R. Park and E. Burgess (1925) suggested that the struggle for scarce urban resources, especially land, led to competition for land and resources, which ultimately led to the spatial differentiation of urban space into zones. They predicted that cities would take the form of five concentric rings with areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated near the city centre and more prosperous areas nearer the periphery. In the post-war period, Park and Burgess’s model fell out of favour as critics suggested that the models were overly simplistic. However, M. Davis (1992) used the concentric rings model to describe Los Angeles as a city with an inner core of ‘urban decay metastasizing in the heart of suburbia’ (Brown, no date, USBC Spatial Rev.).