More Words, Deeper Hole

There was some facile futurism inspired by the urban crises and white flight of the 1960s/70s that imagined city centers just turning into abandoned no-man's lands, or walled prisons, or some such thing--"Escape from New York", etc. The world decides that these regions are so intrinsically screwed that there's nothing they can gain from paying attention and nothing they can do.

Actually, I guess that Deep Space Nine story about the "Bell Riots" was the same sort of thing only vaguely inspired by 1990s South Central Los Angeles and the Rodney King riots; of course, the central notion there was that the abandonment was wrong and had to end.