The Guardian reflects on 20 years since the Bonfire of the Vanities was written. Another book I haven't read: added to the blog list of unread, though.

This story marks 20 years of change in New York city:

Wolfe chose New York because it said something about America. Now many are wondering if the safer, cleaner, richer city has not also lost its role as the heartbeat of American culture. Wolfe thinks so: his latest book tackling the modern American zeitgeist is set in Miami. 'New York, while it is flourishing, has become a less interesting place. It is not where America is changing any more,' said Brian Abel Regan, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion.

That's fascinating and scary. Might it be that people like me look for 'interest?' Do we try and find whole landscapes and communities where our fantasies of class and capitalist warfare can be played out - and if we can't find it, we look elsewhere for our muse? Successful regeneration: who cares about that? It's not interesting.

But the article continues:

The crime, poverty and racial problems that marked the Eighties are clearly not only a thing of the past. Instead they have merely been pushed out of the city's core. In the outer boroughs they still persist, in the huge projects that dot Brooklyn and the Bronx and rarely get much attention from the mainstream media.

There's police brutality and racism out there in the sticks - but gentrification is the overall theme: Harlem itself - a cliche of white fear - now white / safe as anywhere else. (Those two words go together, of course: where do you read black / safe? It's racist as hell.)

So are problems just displaced? We don't know: no-one's trying to measure it. In Sheffield, no-one's keeping track of people kicked out of old council properties and shipped to Doncaster, to make room for Housing Market Renewal on the hills with good city views.

Harlem: this was the place where 'retail-led regeneration' was pioneered. 'Business in the Community' bought that wholesale and imported into their model for the UK. There's more comparison to be done here, but maybe not just right now...