Mike Davis: The fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space

Mike Davis has in his book Planet of Slums (2006) a passage that summerises the problematics I want to work with. He writes:

‘It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation. Some Brazilian writers have recently talked about “the return to the medieval city,” but the implications of the middle-class secession [Dutch: afscheiding, JvB] from public space – as well as from any vestige [Dutch: spoor, JvB] of a shared civic life with the poor – are more radical. Rodgers, following Anthony Giddes, conceptualizes the core process as a “disembedding” of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence.’[1]

Davis refers here to an article by Dennis Rodgers called “Disembedding” the City: Crime, Insecurity and Spatial Organization in Managua. This article, about Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua can be used as a comparable situation with São Paulo.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006, p119.