I’ve been thinking about and studying regions for 40-some years, man and boy, and I’ve done serious scifi/cyberpunk time too, but this bit from Mike Davis [Late Victorian Holocausts, Magical Urbanism, City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, others…] is the clearest link between those worlds that I have ever seen:
The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of off the radar screen. They therefore become the equivalent of rain forest, or jungle: difficult to penetrate, impossible to control.
I think there are fairly smart Pentagon thinkers who don’t see this so much as a question of regions, or categories of nation-states, so much as holes, or enclaves within the system. One of the best things I ever read about this was actually William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light. Gibson proposes that, in a world where giant multinational capital is supreme, there are places that simply aren’t valuable to the world economy anymore – they don’t reproduce capital – and so those spaces are shunted aside. A completely globalized system, in Gibson’s view, would leak space – it would have internal redundancies – and one of those spaces, in Virtual Light, is the Bay Bridge.
(from William Gibson’s blog, but see BLDGBLOG for the whole [and totally EXcellent] interview)
Castells talks about the ‘black holes of globalization’, places that are just irrelevant to the political economy of the the network of ‘global cities’ (Chiapas is such a black hole). Also, recall the concept of Scott in ‘Seeing like a State’ of ‘illegibility’. States like things to be ‘legible’, grid pattern streets with sequential housenumbers, for example. Slums are not legible, nor are traditional villages with winding streets and alleys. I think a lot of the ‘problem’ with the internet is, depite all the NSA computer power, keyword searching and visualization techniques, internet content is largely illegible from the heights of power.