Dead Cities

Excellent collection of essays from the always insightful Mike Davis. His analysis of the planned under investment and sabotaging of the urban cores in the 70s, 80s, and 90s paints a fascinating and infuriating narrative.

Pretty amazing. It seems like all his stuff is pretty much a reiteration of the same basic tenets, but it’s illuminating on a variety of obscure topics: working class teen riots in the early 60s, fake corporate cities in South LA, dead animal garbage dumps in Nevada nuclear testing grounds, and of course more on Bunker Hill, which seems to be endlessly fascinating and able to supply whatever theoretical or literary fuel you request for your apocalyptic fire.

Davis is endlessly fascinating and illuminating. Even when I don’t agree with him or don’t share an interest in his topic, he’s thought-provoking. The danger in reading a collection like this is that it gives me hundreds of new side topics to explore and man, I just don’t have the time to read the stuff that’s already on my list.

‘Dead Cities’ has been on my to-read list for at least seven years and I can make a plausible guess about why I decided to read it: the title. Urbanism and the apocalypse are particular interests of mine. I’ve previously read Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, which deals with similar themes while having a more specific focus. ‘Dead Cities’ is a collection of disparate essays and thus fascinating for its spatial range, from a single neighbourhood to the entire solar system. This extremely broad interpretation of urbanism is both entertaining and thought-provoking for the reader (or at least I found it so). The essays are grouped into four chapters, loosely themed around extremes of pollution and natural disaster, what went wrong with Los Angeles, global catastrophe, and miscellaneous. All are written in a fluid and involving style, neither academic nor journalistic, that I felt did the very serious topics justice while retaining a literary flair. Given that the collection was published in 2002 and the pieces within written in the late 90s and early 00s, it is instructive and depressing to note the further deterioration in the environment, housing affordability, and urban policy during the two subsequent decades.

There is insightful analysis to be found throughout, although Davis is most incisive when explaining how urban areas develop as they do:

The terrible beauty struggling to be born Downtown is usually called growth, but it is neither a purely natural metabolism (as neoliberals imagine the marketplace to be) nor an enlightened volition (as politicians and planners like to claim). Rather it is better conceptualised as a vast game - a relentless competition between privileged players (or alliances of players) in which the state intervenes much like a card-dealer or croupier to referee the play. Urban design, embodied in different master plans and project visions, provides malleable rules for the key players as well as a set of boundaries to exclude unauthorised play. But unlike most games, there is no winning gambit or final move. Downtown development is an essentially infinite game, played not towards any conclusion or closure, but towards its endless protraction.

While the level of detail in the essays about American cities, especially LA, is interesting, the same situations and themes recur: regulatory capture, corruption, racism, inequality, and environmental degradation. The shocking state of cities in America seems bizarre in comparison to the UK, where wealth is concentrated in dense city centres and poverty pushed to the outskirts. With its greenbelt protection, Britain has never embraced suburbs to anything like the same extent as the US. Rather than being abandoned to those unable to move, UK urban centres are highly desirable locations snapped up in fragments by international investors at inflated prices. Not a great situation either, but a very different spatial dispersion of development and wealth to that in America.

The two essays which I found most memorable and striking were in the final section: ‘Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage?’ and ‘Dead Cities: A Natural History’. The former discusses in some depth how disciplines including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology have been transformed by growing understanding of how many meteors hang around the solar system banging into things. I was only aware of such theories in the broadest possible terms (a meteor killed the dinosaurs, right?) so found this mind-expanding. It’s probably the densest and most difficult of the essays, yet also the most rewarding. I didn’t expect to find so much astronomy in a book on the urban environment; it was a pleasant surprise. Davis elegantly links a variety of scientific material, while acknowledging debates and uncertainties across fields:

Evolution by catastrophe, Michael Rampino adds, also entails speciation through a different process than the classic gradualist mechanisms of geographic isolation and adaptive change. Catastrophe replaces the linear temporal creep of microevolution with nonlinear bursts of macroevolution. Comet showers accelerate evolutionary change by injecting huge pulses of sudden energy into biogeochemical circuits. Nutrient recycling is stimulated and bolides add new stocks of organic molecules. [...] Most importantly, catastrophes break up static ecosystems and clear adaptive space for the explosive radiation of new taxa - like mammals after the K/T horizon. Rampino, awed by this dialectic of creative destruction, openly wonders if impact catastrophe is not the real driving force behind the movement towards greater biological diversity, and if Gaia has not evolved in intricate choreography with Shiva.

