City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

The essays about the city of Fontana and the history of the Catholic church in L.A. were incredible.

Brutal. As thorough a look as is possible at why LA is as fucked as it is

In the author’s words, “City of Quartz … is the biography of a conjuncture: one of those moments, ripe with paradox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history suddenly converge with profoundly unpredictable results. [It is] … about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.”

I moved to Los Angeles two years ago, weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent George Floyd protests shattered the currents of city life and indelibly altered society. Put in perspective the events of 2020 become less extraordinary— one more meteoric change to a city (LA) and a region (Metro LA/SoCal) tacked to the end of a long list. This is what Mike Davis dissects and catalogs in City of Quartz: the inflection points, as he sees them, in LA’s growth and development over the past 150 years.

Broken down by chapter, Davis writes densely and at length on:

1. People— who immigrated to LA and why, its visitors and their thoughts, the growth of its society and downstream effects on the city.

2. Power— the structures and lines of power that built LA, both physically (in the case of developers, land speculators, and associated industry like the railroad companies) and politically. These two groups tended to be single individuals or collectives of unfettered capitalists directing politics.

3. Real estate, suburbanism, and “affluent homeowners … engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.” NIMBYism exhaustively analyzed.

4. LA’s architectural reflection of the 1960s-80s sociopolitical repression. “The dire predictions of Richard Nixon's 1969 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence have been tragically fulfilled: we live in 'fortress cities' brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror' where the police battle the criminalized poor.”

5. Police, policing, and the political-law enforcement axis in LA. If you already know the LAPD’s history, its organized internal gangs and utterly fucked up criminalization of the poor and non-whites, there is still much specific history here to anger and educate you. If you don’t know anything about it yet, buckle up.

6. Religion. Particularly the history of the Catholic Church in LA; how it has reacted, and failed to react, in the face of rapidly changing demographics due to immigration.

7. The history of Fontana as a microcosm. “If violent instability in local landscape and culture is taken to be constitutive of Southern California's peculiar social ontology, then Fontana epitomizes the region. It is an imagined community, twice invented and promoted, then turned inside-out to become once again a visionary green field. Its repeated restructurings have traumatically registered the shifting interaction of regional and international, manufacturing and real-estate, capitalism. Yet despite the claims of some theorists of the 'hyperreal 'or the 'depthless present' - the past is not completely erasable, even in Southern California. … To this extent the Fontana story provides a parable: it is about the fate of those suburbanized California working classes who cling to their tarnished dreams at the far edge of the L.A. galaxy.”

City of Quartz was written in 1990 and the edition I read contains a 2006 preface from Davis. He points out why he continues to be so pessimistic— “Taking 1990 as a baseline, consider some of the most important structural trends and social changes of the generation that followed the original ‘conjuncture.’”

1. Regional (Im)mobility: the complete failure to develop sustainable public transport.

2. Branchville: capital flight and the echoes of the “L.A. 2000” scheme to become the new command center of the California and Pacific Rim economies which collapsed in the 1990s recession. Even more poignant as Silicon Valley has exploded in the age of smartphones and social media.

3. Manufacturing Decline: in 2006 starkly highlighted by the flight of jobs and industry to China. This has only accelerated.

4. The New Inequality: the permanent healthcare, education, and income crisis among the city’s vulnerable, “emblematic of the larger deficit of investment in a humane social safety net.”

5. Terminal Suburbs: regional re-segregation in California and massive white flight (LA County losing 20% of its white population in the 90s), “part of a larger sorting-out process by which white, religiously-conservative ‘red America’ is taking its distance from heavily immigrant and liberal ‘blue America.’”

6. Spurning the Peacemakers: the complete failure to build on inter-gang solidarity in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and in fact the deliberate spurning and undermining of the truce.

