Thug Rule II: Feral Cities

The New York Times Magazine has an article in its annual 'ideas' issue about so-called "Feral Cities".

Quote from the Times:

"The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells."

Building on the ideas posted in my previous "Thug Rule" post, I will note that the breakdown of social order in the face of thugs armed with the real weapons of mass destruction -- cheap guns, ammunition, and explosive -- is one of the most pressing technological issues of our era. It's worth noting that the balance between order and chaos has historically tipped one way or the other based on available technologies and the political will to apply them. Rome, in the fading days of its glory, was ruled by the mob, because no military technology existed at the time which could be usefully applied in an urban context where preservation of property value was important. Millenia later, Louis XIV demolished entire neighborhoods of Paris (I believe Colbert was the architect both of the policy and the new boulevards) to creat long, wide, straight streets converging to plazas, which could be policed in extreme cases with cannon and musket fire. These new lines of sight/fire replaced the easily mobbable warren that had been the Paris streetscape before, and the application of technologies of urban design, scientific policing, and the general rise in prosperity brought on by the industrial era caused thug power to decline dramatically. Now we appear to be on the verge of the post-industrial era, and the emergence of thug rule at both the national level and the urban level will be one of the greatest problems of the 21st century. One answer is totalitarian methods of control. Louis XIV pioneered these as well. As one wanders the Louvre, it's worth remembering that its gigantic (literally palatial) halls were created to house the bureaucracy of governmental control pioneered by the "L'etat, c'est moi" state of the Sun King. Today, with electronic surveillance and database technologies, combined with highly precision weapons of policing/combat, highly centralized government can fight back -- but the middle-class middle ground of civil society is lost, for the social and technological factors which made this middle layer so powerful over the past two centuries are fading away.