Just the other morning, in rush hour traffic near USC, another bicyclist was hit and killed.  Witnesses say the man was making some kind of turn—an awkward one he should not by law perform—which put him smack dab in the way of an approaching vehicle.  But that’s not what killed him.  Rather, an argument broke out; it escalated; the motorist exited the vehicle and slammed the bicyclist to the ground.  Then, he ran him over, dragging him a few blocks…and sped away, anonymous.  The only details that identify him are witness accounts of his car—a white SUV with minor damage on the driver side mirror:  in other words, an everyman car of Los Angeles.

All this happened near Exposition Park at USC:  a park that boasts a beautiful garden and a series of museums and a sports arena.  Exposition Park is in the middle of a slum—an area that used to be called South Central but which recently was renamed “South LA” to soften its association with the Rodney King Riots of 1993—but to local residents any sort of renaming still cannot mask the power of rap lyrics that reinforce its stature as an area of gang activity.  The USC area is a zone of extreme acts of random violence, where it is increasingly the norm that international students, sitting in their car, are gunned down for no apparent reason except that they are sitting ducks.

For me, though, this kind of violence is about the expansion of the city—of people rubbing up against each other like the steel wool fur of a black cat in dry weather, emitting sparks, shocks.  It is fitting that Exposition Park is the marker of this violence, because it is one of the areas of the city’s wildest, most ambitious expansions.  Exposition Park started off as 160 acres of agricultural fair ground and subsequently hosted two Olympics and two Superbowls.  It is the showground of what the city wants to be and, so in one phase, it was a showcase for the City Beautiful Movement—that grand idea that we can impose a harmonious neoclassical beauty to cities—one made of Greek temples and bas reliefs of hunky young Aryans exercising their modelesque bodies.

Most recently, Exposition Park was the final depository of the decommissioned Space Shuttle Endeavour.  And this was an amazing honor and even more amazing spectacle, especially if you were able to look up at the sky on September 12, 2012 to witness the spacecraft carried through the heavens on the back of a 747.  Of course, the telling fact is that, in order to move the Space Shuttle through the streets, the city had to cut down hundreds of old trees to make room for its wings.  And they planned to do so, not in any of the nicer parts of Los Angeles but South Central.  This, despite the protests of residents who had little say in the matter.

In this light, both the gun violence against international students and the bike violence share a silver strand of connection that brings the public and private together in the labyrinth of revitalization policy:  The gun violence against students—almost all Chinese international students—is a reaction to the aggressive expansion of a mega-rich, privately-funded university outside of its traditional boundaries and into the neighborhood; it is no accident that these execution style killings spiked during a time when the entire perimeter of the campus is surrounded by construction–construction designed to enclose the university population, consolidating living space and retail services so that the gang-ishness of South Central cannot penetrate the bubble of this university in “South LA.”

Already, authorities have erected barriers at the gates of USC–you need to show i.d. to enter the ivory tower–and the locals can no longer traipse around the campus and use it as a shortcut to get from place to place.  It is no accident that the perpetrators have chosen the Chinese:  the newest group of students who arrive with ostentatious signs of wealth—students who are the children of the elite of the elite, who drive late model exotic cars that are sleek as Italian leather purses and which they treat as casually as a white Honda SUV.

But let us press this silver thread of connection further still–a connection between the violence late at night in a car and the violence that broke out in broad daylight on the roads.  Bike lanes, we may recall, are a new phenomenon in the city:  an attempt to make a car centered city into one that consumes less energy, allowing alternative forms of transportation.  “A road diet” is what they call it now, because the bicycle lanes compete in a zero-sum game, taking from the cars that extra bit, and annexing it as their own.

This means that drivers in Los Angeles hate bicyclists and vice versa.  And you could witness this in the comment forums immediately after the death of the bicyclist:  comments that were filled with rage and victim-blaming, comments incapable of thinking of the bicyclist as a human being who didn’t deserve to get, quite literally, dragged through the streets.  Bike lanes are often the sign of invaders—of hipsters, of entitled-assholes-with-no-regard-who-change-the-rules.

The expansion of the bike lanes goes hand-in-hand with the phenomenon of gentrification:  that process—often quite violent—of the city reinventing its boundaries, its neighborhoods, its constituencies.  The bike lanes are supposed to act in concert with the expanding metro system—the light rails and buses and subways that soon will connect the eastern portions with that holy grail, the beach that sits like a beacon in the West.  And this is probably why the bicyclist was where he was:  near Exposition park where the metro system’s blue line dumps out into a slum that is being carved up into a city.