The latter titular essay is very different. I appreciated it equally, albeit in a different way. It evaluates the environmental realism of early postapocalyptic literature, specifically After London: or, Wild England and Earth Abides. In some ways, this essay prefigures Alan Weisman’s compelling thought experiment The World Without Us, as Davis considers what happens to cities when humanity abandons them. The reminder of After London: or, Wild England’s lyrical vision was welcome, although I think Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud also deserved a mention. I particularly liked the discussion of which plants thrived in bombed-out cities during WWII:

The botanical census of bomb sites in the City and the East End revealed a new pattern of urban vegetation adapted to fire, rubble, and open space. Uncommon natives and robust aliens dominated this unexpected ‘bomber ecology’. The most successful colonist of blitzed sites, for example, was the formerly rare rosebay willowherb, which in Jefferies’ time could only be found in Paddington Cemetery and on a few gravelly banks. [...] Among other aliens that flourished during the Blitz were the Canadian fleabane, already a familiar plant on railway embankments, the redoubtable buddleia, and the Peruvian Galinsoga parviflora, an escapee from Kew Gardens.

I have some ambivalence about my obsession with post-apocalyptic visions; Davis acknowledges that such fascination with urban destruction has associations with eugenics and exterminism. Yet he manages to examine disasters real and theoretical while avoiding voyeuristic disregard for their human impact. I learned a lot from this collection of nuanced and thoughtful essays. Inevitably the content is largely depressing, but not hopeless. For some reason, the most painful environmental disaster to read about in this collection was not nuclear waste, climate change, or soil degradation, but industrial overfishing. Perhaps because deep sea trawling destroys so much and so wastefully, for no good reason, without it even being clear what irreplaceable biodiversity is being lost.

I didn't really know much about Mike Davis going into this but was pretty sure I wasn't gonna love his work. Considering that he's a self-described urbanist and that the only label I'm even close to comfortable with for myself at this point is anti-civ it's kind of surprising I even decided to start this. His name had just come up so many times endorsing other books I've read that I had to see who he was. There actually are some interesting essays in here, mainly the first couple and last couple chapters. The rest basically just focuses on Los Angeles's poor planning and political corruption in the 80's and early 90's, which doesn't really make much difference to me since no matter how well planned a city is I'd still say it's destined for failure. He almost seems to agree with that himself at times while at other times talking about deindustrialization and low population densities as if they're bad things and worthless construction projects ("creating jobs") as if they're good things. It's hard to make out what exactly his view on urbanism really is. Is he promoting it or just studying it? He does at least seem to have his heart in the right place when talking about minorities, poor people, the environment, etc. Added to the problem of obscurity though this is also outdated and written in kind of a pedantic style. Even the interesting parts might not be accurate. So while I didn't hate it as much as I feared I might I still can't see any good reason to recommend that anyone else waste their time with it. Maybe one of his newer ones would be better.

this collection of essays is a mixed bag. there's a few fantastic pieces ("berlin's skeleton in utah's closet," "who killed L.A.?: a political autopsy" and "dead cities: a natural history" come to mind), some that are only interesting if you really study the fields they address ("burning all illusions," "cosmic dancers on history's stage"... which i failed to finish) and a few that aren't so hot, like his intro piece about 9/11. as usual, davis is best when he's politicizing catastrophes and using literature and the arts to mirror his arguments. my favorites essays rely heavily on journalistic scholarship. davis is refreshing among "theory" types in that he seems to fall back on public policy and newspaper reports more than freud/marx/nietzsche/derrida/butler/fanon, and so forth. and he has a knack for asking great, punchy questions, like "was the cold war the earth's worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years?" i kinda wish he's be more forthcoming about his own fascination with the apocalypse, which borders on outright fetishistic at times. this is actually part of what's interesting about davis, but often sets his scholarship at an awkward distance from his own desires.

We're DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED.

doesn’t miss, although still varies in quality, like every other essay collection ever collected. Davis is at his best cohering world-size ideas into relatively granular material nuggets, and there are countless moments of startling, internationalist clarity in this collection. for example, regarding the interethnic gang warfare of nineties Los Angeles:

‘“Dios me salve Maria…” An old catholic custom, the same in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles as Palermo or Galway, it is a vigil kept by women, praying to another woman whose son was murdered two thousand years ago.’ (292)

the cosa nostra, the IRA, the midcity locos—it’s trite and reductive to compare specific gang wars like so much produce, but of course davis never falls into such simplifications, offering instead the insistent reminder that we require solidarity with each other to get out of any of this—all of this—and that we are not so far removed from one another as we might imagine.