{"id":264,"date":"2006-05-26T08:06:18","date_gmt":"2006-05-26T08:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=264"},"modified":"2006-05-26T08:06:18","modified_gmt":"2006-05-26T08:06:18","slug":"mike-davis-on-william-gibson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"Mike Davis on William Gibson"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about and studying regions<\/b> 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<\/b><\/a>, Magical Urbanism<\/b><\/a>, City of Quartz<\/b><\/a>, Planet of Slums<\/b><\/a>, others…] is the clearest link between those worlds that I have ever seen:<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 rogue micro-sovereignties. That\u2019s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums \u2013 the slums on the edges of cities \u2013 lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I think there are fairly smart Pentagon thinkers who don\u2019t 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\u2019s novel Virtual Light<\/b>. Gibson proposes that, in a world where giant multinational capital is supreme, there are places that simply aren\u2019t valuable to the world economy anymore \u2013 they don\u2019t reproduce capital \u2013 and so those spaces are shunted aside. A completely globalized system, in Gibson’s view, would leak space \u2013 it would have internal redundancies \u2013 and one of those spaces, in Virtual Light<\/b>, is the Bay Bridge.
(from William Gibson’s blog<\/a>, but see BLDGBLOG<\/a> for the whole [and totally EXcellent] interview)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}