The city as text - A2 Communications

Post modern architecture might take the form of one single building which incorporates several eras of design or a whole area where no attempt is made to link all the buildings into one general unifying design.

Towns and cities are also a battleground for economic, social, political and ethnic forces. We see the power of vested interests and the marginalisation of the dispossessed. A major interpreter of post modern cityscapes - primarily L.A. - is Mike Davis(1990).

Main Points:

In LA the rich have isolated and secured themselves behind walls with private security forces and state of the art surveillance. There is a corporate citadel segregated from the poor neighbourhoods and architecture reflects this.

A library in LA has been designed to look like a foreign legion fort!

Streets in poorer areas are often barricaded and sealed off by the police in their war on drugs.

A shopping mall in another district has been surrounded by staked metal fences with a LAPD substation in a surveillance tower.

The defence of luxury lifestyles has become a repression of space and movement for the rest, with the constant threat of " armed response"

The city is becoming militarised and this has been perceptively reflected in pop culture through films such as ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, RUNNING MAN - where inner cities are areas of incarceration - BLADE RUNNER - with high-tech police death squads - DIE HARD - with battles fought in "sentient" buildings controlled by computer technology.

Urban reform and social integration begin to look like an impossibility.

What we now have is a division between the fortified areas of the wealthy and powerful, and the places of terror of the criminalised poor.

Increasingly, the wealthy carry on their lives - residential, workplaces, consumption areas, and travel environments separate from the rest who crowd together.

The threat of crime, in this post modern world, has become more powerful than the facts of crime. Most street violence, etc. is self contained within ethnic and class boundaries but the middle class - who have little or no first hand experience of inner city conditions - magnify the threat through imagination and the media.

Modern "public spaces" - shopping centres, office centres, cultural areas - are not designed for the underclasses and they understand this "hidden message".

Redevelopment has encouraged spatial apartheid. The financial core of LA is separated by a moat - the Harbor Freeway - and the fences of Bunker Hill from the poor immigrant areas that surround it.

The shopping precincts above Hill Street are for the rich and a few middle-class while the poor and the immigrants get their shopping and entertainment elsewhere.

 In contrast, old photos of the downtown areas show mixed ethnic, ages and classes roaming the streets together.

A new plan for downtown redevelopment is designed in such a way that pedestrainisation will be difficult therefore will "kill the crowd" and favour the rich.