i still love you LA, my stinky hodge-podge city of nimby's

Solid essays about different aspects of LA (rise and fall of steel towns, power struggles b/w different types of Catholics, NIMBY/YIMBY stuff) from a leftist perspective. I finished this book on ebook because I left the physical copy on the bus but I hope some random person picked it up and read it.

When I first read this book, shortly after it appeared in 1990, I told everyone: this is that rare book that will still be read for insight and fun in a hundred years. Rereading it now, nearly three decades later, I feel more convinced than ever that this prediction will be fulfilled.

Rereading this book has been a revelation. When I first read it in college, it seemed a spooky analytic apparition, explaining with hallucinogenic precision the 1980s Los Angeles I had grown up in, including the strong sense that everyone I knew there shared that there was nothing for it but eventually a city this corrupt had to expect to be BURNED DOWN. Then, a couple years later, when the Rodney King riots exploded in reaction to the violent repression of the LAPD, as the new video sousveillance turned the panopticon Davis had so acutely described back against the agencies of racist law enforcement, the book went from merely analytically profound and amusingly written to something more like a prophetic jeremiad.

Beyond my judgments of the literary and analytic merits of the book, it is also somewhat depressing for me personally to realize how utterly my own political and social vision has been spellbound by this text -- though it difficult for me to assess how much of my shared vision comes directly from this text, as opposed to having grown up in the world that the book describes. However that might be disentangled, the insights about the production of defensive space, about the zones of autonomy for the rich and the poor, about the privatization of public goods, about cyberpunk urban sensibility, about the noir fascination with the louche, about how the meaning of power can only be discovered by examining the deviant resistances, about the rhetorical tic of using transposed historical metaphors (especially from the French revolutionary tradition) to illuminate the contemporary, about the confidence that all hegemonies are failed and fractured, about disgust at elite toleration of social abjection and exclusion, and about the sense that deployed capital in the last instance determines social relations... I don't know whether I learned it here or whether it grew out of the crabgrass that Davis and I shared, but all of these instincts are already here, fully formed.

Finally, the new preface (from 2006) is itself an interesting document, one which reframes the argument of the 1990 book as really being about the differentiated impact of globalization (a term which had only begun its upward march at the time of original publication) on different parts of the city. Which is correct, but that was pretty buried background in the original text, mostly nodded to with allusions to foreign capital funding the rebuilding of downtown, the changing structure of the industrial manufacturing base of the city, and of course the play of immigrants. Bring that into the foreground significantly alters the narrative, suggesting that the villains of the book -- the downtown boosters and westside machers -- were themselves less instrumental than the massive forces of which they were merely the vehicles.

It can be read as a novel. So good to read it and it made me love and hate Los Angeles. Both fascinating and frightening, you'll get to know more about L.A. than ever and you'll have different approach and vision in everything that surrounds you when walking and driving in your city.

Mike Davis is obviously a treasure. I read this on account of his passing away, though I’d owned it for a while, and frequently saw it highlighted in bookstores on the east side of LA. Like, if you put it on your Hinge profile it signals something to a certain segment of the population. The book itself is dense as hell with information and covers an array of topics, stretching from the Catholic Church in LA to gangs to housing associations in the SF Valley and a history of the city of Fontana. Does it tell a coherent story about Los Angeles? Is there an overarching point beyond the details? You can draw something out about the epicenters of power but this is decidedly a niche read.

so reading a book about a place, any place, is pretty special but i think reading a book about my place, or a place that i feel like is mine or i have at least a part in, can either be frustrating in its incompleteness and its failure to rise up to capture the aesthetics, feelings, and political economies of "your place," or it can be astounding, both undermining and justifying your feelings of a place. City of Quartz, for me, is the latter.

