> in much of the western world, barbarism has been normalized. it is considered obvious that cities have bad areas that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and residents alike. visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the streets after dark, and turn to criminal gangs for protection, which further degrades the security of everybody else. predators control public space, parks are death traps, aggressive menace is celebrated as attitude, property acquisition is for mugs (or muggers), educational aspiration is ridiculed, and non-criminal business activity is despised as a violation of cultural norms. every significant mechanism of socio-cultural pressure, from interpreted heritage and peer influences to political rhetoric and economic incentives, is aligned to the deepening of complacent depravity and ruthless extirpation of every impulse to self-improvement. these are places where civilization has fundamentally collapsed, and a society that includes them has to some substantial extent failed. > the disintegration of urban civilization has profoundly shaped the structure and development of cities. in many cases, the natural pattern, in which intensive urbanization and corresponding real estate values are greatest in the downtown core, has been shattered, or at least deeply deformed. social disintegration of the urban center has driven an exodus of the prosperous to suburban and exurban refuges, producing a grotesque and historically unprecedented pattern of donut-style development, with cities tolerating ruined and rotting interiors, where sane people fear to tread. inner city has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what an undistorted course of urban development would produce. this is the geographical expression of an american social problem that is at once basically unmentionable and visible from outer space.
Spain