7. City of Organizers: here is Davis’ note of cautious optimism on the future of the labor movement, which I tend to think was misguided given the subsequent 15 years leading to today. He was however spot on about politics: “I find nothing praiseworthy in current calls for more 'centrism' or 'pragmatism': euphemisms for the continual process of incremental adjustment to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party. In contrast, conservative Christian groups have built impressive political bases in local suburban politics largely through unyielding, programmatic tenacity. Odd to say, but many conservatives seem to have a better grasp of Gramsci than many on the Left. Above all, they understand the principle that a hegemonic politics must represent a consistent continuum of values: it must embody a morally coherent way of life.”

“We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.”

Thematically sprawling, thought-provoking (often outraging - against forms of oppression built into urban space, police brutality, racist violence, & the Man), and at times oddly entertaining. e.g., in describing anti-homeless design of outdoor elements in cities (hostile architecture/deterrents) Davis writes, "Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to garbage, as happened in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag lady-proof trash cage: made of three-quarter inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless moldering fish heads and stale french fries."

I appreciated the consistent strains of both contempt for those who use their power to further crush the destitute beneath their boots (NIMBY city councilmembers, racist LAPD, and Nancy Reagan all get some shoutouts), along w/ strongly implied faith in the humanity and possibility for redemption of all (esp those groups most written off by society - gang members, unhoused folks, etc). His writing on urban life made me think a lot about who our cities are built for and why. Do we want more fortresses for the rich, policing of the poor, and quasi-public spaces that only open if your wallet is? I hope not, but Davis wrote this in 1990 and the issues remain relevant now.

Extremely detailed to the point of losing me at times, but maybe because Los Angeles in 1990 is now every city in the US: militarized, hollowed out, and replete with a corrupted liberal elite coordinating with a reactionary homeowner class. City of the future baby.

An amazing overview of the racial and economic issues that has shaped Los Angeles over the last 150 years. This book placed many of the city's peculiarities into context.

Amazing book.

DNF so boring

Angelenos – who we are and how we got that way-- or rather Southern Californians, as this book really covers the whole region. As a second generation native, found this exhaustively researched and wide-ranging commentary really fascinating. A three-month project and I learned a lot! It was published in 1990, so is missing the last 20 years, which would be instructional, but it is still valuable to see how we got on the road we’re on.

Chapters are thematic and the book covers huge amounts of territory. The culture of sunshine and noir, how utopia and dystopia myths co-exist, the intellectual influences of both “debunkers” and “boosters,” European exiles, JPL and aerospace scientists and scientologists, jazz in South Central and bohemian artists in the 1940s and 1950s, with art later becoming the realm of big money and big real estate. Davis discusses the influence and power of different factions, Downtown money vs. the Westside, real estate development through the ages and the local community politics attached to it, the disintegration through neglect of South Central (setting the scenario for the riots of ’92, an event that doesn’t seem surprising after reading Davis’ analysis of the sociopolitical scene in the 1980s), and the influence of the Catholic Church throughout the region and warring factions within it (interesting too to hear what our controversial Cardinal Mahoney was up to in the 70’s and ’80s). There is a short history of gangs and of the LAPD and their clashes, and discussions of class struggle and urban design. The weakest section to me was the last chapter, a history of Fontana, from agrarian utopian possibility to boom steel-town to wasteland. A little too much detailed history of the union movement there and the fall of Kaiser Steel. It seems a little out in left field, but is the author’s home town, and may have been meant also as a metaphor for the destiny of rest of the area.

There is definitely a very liberal bias throughout. Conservatives, beware --This book is part of the Haymarket Series, which focuses on social justice and the labor movement. However, the facts are interesting, and verifiable facts are facts. Davis’s interpretations of various events and their apparent consequences are something to seriously consider, even when one does not buy in 100%.

My only major gripe is the pedantic language and foreign language phrases very liberally sprinkled throughout. Davis’ vocabulary is impressive if you like that kind of thing, but too many big and obscure words make it seem he is trying too hard to overcome his blue collar roots. But overall, a fascinating read for any serious student of California history.