9 But malice aforethought
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny
of your next-door neighbour.
(Bagehot, cited in Lane 200 4 : 15)Perhaps he doesn’t wait even for the end of the conversation, but gets up at the
point where the matter has become clear to him, flies through the town with his
usual haste, and, before I have hung up the receiver, is already at his goal working
against me.
(Kafka 1988: 4 25)He who says neighbours says enemies.
(France 2002 [1909]: 9)Introduction
The idea of the city as doomed is one of the common tropes of urban represen-
tation, as Mike Davis (2002) has illustrated at length in one of his latest books.^1
For Davis, the Western city is rapidly coming unglued. It is a runaway train fuelled
by equal parts hubris and fear. It is Roadrunner suspended over the abyss. In tapping
in to this anxious tradition of writing on cities, Davis is hardly alone. For example
he cites approvingly that rather idiosyncratic Marxist Ernst Bloch, in equally
apocalyptic mode, arguing much earlier that, in contrast to the adaptive and
improvisatory pre-capitalist city, the capitalist city is in a continual state of radical
insecurity and dread. Transfixed by the idea of a totally safe and calculable environ-
ment, the capitalist city is fixed and unbending in the face of unexpected events:
‘it has rooted itself in midair’. And so it is heading for a fall; ‘where technology has
achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature... the coefficient of known
and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately’ (Bloch
1998 [1929]: 30 7 , 309).
Well maybe. I thought that I would begin this chapter by arguing against
these increasingly common nightmare scenarios which seem to be so prevalent that
they are now producing all kinds of echoes – such as the growing historical literature
on metropolitan catastrophes.^2 I believe that on many dimensions the contemporary
Western city is more robust than it has ever been and I will want to explain why
(cf. Massard et al. 2002). But I am also sure that the inhabitants of Western cities