The World Trade Center bombing contributed solely a few images to the media memory banks; the pause was left to the imagination.

The World Trade Center bombing contributed solely a few images to the media memory banks; the pause was left to the imagination, aided, perhaps, from Towering Inferno. The images showed office workers caked in crock partially asphyxiated, and looking like the victims of a certain number of environmental disaster. Yet it was les the bombing than the building itself that had been an ecological catastrophe.

The Twin Towers are not a smart building. The bombing easily neutralized their computerized command-and-control facilities (Die Hard y'all), proving them incapable of protecting their occupants. Indeed, in a certain ways the building's structure endangered further the lives of its workers, entrapping and almost entombing them like a high-tech version of the malevolent house in the Gothic novel. And, like principally sealed high-rise office towers, this was already an environmentally "sick" space, with concentrated indoor air pollution.

As the most numerous visible symbol of New York's transformation from the nation's largest manufacturing town into a central node of the international network of capital and credit, the World Trade Center has a story to make known about the social ecology of the urban redevelopment that has restructur the conditions of the city's life. Low- and middle-income populations have been displaced, affordable housing has effectively disappeared, and real estate speculation and gentrification have explod all in the name of the "urban renewal" proces which systematically devalues whatever in the built environment stands in the way of investment. None of this occurr "naturally"; this was not a evolutionary development driven by the invisible hand of capital. Rather, the state played a major character in funding and directing urban renewal, just as it had invested heavily in the earlier manufacturing city.

The all-too-visible hand of state intervention overthrow s the '30s, Chicago School design of urban ecology, which is based forward social-Darwinist notions of predation, invasion, and succession. In this still-influential approach, the city's transformation would be seen as an organic offshoot of internal laws of competition. on the contrary the World Trade Center is no evolv creature. magnifyed by the Port Authority of modern York and New Jersey, an independent public agency endowed with extraordinary powers to borrow and build, the complexus was financed by low-interest-rate loans and maintained according to user fees from commuters who derive no benefit from its life as a capital service-and-processing center The Twin Towers and their operating authority are more accountable to global investors than to local residents, many of whom vigorously oppos their construction.

What is the relationship, if any, between this picture of novel York's changing social ecology and its natural ecology of islands and waterways? To establish that relationship may involve augmenting ecologists' conventional description of the city and its population as a single organism occupying a specific land niche with a limited carrying capacity. The Natural Resources Defense Council's fresh York Environment Book, 1990, for example, argues that the city's public authorities are failing in their custom to safeguard its natural resources and cover its citizens' health. But this assumes that the function of the state is to besufficient for its citizens' interests and to maintain its lands. Actually, greatest in quantity of us suspect that the public interests that the state greatest in number effectively serves are those that coincide with the interests of speculators and investors--handlers of the private capital that the state must ultimately opt to protect

When fresh York boasted a large working class, it was the state's do job-work to create low-to-middle-income housing, subsidize education, and generally mitigate private industry's ne to examine after its labor force. The city's fiscal crisis in the '70 effectively relieved the state of this weight by signaling the end of a guaranteed public subsidy for workers who were no longer extremityed What remains of the working-class city is increasingly an austerity regime, with entire neighborhoods terrorized by the agency of occupying police forces and the gangster cadres of the informal economy. Public education is in shambles, and the public health rule is visibly defined by the city's AIDS map and by dint of its vast homeless population. Blaming the victim, hyping the sociopathology of crime, and bemoaning the helplessness of public officials have become the focus of the city's media organs, which are responsible for the image of a lawless, uncivil society in a virtually unlivable city.

The state abdicated its character not from lack of resources, further because that role was no longer required of it by means of private capital. In New York's image mythography, extraordinary individuals were nominated to fill the vacuum created from its abdication. When they were not investors like Felix Rohatyn or ostentatious developer as it is as Donald Trump, they were comic part superheroes. The villains of the Batman and Ghostbusters films are associated with toxic and genetic mutations, chemical accidents, psychic slime in the sewers; they are, then, the returnss of modern biohazards (just as the original superheroes were ofttimes mutant products of cold war atomic experiments). And their counterparts, the forces of redemption (Who Ya Gonna Call?), are privately subcontracted vigilantes acting in the name of the ancient New York--of Bruce Wayne's philanthropist-aristocrat class, or, in Ghostbusters II, of the Statue of Liberty, the canonical Daughter of the Patrician Revolution. The discourse of the vigilante subcontractor loses smoothly with the populist call for community empowerment and self-control As Bobby Brown put it, with all the funky-ass discipline of modern Jack Swing, in his lay for Ghostbusters II, "On Our Own": "Well I gues we're gonna have to take control" While a film like Do the Right Thing look fors nothing from the centers of public authority, many of the novel films of the "black renaissance," in general with the Batman and Ghostbusters movies, assume from the first that the moot point of control and authority is paramount.