Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repression in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous 'armed response'. This obsession with physical security systems, and collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating 'postmodern space', or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan 'galaxies', has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level.

With historical landscapes erased, with megastructures and superblocks as primary components, and with an increasingly dense and self-contained circulation system, the new financial district is best conceived as a single demonically self-referential hyper-structure, a Miesian skyscape raised to dementia.

Almost everything I ever wanted in a book about LA

he’s SPITTING

A monster of a book. Mike Davis is without question one of the best to ever do it. You don't have to be an Angelino to enjoy this one, but it does give a special charm to an otherwise grim tale of political corruption, development, finance, and the birth of a "modern" city.

Despite having been an urban studies major in college, I put off reading City of Quartz for a long time because I was under the impression that it contained a lot of minutiae about Los Angeles politics that I didn't care to learn about. I was right about that, and struggled through the two chapters of the book ("Power Lines" and "Homegrown Revolution") that focused primarily on local politics -- the ten or so pages of these chapters that were interesting to me were buried in 40+ pages of excruciating detail about the outcome of specific community conflicts, etc. For anyone who is interested in LA from a more conceptual perspective, and for what it specifically represents about contemporary urbanism and American society, the chapters "Sunshine or Noir?," "Fortress LA," and "The Hammer and the Rock" are the strong points of the book.

My other beef with City of Quartz is how male-centric it is. By the time I got to the last two chapters, about the Catholic church and (partly) the Fontana steel industry and its workers' union, I was completely fed up. Davis focuses on one male-dominated institution/group after another, whether City Hall, the LAPD, African-American gangs, or overseas financiers. It's true these institutions/groups have made LA what it is and given it its particular mythology, but millions of women have shaped and lived in LA, too, and you wouldn't know it from this book. It's just inexcusable for a book concerned equally with LA's powerbrokers and with the socially and politically disadvantaged groups that have struggled with the former for their right to the city.

A reliably lefty history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz was a fascinating read for a recent transplant from the east coast. Mike Davis' collection of essays eschews the day-to-day history, choosing instead to focus on several underlying factors to the ur Angeleno character: Architecture-as-fortress, crime-as-byproduct-of-disenfranchisement; the Catholic church as institution of greed, power, and racism; the boom/bust of manufacturing; etc. Davis makes a compelling case for why the city operates the way it does - or, rather, why the city in the 90's, at the height of its various tensions, operated as it did; the revised edition isn't much revised at all in that sense - but he's short on solutions.

Cronyism, greed, and an inferiority complex to the more established power centers of the east coast are portrayed as the perennial animating factors for Los Angeles' worse angels, but aside from a lot of hand-wringing there's not much that, seemingly, can be done retard these drives or focus them on a more positive bent. I often avoid politicized books (and I admit that it would be tough to write a non-politicized book about any major American city, especially L.A.) for this very reason. I get all worked up and then there's no vent for my frustration or righteous indignation. What is the solution: Better urban planning, less development/more development, forced integration, what?! Davis anemically raises the point that perhaps the way forward is through more local control of capital and markets; he blames a lot of the income disparity of the 80s and 90s on foreign investments in the city, but its not as clear cut as that. From Davis' point of view, one of the first villains on the scene was the very local LA Times. But surely there are benefits along with the negatives. After all, something keeps driving people to this city. I think the truer path here is one that is not so polarized. And, to his credit, Davis presents a more balanced argument in the final essay, the one about Fontana. He presents both the good and the bad about that city's evolution from agrarian eden to industrial polluter and finally commuter suburb in a calm, rational light. Solutions, though, are in short supply, and maybe that's the take away message here: Nobody knows how to fix things.

At the end of the day, I enjoyed this book very much (despite the fact that it took me months to read). City of Quartz was a great primer in the history of a city that I find fascinating, but know precious little about. A more dispassionate tone may have broadened the appeal a bit, but undoubtably some of the fire would've been lost. I recommend this book to anybody interested in contemporary urban space - how we negotiate it, how it came to be the way it is - and for anybody interested in getting a peek beneath the surface of this most enigmatic of cities.

If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

Broadly interesting to me. Davis sketches several interesting portraits of Los Angeles responding to influxes of capital, people, and ideas throughout its history and evolving in response. This is most interesting when he highlights divisions and coalitions--Westsider vs. Downtown, Valley homeowners vs. developers.

