Mike bb u must edit

Thoroughly depressing look at Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California from a historically ecological perspective. Made me chuckle. A lot. As it goes, i suppose. We all knew LA would sink into the ocean. Good to have Mike Davis's well-researched and slightly smarmy proof.

Intriguing look at the history of Los Angeles from an ecological point of view. It has no water except what it brings in through pipelines. The natural cycle of weather brings Santa Ana winds and dryness which causes wildfires. Wild animals encroach upon the city as it expands into their territory. Davis also talks about Los Angeles as depicted in film and novels.

I've never been to L.A. and this isn't the greatest advertisement for doing so, but it is disturbingly prescient and fascinating. Kind of like "Blade Runner" which is one of the many things it discusses. It made me think about the way in which older cities had to grow up in harmony with the land and its resources whereas newer ones were essentially thrust upon them. There are also apparently some doubts about Davis's veracity but I really enjoyed this, so much so that after spending a Sunday morning reading this, I devoted the afternoon to reading City of Quartz.

Mike Davis evaluates the multivalued tensions pulling at the fabric of LA. He walks through the history of the geography, the drastic ecological shifts caused by humans and otherwise, weather patterns, suburban-urban development, economic distribution via political processes, and on top of everything reviews a brief history of "artistic" LA apocalypse literature and film. What emerges as one might suspect is the center of western decadence flooded in class inequality and a society continuing to view the context of capitalism as racial charged, while those in Anglo-centered power dynamics (and those under these rules) still ignore completely the structural fault zones. What is more striking might be the follow up to this book, what has happened in the ten years since its publication: 9/11, the dot com bust, the bush II administration, the second gulf war/iraq/afghanistan, the 2008 stock crash, the bailout, the obama election and current movements, the fires of the summer of 2007, all of these are almost predicted in his focused study of LA(if undirectly). In the wake of these things changes are bound to happen right?

In "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," Mike Davis has the temerity to argue not only that Southern California has always been a place where extremes of earth, wind and fire make notions like "average rainfall" a mere abstraction, but that the modern, man-made monstrosity of Los Angeles "has deliberately put itself in harm's way."

In a series of loosely connected, longish essays, Davis chronicles Southern California's fall from Edenic grace through rapacious overdevelopment and the ceaseless marketing of myths, like its "climatic exceptionalism," that were no more than that to begin with. His restless curiosity covers everything from the region's little-noticed experience with tornadoes (he says Los Angeles is the American metropolis that has suffered most from tornado damage in its urban core) to the inevitable clash with mountain lions, coyotes and other fauna caused by the city's steady encroachment into rural canyons. (Los Angeles has "the longest wild edge" of any major nontropical city, he writes.)

But what really animates the book is the author's sense of outrage at the social inequities ever present in the fallen paradise. He boils at the city fathers' failure to set aside adequate public parkland for the growing metropolis as private owners gobbled up beachfront, canyon and ranch, and he notes that by 1928, "barely half an inch of publicly owned beach frontage was left for each citizen of Los Angeles County," a reality that any proletarian beachcomber knows too well today.

Davis is never more persuasive than in a chapter called "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn." With dead-eyed precision, he distills the bitter irony wrought by years of deliberate fire suppression in the canyons above the Pacific: Multimillion-dollar movie-star homes are protected, but so is dead brush, which becomes thicker and makes the inevitable periodic conflagrations even worse. He juxtaposes this account with a chronicle of the city's apparent inability to prevent fires in the fleabag hotels that are the housing of last resort for impoverished immigrants downtown.

Likewise, a prodigiously researched chapter on the genre of disaster films and fiction in which Los Angeles is happily destroyed becomes more than just a giddy survey of pop culture and instead explores how often racial minorities have been both scapegoated and targeted for such destruction, from Japanese immigrants at the turn of the century to the black and Hispanic underclass of today.

At times, Davis' unceasing focus on the defects of his hometown dystopia becomes overwhelming, and a happily transplanted reader is tempted to throw down the book and head for the beach, or tell him to. Despite his own pronounced gift for original phrase making, he also has an annoying habit of expropriating the piquant observations of others in quotation marks without attribution in the text, though the book has meticulous footnotes and a thorough index.

In the concluding chapter, tantalizingly titled "Beyond 'Blade Runner,"' he portrays the painful decline of once-middle-class suburbs and the growing "gulag" of the state's prison population, but never really proposes any solutions of his own. In Davis' account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now. Summing up the orbiting satellite's view of the Rodney King riot's "thermal anomalies," Davis concludes, "Seen from space, the city that once hallucinated itself as an endless future without natural limits or social constraints now dazzles observers with the eerie beauty of an erupting volcano."

I loved following Davis on this intellectually diverse dive into the various disasters waiting to befall southern California. The structure of the book is a little odd, moving systematically through various types of ecological disaster from big to small before jumping into literary/cinematic analysis for the last third of the book, but that organization also makes it easy to follow (and speed through certain chapters of lesser interest.) Odd looking back in 2023 to the meta-conversation about this book and how contentious it was when it came out, versus the sort-of accepted nature of many of the assertions here now, just based on our further understanding of climate change and the Marxist interpretations of capitalism's effect on it.

Remarkable overview of how Southern California developed into a concrete jungle through mismanagement and greed, starting in the early 19th century. Shocking statistics on the destruction of the natural ecology of the region. Hilarious chapter reviewing the various disaster films and novels in which Los Angeles is "destroyed."

3.5 interesting, thorough, but unfortunately its length bogged me down.

Phenomenal. Unlike anything I’ve come across previously

Fascinating reading about the history of Los Angeles & everything going wrong. Unfortunately this book was published in 1998, so it is a bit out of date. I'd love to read an updated version.

When Malibu burns, the LATimes will have a Davis quote, and who will foot the bill after a state of emergency has been declared? Why not just try planning and building differently?
What happened to buidling codes? The annals of LA's natural disasters.