I have an essay in the Guardian today in honour of the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I'm especially happy about because at the moment I'm living twenty minutes from Jane Jacobs Walk in the West Village. Here's an interesting remark by David Harvey that I didn't have room for in the piece:

"The superimposition of different worlds in many a postmodern novel, worlds between which an uncommunicative “otherness” prevails in a space of coexistence, bears an uncanny relationship to the increasing ghettoization, disempowerment, and isolation of poverty and minority populations in the inner cities of both Britain and the United States. It is not hard to read a post-modern novel as a metaphorical transect across the fragmenting social landscape, the sub-cultures and local modes of communication, in London, Chicago, New York or Los Angeles."

Hysterical realism predicted the London riots!