At times hard to penetrate, with quick successions of names and concepts that are only briefly against. The relentless pessimism also gets tiring at times, with the continual dynamism of the city in question seemingly leading straight downhill from Davis' 1990 perspective. The endless menace of Japanese capital and projections for permanent dominance of Anglo political power over minority groups felt a little played out by the end of the book.

Additionally, it did feel a little disjointed. The thematic divisions of the chapters were mostly comprehensible, though the chronological narrative of each suffered at times. I also do not fully understand the decision to move 50 miles east for the last, long chapter on the farms and steel mill of Fontana. While interesting, it seemed pretty distant from the broader picture painted of Los Angeles.

Still, pretty interesting overall.

Also, really would have appreciated more maps.

-Most depressing view of LA that I've ever been witness to. (but, may have been needed)
-Goes on at length (ad nauseum) about power structure and it's relation to property values.
-HATES Frank Gehry
-Mr. Davis offers no real solutions to problems presented in examples.
-Overall: Great book for facts and overall pictures of where power comes from in LA (in a historical sense). However, you may have to buy a ticket to Disneyland or head to the beach after finishing this piece of work due to the massive amount of depression/hopelessness you may feel towards the City of Angels and it's Mike Davis Future.

I read the audiobook and while dense, this book is fascinating to me as a resident of Los Angeles and a fan of sociology and history told with the gloves off.

I wanted to believe LA wasn’t as founded and shaped by white supremacy and ethic exploitation as much as older cities. The truth is sobering, and the effects have wide and permanent effects.

Lest you think this book might be boring, you’ll find out otherwise when you learn about the intersection of JPL and weird orgies.

My main wish: this book needs an update. Obviously the historical accounts don’t need revising, but the past 30 years deserve this level of documentation. Also, LACMA isn’t in Hancock Park. Fix that.

The chapters about the Catholic Church and Fontana are beautifully written. I’ve had a fascination with Los Angeles for a long time. This isn’t a history of the area as much as a discussion of the main issues facing the region and how they came to be.

Did you know that according to the Census of 1880 Los Angeles was the 187th largest settlement in all of the US of A with a population of around only 11,183?...

I’ve had this book lying around for years and I’m glad I eventually got round to reading it as often it was a veritable treasure trove of social and political history of LA teaching me all kinds of things about a city I know very little about. This book is also nicely enhanced by a series of simple yet powerful photographs by Robert Morrow.

“We may be finding that in some blacks when (the carotid chokehold) is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal (sic) people.”

So said Chief Gates of the LAPD answering to the rash of killings of young black men in their custody back in 1988. What we see in LA, particularly throughout the 80s may not quite amount to genocide but it’s certainly apartheid. The tyranny and oppression that so many blacks and Latinos endured under the police state and the monstrous impunity which those officers got to operate and the funding and support they enjoyed from the highest level speaks deep and clear as to what 80s America was really all about and who it was for.

He really captures the dark, filthy cheating heart of the city and all of the poisonous myths that have grown up alongside it. His research is top notch and he presents his history in clear, eloquent prose so that you learn of all sorts of tidbits. He was great on Boosterism, Noir and “Car-sex-death-fascism” of the city, exploring many aspects of the arts which created versions of the city from Film Noir in the 1920s through to David Lynch, and of course also in the written worlds from Fante, Bukowski, West and Chandler through to Pynchon, Didion, Ellroy and Easton Ellis.

“In 1973 home prices in southern California were $1000 below the national average, six years later they were $42,400 higher, 15 years later they were $143,000 higher.”

Which may give you some indication as to who was really driving development and the expansion of the city?...The levels of chronic racism are truly astonishing, with paranoid, white home owners going so far as to sue some black families who dared to move into their area. Even when Nat King Cole bought a house in the wealthy, white area of Hancock Park in the 1950s he was had to endure burnt crosses on his lawn and his neighbours refused to speak to him for more than a decade.

As I say, I didn’t realise how little I knew about LA until I read this meaty piece of work. Davis tackles a big subject, but meets the challenge well, often with brilliant and cutting insights, this was real quality and I look forward to reading more of Davis’s work in the near future.

Haiku Review:

L.A. history
failed utopias abound
maybe I should move.