Dead Cities: A Natural History
Just read Mike Davis, Dead Cities: A Natural History article – absolutely brilliant & inspiring in so many ways. Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.
I worked for a community organisation called Urban Studies Centre in London (a long time ago now). There were around 50 of these scattered around the country at the time, wish they were still going (maybe they are still some surviving?).
A couple of snippets from Mike’s opening paragraph.
… the larger share of energy under the control of the human race has been devoted to the construction and maintenance of its urban habitats.
Geologists calculate that the fossil enegy currently expended in shaping the earth’s surface to the needs of an exploding human population of city-dwellers is geomorphically equivalent – at least in the short run – to the work of the planet’s primary tectonic engines: sea-floor spreading and mountain eriosion. (“We have now become the aruably the prmier geomorphic agent sculpting the landscspe,” write one expert on the history of human earth-moving activity.)
Interested in the profession of ‘ruderal ecology’ that he mentions in the article. Also the work of the photographer Camilo Vergara, who “doggedly returned to document the same sites month after month, year after year”. These studies form a unique arive for helping to understand dereliction as landscape process. He chronicled the developments and destruction of America’s inner cities. His work serves as a social document of an evolving society, he believes that the changing nature of these buildings reveals much about our social history.
You can see a selection of his work here: forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=149448 and here invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu
“I realized that the buildings had the imprint not just of the people who live in the neighborhood, but also of time . . . . I somehow argue that they can be compared to national parks, to New England villages, to the Missions in California in that they define what this country’s all about.” Camilo Vergara.
