114: Margaret Kohn's Brave New Neighborhoods

Margaret Kohn's Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space argues that "public life is undermined by the growing phenomenon of private government" via the privatization of physical public spaces.  As central business districts, parks, and other public gathering places are increasingly replaced with privately-owned shopping malls, gated communities, and Business Improvement Districts, true free speech and face-to-face political debate are foreclosed by bans on political speech or certain viewpoints (or even certain groups of people) on private property.  As opposed to online forums, public space allows for debate in real time, among real, embodied people; it fosters the kind of informed opinions needed to keep a democracy running, so the loss of public space also has profound implications for the functioning of American politics.

Kohn bases her arguments in the historical uses of public space, legal cases regard the public/private status of malls, gated communities, and other privatized public spaces, and theories connecting physical spaces with political process.  She argues that

111: Mike Davis' City of Quartz

Mike Davis' City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles is about "the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles Society," where LA is both a specific place (that David clearly loves and is frustrated by) and a global city that "has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism."  Davis researched this book in the 1980s, when Reaganomics, the crack wars, increased socioeconomic disparity, law-and-order policing, and other anti-urban developments were wreaking havoc on LA; by putting LA in a global economic context, he is able to show that many of these problems are related to globalization, not poor domestic policy, and that fighting capitalism will have the biggest impact on urban welfare.

In an allusion to LA's film industry, Davis calls his method "noir," because 1940s film noir "insinuated contempt for a depraved business culture while it simultaneously searched for a critical mode of writing or filmmaking within it."  Accordingly, the book is both a critique of LA and an investigation of how to make it better.  Davis details the migration of LA's power elites from a post-WWI Downtown/Westside divide to suburbia to international banks, land monopolies, and global real estate holdings; the development of SoCal homeowners associations as racist, classist privatization; "fortress LA" and the privatization and militarization of urban life as a spatialized class war; the history of cocaine in LA as evidence of increasing wealth disparity; the dirty politics of LA's Catholic archdiocese, which is a huge employer and landholder in LA that prefers to be a space of law-and-order rather than one of resistance; and the plight of the suburbanized working class in an era of deindustrialization and decay.  

Throughout, Davis' muckraking journalism digs through LA's many layers of complexity in expose after expose.  As against other urban studies folks who write about globalization (like Saskia Sassen, for instance), Davis brings LA alive, reminding us of the power of its residents even as he implicates the city's elites in global networks of power.

84: Lizabeth Cohen's Town Center to Shopping Center

In "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," Lizabeth Cohen shows that the shift in consumer spaces from downtown shopping districts to suburban shopping centers and malls threatens the public sphere on which democracy depends.

The new landscapes of postwar mass consumption had three major effects on American community life:

• by commercializing public space, they brought market segmentation, including divisions by race and class, to community life
• by privatizing public space, they privileged the rights of property owners over citizens' rights to free speech
• by feminizing public space, they gave women more of a claim to the suburban landscape, but they circumscribed their power by constructing them as consumers only

If mass consumption was supposed to bring standardization in merchandise and consumption patterns, the way it structured (and continues to structure) space actually did the opposite.  Further, the dependence on private spaces for public activity and the increasing privatization of public space threatens democracy: if people no longer have a space to speak our minds or critique larger systems of power, how are we a democracy at all?