What was first apparent was that the trailers floated on little orange steel jacks, precariously sitting up on pins. Fat grey bodies on insect feet. They looked like they could have been knocked over by bullies in the night. Whomsoever wished to disturb these foreign elements could have penetrated their thin paneling and blown them apart, or burned them down. An angry mob could have scattered them over the city or put them in shopping carts and carted them away to underpasses and bus shelters. Such was the confidence and audacity of the academy, that it could abandon all shelter and camp out in this empty heart.
A failing, ragged chainlink fence ringed the perimeter of the dirt lot. There were tumbleweeds picking up little bits of indescribable trash and continuing along until they hit the fence where they formed sculpted dunes of tangled, dangerous-looking junk. This was ground zero of the new Green Zone in the bad backyard of Rayner Banham’s city—the fifth ecology, Darwinian drifter, evolved and sampled from the other four and distributed across the late-capitalist grid. This was the future. But other parts of the city had been promised similar futures in the past. Joan Didion would remember that. The school was counting on it. The kids would come. They would come with their student loans and their trust funds, their hair, Puma’s and hope.
