Beyond Bladerunner

Continuing with Mike Davis’ “Ecology of Fear” I turn my attention to the future. There is something to be said for the realistic approach. In fact this is exactly what Davis’ calls for in his vision of the future. He takes aim at the “cyber punk” image of the Los Angeles of Bladerunner (no one will concede that this was an attempt at an accurate portrayal but there was an underlying basis for its reality) and uses it to illustrate his point of a real future image.

Davis’ image of the future, he argues, should be constructed through projecting “…exisiting trends along their current downward sloping trajectories…”p362. Sounds encouraging. What he points out are a couple of interesting things which might apply to this study. To begin his extrapolation of our swirl down the toilet of life he notes firstly that “With no hope of further public investment in the remediation if underlying social conditions, we are forced instead to make increasing investments in physical security” p364. So it would seem that we are caught chasing our own tail. Our increased built security measures are responses to problems, not proactive moves for safety and therefore we are always a step behind the problem. Therefore it seems that we need to step sideways instead of running in the same circle, and do something different. Architecture of fear only perpetuates more architecture of fear.

This isn’t helped by a new trend of allowing increased involvement of Police and security consultants in town and architectural planning. Davis’ points this out as its been a common occurrence in Los Angeles since the 80’s and 90’s and its even more prevalent nationwide in the post 9/11 epoch. Handing over too much power to the security “experts’ and taking it away from the architects has created an inequality in the balance of security versus all other aspects of design, the challenge for the architect is now how to hide or disguise the newly required fortification demanded by these experts that screams of paranoia, inhospitality and poor design. Just look around at any government building and you’ll notice this attempt, whether it’s the 2 foot thick concrete planters outside the front, or the 4 story high solid concrete base of the new Freedom Tower proposal.

The question one could ask then is whose hands are these kinds of security choices better left to, the designer, the government or the hands of the people themselves? Davis highlights the increasing vigilantism and the occurrence of bulletproof caged liquor and convenience stores, burglar bars on homes and in general what he refers to as the “Brinks” aesthetic. Depending on your perspective, we’ve become very good at either shutting the world out, or shutting ourselves in.

Lastly, I wanted to call attention to a practice coined “Social Control Districts” as illustrated by Davis. He describes these as the cunning act of combining sanctions of the criminal code with land use planning. The result is four “judicial modes”; Abatement, Enhancement, Containment and Exclusion. You might have heard these being touted by politicians and city officials mostly, the most common, “Our neighborhood is a drug free zone” an example of an “enhancement” mode. Unfortunately what this more often than not accomplishes is pushing the problem to an adjacent neighborhood which promptly does the same thing and so on.

In the end I think this points at two main things. First, that we are treating the problems and not their causes (yes I know, a common refrain) and that architecture of fear only perpetuates more architecture of fear. Secondly, that as architects, much of our power to shape a new alternative to the architecture of fear has been taken out of our hands by “specialists” whose primary concern is far from an overall well designed solution. Perhaps in order to do something different and take back some power of control, architecture as profession needs to be taught some new tricks.