Mike Davis, Città morte, 2004

This book collects a series of studies, completed between 1990 and today, and devoted to the examination of urban policies and environmental disasters, largely attributable to men, in contemporary America. More generally, it focuses on the analysis of the urban model of ever-expanding megacities. For Davis, cities die when the communities that animate them are reduced to passive communities, incapable of any initiative, at the mercy of external forces that they are no longer able to oppose or condition. The analysis is extended to the obsession of metropolitan civilization to ignore, subdue or obliterate nature in a mix of Mephistophelic greed and arrogance.