this book rocks! i felt shaky reading it a lot of the time. i think davis' use of the word "excavates" rings really true here. davis digs below LA, cratering deep until you realize you're falling between and on top of a mess of weeds, rocks, and unearthed worms. do i sound dramatic? maybe a bit. but i think the history of LA is so oddly presented, recorded and performed every day, through street signs and cultural institutions and real-estate developers, that it can sometimes be easy to over-familiarize yourself with its myths, and not it's truths (or at least real material conditions.) it soon becomes clear, reading Quartz, that LA's history has been unusually misconstrued, and purposefully so - that institutions like the LA Times, Hollywood, LAPD, and the Mayor's Office have benefitted enormously, both financially and in accumulated power, from the janky network of freeways, barrios, and segregated suburbs they have set up, profitted from, and take for granted. but it's not just overt observations that davis explains and analyzes; it's smaller things, too, that you start to notice and question (hopefully) the longer you live here. why are cultural institutions so accumulated on Miracle Mile and Downtown? how was Skid Row created and why does it continue to exist, despite it having the highest crime rate in the world and not serving the unhoused folks who live there? why are there no public bathrooms in Downtown? what story does Fairfax and Pasadena and Eagle Rock's faux-Mission architecture tell? why the fuck are the Hahns still in power? why is Irvine so weird and why does no one really talk about it? why are there so many truck stops and diners in Fontana? why is Lake Balboa not Van Nuys and why is West Hills not Canoga? why can't we repeal Prop 13!!!! how did reagan's policies in Latin America lead to the continued ghettoization of MacArthur Park and Eastside neighborhoods bordering Downtown? why were so many skyscrapers built in the 80s! why isn't my neighborhood mixed-use!!!!

i think davis answers all these, but even the fact that he's making me ask them, someone's who has taken LA's inequities and general "bad-ness" at face value for too long, is a really good start. and his answers, while analyzed through the lens of labor and class-struggle, mostly, don't fall neatly along any ideological line. i especially liked the chapter on homeowners associations and the tax revolt because it clearly walks us through the shifting power structures in LA, and the different ideologies that are constantly shifting and being manipulated to serve homeowners and big developers. especially at Metro, i think i find myself siding with pro-development forces, and (rightfully) demonizing the NIMBYs, but davis' exercise in showing the evolving ideological weapons of both sides (NIMBYs using environmentalism to argue against development, YIMBYs use "racial justice" (after years of lobbying against fair housing and other economic/racial justice initiatives) to build up and gentrify, etc etc) helped me see that both sides are fucked up, both sides are dedicated almost singularly to the accumulation of capital (fuck homeowners and fuck luxury development!!!) and both sides don't give a rats ass about poor folks, young folks, and folks of color!

davis, in other words, is a world-renown pessimist and is really good at making the reader a pessimist too. rightfully so. like i said earlier, he unearths and tears out and digs digs digs but doesn't plant much new. which is fine. he's a historian. but his history can feel alive in its dialectism and, because of this, this book also feels lively, even 30 years after its publishing. davis doesn't let the reader off easy, and doesn't pretend there's a laundry list of solutions to solve LA's problems, no matter how radical that laundry list might seem. history, here, is itself the future; history is right now. thus, he seems to leave class rebellion and transformation to us and, despite the broad scale of this book, i feel surprisingly clear-headed, maybe for the first time, on what has to be done, and is being done.

in his chapter on the panopticon and the militarization of public spaces in LA, Davis bemoans the loss of "the crowd." LA's been built, politically and spatially, to purposefully separate and segregate, and as long as real estate, homeowners, and the rentier class control production and extraction here, and continue to exploit and undermine workers in the name of efficiency and profit, we will continue to be separated. pollution will go up, rent will go up, homelessness will rise, crime will go up, etc. etc. you know the drill! but re-establishing this "crowd," finding places for people to gather civically, learn from one another, experience each other's hearts and bodies, is the first step needed to fight for one another.

