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November 22, 2008
Mike Davis has published a couple of interesting books ---City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear --- which created controversy over Davis’s ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage. This work, which represents a coming together of Davis's urban concerns with his wider environmental agenda, can act as a prism through which to evaluate interpretations of the modernist city based on supersized lifestyles-addicted to fossil fuels, shopping sprees, suburban sprawl, and gas guzzling cars. Will Americans give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald's, and lawns?
Davis has an interesting couple of paragraphs in a recent article in Salon on the US economy.
America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While G.M. bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.
As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200-mph prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.
Davis argues for a public-works strategy for national recovery. But what kind of public-works strategy? Should it be transport infrastructure, health and education or green manufacturing? Davis has a history of being critical of the modernist urbanization of Los Angeles
He says:
I'm not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.
He says that saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.
Will this happen in Australia? Or will we go the big infrastructure route and cut back on health and education?
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The Google CEO has called for infrastructure investment, but green or smart (e.g. less wasteful/adaptive power distribution grids).
I've got a few links here