The Toxic Rim
Contents
A global perspective may be useful. Los Angeles in 2019 will be the core of a metro-galaxy of 22-24 million people in Southern and Baja California. Together with Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and Shanghai, it will comprise an new evolutionary form: mega-cities of 20-30 million inhabitants. It is important to emphasize that we are not merely talking about larger specimens of an old, familiar type, but an absolutely original, and unexpected, phyla of social life.
No one knows, in fact, whether physical and biological systems of this magnitude and complexity are actually sustainable. Many experts believe that the Third World mega-cities, at least, will eventually precipitate environmental holocausts and/or implode in urban civil wars. Indeed, the contemporary "New World Order" certainly offers enough grim examples of total societal disintegration -- from Bosnia to Somalia -- to underscore realistic fears of a mega-city apocalypse.
If Tokyo proves an exception, despite inevitable natural disasters, it will only be by dint of extraordinary levels of public investment, private affluence and social discipline (and because Japan is culturally a highly urban rather than suburban society). In the recent past, however, Los Angeles has begun to resemble Sao Paulo and Mexico City more than post-modern Tokyo-Yokohama.
It may be theoretically possible, of course, for a Democratic administration in Washington over the next decade to begin to reverse American urban decay with massive new public works. But it will remain extraordinarily difficult to secure Congressional support for reinvestment in the Bos-Wash and Southern California urban cores as long as the Reagan-era deficit remains the dominant issue in domestic politics. Indeed the principal legacy of the Perot movement -- the most successful electoral insurgency in 75 years -- may be precisely the fiscal Gordian knot it has managed to tie around any resolution of the urban crisis.
If hopes of urban reform, now guardedly raised by the Clinton landslide, are once again dashed, it will only accelerate the dystopic tendencies described in this pamphlet. For in the specific case of Los Angeles, where recession has already wiped out a fifth of the region's manufacturing jobs, there is little private-sector help in sight. Even the most traditionally optimistic business-school econometric models now predict a "Texas-style" regional slump lasting until 1997, while forecasters at the Southern California Association of Governments talk about steady- state unemployment rates of 10-12% for the next twenty years.
As the golden dream withers, so also may faith in non-violent social reform. If last year's riots set a precedent, anomic neighborhood violence may begin to be transmuted into more organized political violence. Both cops and gangmembers already talk with chilling matter- of-factness about the inevitability of some manner of urban guerrilla warfare. And in spite of all the new residential walls and scanscapes -- even the future police eye in the sky -- sprawling Los Angeles is a metropolis uniquely vulnerable to strategic sabotage. As the examples of Belfast, Beirut and, more recently, Palermo and Lima have demonstrated, the car bomb is the weapon of anonymous urban terror par excellence (or, as one counter-insurgency expert once put it, "the poor man's substitute for an airforce"). Car bombs have reduced half of Beirut to debris, wiped out a neighborhood known as "Lima's Beverly Hills," and massacred Italy's most heavily guarded public officials.
If the British Army, uniquely, was finally able to prevent car bombers from entering Belfast, it was only after years of effort and the construction of an immense security cage around the entire city center. A comparable preventive effort in Los Angeles -- e.g. closing the freeways and heavily fortifying all the public utilities, oil refineries and pipelines, and commercial centers -- would not only cost tens of billions but also dissolve the city as a functioning entity.
The Los Angeles freeway system, in effect, guarantees to the future urban terrorist what the tropical rain forest or Andean peak offers to the rural guerrillero: ideal terrain.
lf we continue to allow our central cities to degenerate into criminalized Third Worlds, all the ingenious security technology, present and future, will not safeguard the anxious middle class. The sound of that first car bomb on Rodeo Drive or in front of City Hall will wake us from our mere bad dream and confront us with our real nightmare.
The Toxic Rim
Contents