and i think the re-building of the crowd is happening. based on this last election, and Nithya's victory, people are done and finally paying attention! the electorate expanded three-fold and more people voted in that City Council election than any other in all of LA history. and when you pay attention and start working and laboring and putting yourself into a place, that love creates a better place. it transforms because history is constantly transforming. i think about this, sometimes, as the subversion of Jeffersonian Democracy. instead of inputting labor into land and property, folks are starting to put their labor into people, and the places those people live and represent. it's so fucking inspiring to see what's going on here. despite hundreds of obstacles, from apathetic politicians to apathetic city servants to exploitative landlords, landowners, property developers, NIMBYS, etc. etc. people are standing up for themselves and their neighbors, housed and unhoused, and pouring love into LA. i finally think i feel LA's heart beating. there seems to be movement. coalitions are forming. people are done with the shit Davis outlines for 440 pages in this book. i think he would be proud of LA.

It's great to see that this old book still generates lively debate. "City of Quartz" is so inherently political that opinions probably reflect the reader's political position. Davis makes no secret of his political leanings: in the new revised introduction he spells them out in the first paragraph. For a leftist, his arguments about the geographic marginalization of the Los Angeles' poor and their exploitation, neglect and abuse by civic and religious hierarchies will be fascinating and sadly unsurprising. For those on the right, his blunderbuss indictments of individuals, organizations and even whole neighborhoods may seem irresponsible and unfair. In my opinion, though, this is a fascinating work and should be read carefully, and then loved or hated as the case may be.

p.s. - many people try to minimize this book's merit because it was originally written as a Ph.D. dissertation and then rejected. I think this is unfair. Although it was rejected at the time, it is now considered a minor classic in the field of urban studies. I seriously doubt that any of the professors on his dissertation committee have written anything as popular, interesting, and provocative as "City of Quartz".

It feels like Mike Davis is screaming at you throughout the 400 pages of CITY OF QUARTZ: EXCAVATING THE FUTURE IN LOS ANGELES. He’s mad and full of righteous indignation. Los Angeles will do that to you. A native, Davis sees how Los Angeles is the city of the 20th century: the vanguard of sprawl and land grabs, surveillance and the militarization of the police force, segregation and further disenfranchisement of immigrants, minorities and the poor. The book opens at the turn of the last century, with the utopian launch of a socialist city in the desert, which collapses under the dual fronts of restricted water rights and a smear campaign by the Los Angeles Times. It’s all downhill from there. Davis details the secret history of a Los Angeles that has become a brand for developers around the globe. The book was written 25 years ago and Davis is still screaming. Has anyone listened? His voice may be hoarse but it should be heard.

the chapter on NIMBYism is like the 18th Brumaire of housing politics. I will be quoting it ad nauseam in every housing conversation from now on. Lakewoodism, for example, is the defining political dynamic of Sun-Belt cities, and I will just use the term and expect everyone knows what I'm talking about. The Howard Jarvis tax revolt should be as much of a pillar of 20th century periodization as the Vietnam war.

very long—interminably so during the entire chapter dedicated to Catholics, which I’m sure is essential to Davis’s own understanding of Los Angeles, but which I found really fucking boring. all that aside, Davis is a wide-ranging and wry observer of his material surroundings. as a life long Los Angeles skeptic I found a lot of protein to chew on here, but some of his vivid descriptions of the ever-present outsider culture of the city threatened to convert me. despite his excoriating critiques, he loved his city and the many unseen and underpaid workers that built it and continue to build it.

A lot of my anthropology/ethnography friends were telling me this book was great but to be honest I’ve read much better on the subject of urban planning… did not go into enough theoretical depth to provide insight there and the prose was too dry to hold weight on its own (maybe I’ve just been spoiled with my recent fiction reading!). I also realised I just dgaf about LA… maybe this book will resonate more with those who live in American cities and experience that sort of urban planning more directly.

I love this time capsule into LA 30 years ago. I would love to have a comparable set of essays for 2020 in LA.