The sinister, man-made Everest of the Tyrell Corporation, as well as all the souped-up rocket-squad-cars darting around the air space, are obvious progenies - albeit now swaddled in darkness - of the famous skyscraper city of the bourgeoisie in Metropolis. But Lang himself only plagiarized contemporary American futurists; above all, architectural delineator Hugh Ferris, who together with skyscraper designer Raymond Hood and Mexican architect-archeologist Francisco Mujica (visionary of urban pyramids like the Tyrell tower), popularized the coming `Titan City' of hundred-story skyscrapers with suspended bridge highways and rooftop airports. Ferris and company, in their turn, reworked already existing fantasies - common in Sunday supplements since 1900 - of what Manhattan might look like at the end of the century.

Blade Runner, in other words, remains yet another edition of this core modernist vision - alternately utopia or dystopia, ville radieuse or Gotham City - of the future metropolis as Monster Manhattan. It is a fantasy that might best be called `Wellsian' since as early as 1906, in his The Future in America, H.G. Wells was already trying to envision the late twentieth century by enlarging the present (represented by New York) to create a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything swollen up to vast proportions and massive beyond measure.
 

Ridley Scott's particular `gigantesque caricature' may capture ethno-centric anxieties about poly-glottism run amock but it fails to imaginatively engage the real Los Angeles landscape - especially the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, dingbats and ranch-style homes - as it socially and physically erodes into the 21st century.

In my book on Los Angeles (City of Quartz, 1990) I enumerate various tendencies toward the militarization of this landscape. Events since the uprising of Spring 1992 - including a deepening recession, corporate flight, savage budget cuts, a soaring homicide rate (despite the black gang truce), and a huge spree of gun-buying in the suburbs - only confirm that social polarization and spatial apartheid are accelerating. As the Endless Summer comes to an end, it seems quite possible that Los Angeles 2019 could well stand in a dystopian relationship to any ideal of the democratic city.
 

But what kind of cityscape, if not Blade Runner, would this malign evolution of inequality produce? Instead of seeing the future merely as a grotesque, Wellsian magnification of technology and architecture, I have tried to carefully extrapolate existing spatial tendencies in order to glimpse their emergent pattern. William Gibson, in Neuromancer and other novels, has provided stunning examples of how realist, `extrapolative' science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an anticipatory opposition politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the next horizon.

In what follows, I offer a `Gibsonian' map to a future Los Angeles that is already half-born. Paradoxically, the literal map itself, although inspired by a vision of Marxism-for-cyberpunks, looks like nothing so much as that venerable combination of half-moon and dart board that Ernest W. Burgess of the University of Chicago long ago made the most famous diagram in social science.
 

For those unfamiliar with the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology and their canonical study of the North American city, let me just say that Burgess' dart board represents the five concentric zones into which the struggle for the survival of the fittest (as imagined by Social Darwinists) supposedly sorts urban social classes and housing types. It portrays a `human ecology' organized by biological forces of invasion, competition, succession and symbiosis. My remapping of the urban structure takes Burgess back to the future. It preserves such `ecological' determinants as income, land value, class and race, but adds a decisive new factor: fear.