City of Quartz, Davis, M Flashcards
What is the architectural glacis that separates downtown corporate buildings from the surrounding poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles?
It is a monumental structure that segregates the buildings from the surrounding neighborhoods.
Who designed a library in Hollywood that resembles a foreign-legion fort?
Frank Gehry, a famous architect.
Why does the LAPD barricade streets and seal off poor neighborhoods in the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley?
As part of their “war on drugs”.
How did developer Alexander Haagen design his shopping mall in Watts?
He designed a panopticon shopping mall surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower.
What is the “giant eye” that an ex-chief of police is advocating for, and what is “Garden Plot”?
The “giant eye” is a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite, and “Garden Plot” is a 1960s plan for a law-and-order armageddon that some law enforcement officials are still implementing.
What is the “ubiquitous ‘armed response’” in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It is a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement that undergirds the defense of luxury lifestyles.
What has become a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The obsession with physical security systems and the architectural policing of social boundaries.
What has contemporary urban theory been silent about in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The militarization of city life, despite its grimly visible effects at the street level.
What dire predictions made in 1969 have been tragically fulfilled in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The predictions of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that we live in “fortress cities” brutally divided between fortified cells of affluent society and places of terror where the police battle the criminalized poor.
What paradigm of social control has long been superseded in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The old liberal paradigm that attempted to balance repression with reform.
Zero-sum game
Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other.
How is the rhetoric of social warfare different from the old liberal paradigm of social control in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes as a zero-sum game, rather than attempting to balance repression with reform.
What is the consequence of the market provision of “security” in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It generates its own paranoid demand and becomes a positional good defined by income access to private “protective services” and membership in hardened residential enclaves or restricted suburbs.
What does “security” mean as a prestige symbol in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation from “unsavory” groups and individuals, even crowds in general, in residential, work, consumption, and travel environments.
What did William Whyte observe about social intercourse in New York in post-liberal Los Angeles?
He observed that “fear proves itself” and that the social perception of threat becomes a function of the security mobilization itself, not crime rates.
What do surveys show about suburbanites in Milwaukee and inner-city Washingtonians’ concerns about violent crime in post-liberal Los Angeles?
They show that Milwaukee suburbanites are just as worried about violent crime as inner-city Washingtonians, despite a twenty-fold difference in relative levels of mayhem.
What is the function of the media in post-liberal Los Angeles, according to the excerpt?
The media’s function is to bury and obscure the daily economic and political violence of the ruling class while magnifying the perceived threat of violence from poor and marginalized communities.
What do sensationalized accounts of killer youth gangs high on crack and racist evocations of marauding Willie Hortons do in post-liberal Los Angeles?
They foment moral panics that reinforce and justify urban apartheid, and throw up specters of criminal underclasses and psychotic stalkers.
What is the effect of the neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers.
What are the invisible signs warning off the underclass “Other” in today’s upscale, pseudo-public spaces in post-liberal Los Angeles?
They are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass “Other,” such as sumptuary malls, office centers, culture acropolises, and so on.
What do pariah groups such as poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females immediately read in the built environment of post-liberal Los Angeles?
They immediately read the meaning of how the built environment contributes to segregation, even though architectural critics are usually oblivious to this fact.
What is the consequence of the crusade to secure the city in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The destruction of accessible public space.
What does the opprobrium attached to the term “street person” indicate in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It is a harrowing index of the devaluation of public spaces.
What has urban redevelopment done to once vital pedestrian streets and public parks in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It has converted them into traffic sewers and temporary receptacles for the homeless and wretched, in order to reduce contact with untouchables.
What is happening to the American city in post-liberal Los Angeles, according to many critics?
It is being systematically turned inside out, with street frontage denuded, public activity sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation internalized in corridors under the gaze of private police.
How is the privatization of the architectural public realm shadowed by parallel restructurings of electronic space in post-liberal Los Angeles?
They are shadowed by heavily policed, pay-access “information orders,” elite databases, and subscription cable services that appropriate parts of the invisible agora.
What has declined in post-liberal Los Angeles along with urban liberalism?
The Olmstedian vision of public space has also declined.
What is The Olmstedian vision of public space
The Olmstedian vision of public space refers to the philosophy and design principles of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who is best known for designing New York City’s Central Park.
The vision emphasizes the importance of accessible and well-designed public spaces as essential components of a healthy and vibrant urban environment.
Olmsted believed that public spaces should be open to all members of society, regardless of class or status, and that they should provide a respite from the stresses of city life.
The Olmstedian vision also emphasized the importance of natural beauty and the use of green spaces to promote physical and mental health.
Who was Frederick Law Olmsted in post-liberal Los Angeles?
He was North America’s Haussmann and the Father of Central Park, and he conceived public landscapes and parks as social safety-valves, mixing classes and ethnicities in common (bourgeois) recreations and enjoyments.
What animated the construction of the canonical urban spaces of the La Guardia-Roosevelt era, according to Manfredo Tafuri in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The same principle that animated the construction of public spaces under Olmsted’s vision - as the emollient of class struggle, if not the bedrock of the American polis.
What has happened to the reformist vision of public space in contemporary urban America, according to the excerpt in post-liberal Los Angeles?
It is now obsolete, as public space no longer functions as a means of class mixing. Contemporary urban America is more like Victorian England than the New York of Walt Whitman or La Guardia.
What has happened to public amenities in post-liberal Los Angeles?
They are radically shrinking, parks are becoming derelict and beaches more segregated, libraries and playgrounds are closing, youth congregations of ordinary kinds are banned, and the streets are becoming more desolate and dangerous.
How are the Oz-like archipelago of Westside pleasure domes in post-liberal Los Angeles reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariat?
They are dependent upon their social imprisonment in increasingly repressive ghettoes and barrios.
What has municipal policy in post-liberal Los Angeles taken its lead from?
The security offensive and the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation.
What has supported the shift of fiscal resources to corporate-defined redevelopment priorities in post-liberal Los Angeles?
De facto disinvestment in traditional public space and recreation.
What has the pliant city government in post-liberal Los Angeles collaborated in?
The massive privatization of public space and the subsidization of new, racist enclaves (benignly described as “urban villages”).
What is neglected in current discussions of the postmodern scene in Los Angeles?
The overbearing aspects of counter-urbanization and counter-insurgency, including the brutalization of inner-city neighborhoods and the increasing South Africanization of its spatial relations.
What is laid over the brutalization of inner-city neighborhoods in post-liberal Los Angeles?
A triumphal gloss, including terms like “urban renaissance” and “city of the future,” that obscures the reality of the city’s spatial relations.
What is the thesis of the observations in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The existence of a new class war (sometimes a continuation of the race war of the 1960s) at the level of the built environment.
What is the thesis of the observations in post-liberal Los Angeles?
The existence of a new class war (sometimes a continuation of the race war of the 1960s) at the level of the built environment.
Are the observations in post-liberal Los Angeles a comprehensive account of the city’s economic and political dynamics?
No, they are not a comprehensive account, as that would require a thorough analysis of economic and political dynamics.
What does Los Angeles offer in its usual prefigurative mode, according to the excerpt in post-liberal Los Angeles?
An especially disquieting catalogue of the emergent liaisons between architecture and the American police state.
Who was the first militarist of space in Los Angeles?
General Otis of the Times.
What was the name of General Otis’s home in Los Angeles?
The Bivouac.
