Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
Mike Davis
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1595583920
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as "The World" is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland.
Davis and Monk have assembled an extraordinary group of urbanists, architects, historians, and visionary thinkers to reflect upon the trajectory of a civilization whose deepest ethos seems to be to consume all the resources of the earth within a single lifetime.
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Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks”; 26 or see marshaled against an open-borders argument the question “Should we really be willing to see waves of diseased immigrants come in?”; 27 or read the warnings of “illegals crossing the Tijuana border,” and the lament for a Los Angeles with “crowds of immigrants, most of them probably illegal, roaming the streets in search of one knows not what,”28 the despicable racial anxieties are blatant. For some libertarians, “liberty” is more negotiable.
54 Hassan Fattah, “In Dubai, an Outcry from Asians for Workplace Rights,” New York Times, 26 March 2006. 55 Julia Wheeler, “Workers’ Safety Queried in Dubai,” BBC News, 27 September 2004. 56 Fattah, “In Dubai”; Dan McDougall, “Tourists Become Targets as Dubai’s Workers Take Revolt to the Beaches,” Observer, 9 April 2006; and “Rioting in Dubai Labour Camp,” Arab News, 4 July 2006. 57 Quoted in Lyne, “Disney Does the Desert?” Chapter 4: Capital of Chaos 1 United Nations Security.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), identified the short-term contract as characteristic of the postmodern condition, “[supplanting] permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs.” I would add in religion too. 51 See the epigram to Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London, 2005), 6.
For the world market. As one developer told the Financial Times, “If there was no Burj Dubai, no Palm, no World, would anyone be speaking of Dubai today? You shouldn’t look at projects as crazy stand-alones. It’s part of building the brand.”11 And its owners love it when architects and urbanists, like George Katodrytis, anoint it as the cutting edge:Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems.... If Rome was the “Eternal City” and New.
Financing of industry), could not compete and were increasingly starved of hard currency. The financial system was in crisis. In 1988/89 the bankers finally persuaded the government to eliminate the investment companies. It passed a law that suspended their operations for up to a year, then closed down those it found insolvent (or in many cases made insolvent) and forced the remainder to reorganize as joint-stock companies and deposit their liquid assets in the banks. The measure protected the.