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

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He was wary of air pollution and what would happen with the ever-increasing number of automobiles clogging the freeway system. It is a brilliant tactical move: throughout the text, Davis impales the futuristic, "sunshine" presentation of the city, revealing instead the true, diabolical underbelly of Los Angeles's sprawling landscape, which operates as a "stand in for capitalism in general.

Born in 1946, he has working-class origins and subsidized his studies by working as a meat-cutter and truck driver. City of Quartz is in the California noir tradition of Chinatown, which centres on a Los Angeles water and land conspiracy. Art then isn't mention for a couple hundred pages until an anecdote about Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann walking near the bay when they noticed the beach covered which is first assumed to be caterpillars but is then recognized as thousands of condoms washing ashore from a water treatment plant.City of Quartz was a great primer in the history of a city that I find fascinating, but know precious little about. Fontana, which was once a largely self-sufficient farming town, had its destiny determined by the market force that was Kaiser’s Steelworks, which flourished in the town in the years of the Depression before polluting and decimating it when it went bankrupt. Mixed with insufficient public transit infrastructure, the affordability crisis has amplified congestion on the city's infamous freeways, leading Los Angeles cars and trucks to produce nearly 20% of the city's harmful emissions.

I also love that the first chapter is the literary chapter – the inventing, debunking, mythologizing of L. In this taut and compulsive exploration, Mike Davis recounts the story of Los Angeles with passion, wit and an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust and, often, the dangerous. 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.

Labour was not a success story within this larger narrative – as revealed in the book’s concluding chapter.

While deadly serious about the subject matter at hand — that of the morally bankrupt elements of Los Angeles's political and cultural power structures and the harms their decisions propagate — his prose is often cheeky and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. He becomes especially exorcised over a South Central mini-mall, which the developer would build only after the city agreed to install an LAPD substation on the premises. As the wealthy are isolated in their luxurious silos, the inner-city poor are increasingly ghettoized by the often racist Los Angeles Police Department. A.’s growing suburbanization along with other developers and bankers like Eli Broad and Mark Taper (their names are all over downtown buildings). A new edition of Mike Davis’s visionary work on Los Angeles and the transformation of the modern city.Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. Consequently, there is little hope professed in this book – whereas audiences normally look for hope. 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.

WHITE THRASH KIDS = REDNECK GEEKS Seven pm at “the white trash” in Berlin (we’re) borely in the place that we glimpse. A. School and a nod to UCLA’s Scott and Soja and Dear and the rest, working against today’s boosters of downtown money. A work of social criticism shows how Los Angeles's history, hidden power structure, and disparity of wealth will effect the city's future and the future of urban America in general.

The Red in Tooth and Claw SP808 remix is ethereal, haunting and deeply beautiful in its re-imagining of one of Rosetta's classic tracks. THE QUICK AND THE DEAD It's all about savoir-faire: first you learn to read, then you learn to count, then you understand what's expected of you. Davis's spatial analysis of the carceral state underscores how capitalist metropolitan governance itself relies upon and breeds new modes of punishment. It made sense of things; why the railways have gone and why freeways had proliferated for example (the railways in LA were brought up by a conglomerate made up of companies in the car industry, who just shut them down because they were competition, which in time meant the freeways popped up).