Is there any need to explain why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles? In the wake of the Rodney King riots, the rhetoric of urban reform persists, but the substance is extinct. "Rebuilding L.A." simply means padding the bunker.
As city life grows more feral, different milieux adopt security strategies and technologies according to their means. Video monitoring of Downtown's redeveloped zones has been extended to parking structures, private sidewalks, plazas, and so on. This comprehensive surveillance constitutes a virtual scanscape--a space of protective visibility that increasingly defines where white-collar office workers and middle-class tourists feel safe Downtown. Inevitably the workplace or shopping mall video camera will become linked with home security systems, personal "panic buttons," car alarms, cellular phones, and the like, in a seamless continuity of surveillance over daily routine. Indeed, yuppies' lifestyles soon may be defined by the ability to afford electronic guardian angels to watch over them. In the meantime, these hard times are boom years for the makers of video surveillance technology.
Tall buildings are becoming increasingly sentient. The sensory system of the average office tower already includes panoptic vision, smell, sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection, and, in some cases, hearing. Some architects now predict the day when the building's own AI security computer will be able to automatically screen and identify its human population, and, even perhaps, respond to their emotional states (fear, panic, etc.). Without dispatching security personnel, the building itself will manage crises--and, when all else fails, the smart building will become a combination of bunker and fire-base.
Beyond the scanscape of the fortified zone is the halo of barrios and ghettos that surround Downtown Los Angeles. In the words of historian Kevin Starr: "This is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities."
Back in the 1920's, when Social Darwinism held sway at the University of Chicago, Prof. Ernest W. Burgess created a dartboard schematic of the "North American city" that has been called "the most famous diagram in social science." It represents the five concentric zones into which the struggle for the survival of the fittest supposedly sorts urban social classes and housing types. It portrays a "human ecology" organized by biological forces of invasion, competition, succession and symbiosis. My remapping of the urban structure takes Burgess back to the future. It preserves such "ecological" determinants as income, land value, class and race, but adds a decisive new factor: fear.
In contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles, a new species of special enclave is emerging in sympathetic synchrony with the militarization of the landscape. For want of a better term, we might call them "social control districts" (SCDs). Merging the sanctions of the criminal or civil code with land-use planning, they create what Michel Foucault would undoubtedly have pegged as further instances of the evolution of the "disciplinary order" of the twentieth-century city.
Currently existing SCDs can be distinguished according to their juridical mode of "spatial discipline." Abatement districts, currently enforced against graffiti and prostitution in sign-posted areas of Los Angeles and West Hollywood, extend the traditional police power over nuisance (the legal fount of all zoning) from noxious industry to noxious behavior. Because they are self-financed by the fines collected or special sales taxes levied (on spray paints, for example), abatement districts allow homeowner or merchant groups to target intensified law enforcement against specific local social problems.
Enhancement districts, represented all over Southern California by the "drug-free zones'' surrounding public schools, add extra federal/state penalties or "enhancements" to crimes committed within a specified radius of public institutions. Containment districts are designed to quarantine potentially epidemic social problems, ranging from that insect illegal immigrant, the Mediterranean fruit fly, to the ever increasing masses of homeless Angelenos. Although Downtown L.A.'s "homeless containment zone" lacks the precise, if surreal, sign-posting of the state Department of Agriculture's "Medfly Quarantine Zone," it is nonetheless one of the most dramatic examples of an SCD. By city policy, the spillover of homeless encampments into surrounding council districts, or into the tonier precincts of the Downtown scanscape, is prevented by their "containment" (official term) within the over-crowded Skid row area known as Central City East (or the "Nickle" to its inhabitants). Although the recession-driven explosion in the homeless population has inexorably leaked street people into the alleys and vacant lots of nearby inner-ring neighborhoods, the LAPD maintains its pitiless policy of driving them back into the squalor of the Nickle.