(NEW EDITION) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

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Born in 1946, he has working-class origins and subsidized his studies by working as a meat-cutter and truck driver.

This is a story of the ‘contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society’ (vi), but written in very unexpected ways. His next major book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), met a similar mixture of acclaim and criticism. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. An urban water crisis looms as the Hoover Dam’s levels sink during an unprecedented drought, and wildfires routinely threaten housing on the margins of an ever-expanding metropolitan area. Though he was an almost exact contemporary of mine as an American historian, I never met Mike Davis, and I was not an avid early reader of City of Quartz.Davis argues that LA architects are creating buildings and public spaces that are intentionally meant to drive the poor and oppressed out of the city.

Sydney, for example, provides close parallels, with its market-driven treatment of housing, in which developers and political forces join to plan new urban projects. Amid a sea of intentionally muddling discourse about what is or is not possible — and that seems meant to inure the masses into accepting mass death — Davis's work refuses to take the bait, exposing the scandal that is racial capitalism, one story at a time. It is] a working theory of global cities writ large, with as much to teach us about multiculturalism as it does racial apartheid in Los Angeles. When documentary filmmaker Laura Gabbert made her loving treatment of Gold and his version of Los Angeles, the 2015 City of Gold (my favorite documentary film of all time) she featured footage of the wonderfully bearded Banham, lecturing to a hall full of students about how "L. To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

Environmentalism is a congenial discourse to the extent that it is congruent with a vision of eternally rising property values in secure bastions of white privilege. In my opinion, though, this is a fascinating work and should be read carefully, and then loved or hated as the case may be. He presents both the good and the bad about that city's evolution from agrarian eden to industrial polluter and finally commuter suburb in a calm, rational light. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West - a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. The enormity of the subject is reflected in this protean book, one of such distinct (almost disparate) chapters, each almost at odds with each other in an assemblage as pasted-on as the utilities must be in the emerging communities which are tacked on to the greater metropolitan area.

City of Quartz is in the California noir tradition of Chinatown, which centres on a Los Angeles water and land conspiracy. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. These included old and new investors, rival groups of local and state politicians, regional boosters, defenders of upper-middle-class neighbourhoods. It explores the legacy of the Boosters, East Coast WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), who emigrated to the town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and promoted Los Angeles as a Mediterraneanized paradise for “fortune and health-seekers” (25).Davis's dissection of Los Angeles' homeowners' associations demonstrates, however, that there is nothing organic or defensible about the region's geography. Mike Davis' collection of essays eschews the day-to-day history, choosing instead to focus on several underlying factors to the ur Angeleno character: Architecture-as-fortress, crime-as-byproduct-of-disenfranchisement; the Catholic church as institution of greed, power, and racism; the boom/bust of manufacturing; etc. A reliably lefty history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz was a fascinating read for a recent transplant from the east coast. Where Davis had written of a "few white-collars ventur[ing] into the Grand Central Market," I saw a gentrifying flood, of which I was a little droplet myself. Seen in the context of the suburban sociology of Southern California, it is merely the latest incarnation of a middle-class political subjectivity that fitfully constitutes and reconstitutes itself every few years around the defense of household equity and residential privilege.