The construction of and control over a particular geography, Davis's work shows, is a modality of state power, a site where the true intentions and material effects of a territorially-bounded political project are made legible, often in sharp contrast to that governing body's stated commitments. Mike Davis is one of the finest decoders of space. Disrupting this cruel abstraction of space, Lefebvre insists, requires that leftists "read" and "decode" the built environment to reveal the "real 'subject" of space - that of "state (political) power." 2 The construction of this "abstract space" as Lefebvre calls it, thus provides capitalists with a spatial instrument through which to covertly embed forms of social control and methods of capital extraction all while dodging accountability for the death-dealing political repercussions that such built environments produce. "(Social) space is a (social) product," Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, but this "fact" is "concealed" under global capitalism because space reduces the "real'.to a 'plan.'" 1 The idea that spaces develop from "logical" or apolitical forces - that they are "innocent" and "free of traps or secret places" - shields any reference to the structures of accumulation, political decision-making, and historical power dynamics that go into and explain the intentions behind the construction of the modern urban built environment.
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