![]() The boulevards, for all their exposure of the vagaries of urban life, were built first for military control. Is this the modern square, the interstitial boulevards of Haussmann Paris, or the achievement of profit over people? Maybe both. Seemingly places that would allow for the experience of spectacle for all involved, but then one looks at the doors of the Sony Center, the homeless proof benches of LA parks, and especially the woeful public transport of LA. These places seem to be modern appropriations of the boulevard. One could compare the concrete plazas of Downtown LA and the Sony Center dominated Postdamer Platz and see little difference.īoth stolid markers of their city’s presence. ![]() ![]() A city that has been thoroughly converted into a factory that dumps money taken from exterior neighborhoods, and uses them to build grand monuments downtown. Descending over the San Gabriel mountains into LAX, Los Angeles, the gray rolling neighborhoods unfurling into the distant pillars of downtown leaping out of its famous smog, one can easily see the fortress narrative that Mike Davis argues for in City of Quartz. ![]()
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