the poverty line-have faced relentless economic decline. While city resources (to the tune of $2 billion) have been absorbed in financing the corporate renaissance of Downtown, Southcentral L.A. has been markedly disadvantaged even in receipt of anti-poverty assistance, "coming far behind West Los Angeles and the Valley in access to vital human services andojob-training funds:' Black small businesses have withered for lack of credit or attention from the city, leaving behind only liquor stores and churches.

Most tragically, the unionized branch-plant economy toward which working-class Blacks (and Chicanos) had always looked for decent jobs collapsed. As the Los Angeles economy in the 1970s was "unplugged" from the American industrial heart- land and rewired to Fast Asia, non-Anglo workers have borne the brunt of adaptation and sacrifice. The 1978-82 wave of factory closings in the wake of Japanese import penetration and recession, which shuttered ten of the twelve largest non-aerospace plants in Southern California and displaced 75,000 blue-collar workers, erased the ephemeral gains won by blue-collar Blacks between 1965 and 1975. Where local warehouses and factories did not succumb to Asian competition, they fled instead to new industrial parks in the South Bay, northern Orange County or the Inland Empire-321 firms since 1971. An investigation committee of the California Legislature in 1982 confirmed the resulting economic destruction in Southcentral neighborhoods unemployment rising by nearly 50 per cent since the early 1970s while community purchasing power fell by a third.

If Eastside manufacturing employment made a spectacular recovery in the 1980s, it offered little opportunity for Blacks, as the new industry overwhelmingly consisted of minimum-wage sweatshops, super-exploiting immigrant Latino labor in the production of furniture or non-durables like clothes and toys. (Borrowing the terminology of Alain Lipietz, we might say that a "Bloody Taylorism now operates within the ruined shell of Fordism." This extinction of industrial job opportunities has had profound gender as well as socioeconomic ramifications for the Black labor force. Young Black women have been partially able to compensate for community deindustrialization by shifting into lower-level information-processing jobs. Young Black working-class men, on the other hand, have seen their labor-market options (apart from military service) virtually collapse as the factory and truckdriving jobs that gave their fathers and older brothers a modicum of dignity have either been replaced by imports, or relocated to white areas far out on the galactic spiral-arms of the L.A. megalopolis-fifty to eighty miles away in San Bernardino or Riverside counties. Equally, young Blacks have been largely excluded from the boom in suburban service employment.... it is a stunning fact-emblematic of institutional racism on a far more rampant scale than usually admitted these days--that most of California's 1980s job and residential growth poles-southern Orange County, eastern Ventura County, northern San Diego County, Contra Costa County, and so on-have Black populations of I per cent or less. At the same time, young Blacks willing to compete for more centrally located, menial service jobs find themselves in a losing competition with new immigrants, not least because of clear employer opinions about labor "docility." As a result, unemployment amongst Black youth in Los Angeles County -- despite unbroken regional growth and a new explosion of conspicuous consumption -- remained at a staggering 45 per cent through the late 1980s .....

The scale of pent-up demand for decent manual employment was also vividly demonstrated a few years ago when fifty thousand predominantly Black and Chicano youth lined up for miles to apply for a few openings on the unionized longshore in San Pedro. ... As the political muscle of affluent homeowners continues to ensure residential segregation and the redistribution of tax resources upwards, inner-city youth have been the victims of a conscious policy of social disinvestment. The tacit expendability of Black and brown youth in the "city of the angels" can be directly measured by the steady drainage of resources-with minimum outcry from elected officials-from the programs that serve the most urgent needs....

Job alternatives for gang members have been almost nonexistent, despite widespread recognition that jobs are more potent deterrents to youth crime than STEP laws or long penitentiary sentences. As Charles Norman, the veteran director of Youth Gang Services, observed in 1981: "You could pull 80 per cent of gang members, seventeen years old or younger, out of gangs if you had jobs, job training and social alternatives." . . . As the LAPD's budget crept above $400 million in 1988, the City Council begrudgingly approved a $500,000 pilot program to create one hundred jobs for "high-risk" youth. In the vast escalation of hostilities since the mid 1980s, this pathetic program is the only "carrot" that the City has actually differed to its estimated 50,000 gang youth....

. . .In Los Angeles there are too many signs of approaching helter-skelter: everywhere in the inner city, even in the forgotten poor-white boondocks with their zombie populations of speed-freaks, gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate, cops are becoming more arrogant and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible Armageddon.