I finished this flying over the Pacific Palisades and into the L.A. maw. It was amazing to see the fractal subdivisions that Davis talks about tendriling off to Fontana on the horizon. The book is, of course, amazing for being both loving and damning of the city but I would suggest skipping chapters 2, 3 and 6. Davis is best when he's playing the cultural critic and less so when he's the motormouth metro-desk reporter, expecting you to know and care about every switch in the City Council from 1981 to 1989.

Davis totally lacks a knack for structure, so this starts and ends in ways that don’t feel like a start or an end (after the great prologue you’re dunked into... 70-year-old union disputes that require a mountain of context before the talk of LA’s grand design even comes in), but in between you’ll find some of the best writing on LA out there. Would love to read a 30-years-later edition - how much, how little has changed.

I lived in LA from 1999 to 2010, longer than I've lived anywhere else -- but I took the city on its own terms and didn't really understand the full spectrum of interests that molded the city into what it was. I don't have a background in urban studies, but this book (passionately argued on a constellation of loosely related topics) was definitely a disturbing eye-opener. From the disenfranchised roots of local gangs to the politics of the Catholic archdiocese, from real estate speculation and HOAs to the working-class steel town of Fontana (where I lived in my pre-memory early childhood while my dad worked in related industry), Davis covers the gamut. Really interesting stuff, and well worth at least a skim.

Incredible. I don't know where to start.

What is it that turns smart people into Marxists?

I cannot write this review without prefacing the perspective that I come from: I'm from LA, a member of a West Side Jewish family involved in real estate development, and these days a grad student in science and technology studies. What I was interested in was what Los Angeles means; is it the American dream or the American nightmare? Davis almost gets there, but instead gets stuck reproducing the shibboleths of political economy.

Davis chronicles the struggles of various LA power centers: the downtown establishment against the Westside insurgency; boosters against noir exiles; white and black; police and gangs; factions within the catholic church. But while he starts from a fascinating premise the LA is somehow a uniquely post-modern city, he quickly becomes embroiled in standard narratives about oppressed minorities struggling against fascist power structures. I don't disagree with him here, LA is a racist and oppressive city, and was more so in the late 80s when this book was researched, but saying so isn't particularly interesting. I enjoyed the chapters on noir and police brutality, and a glimpse into the hidden workings of the Catholic church, but Davis spent so much time look for the periphery that he misses the centers of power lie the LA Times, the County Board of Supervisors, Home Owners Associations, or transit planning (these are centers he himself brings up, and then glosses over in favor of community organizers and unions).

This isn't the worst book ever, and it's actually a fun read for Marxist geography, but it's not the LA that I know, (development, freeways, Hollywood, Judaism, the West Side, and The Valley), and it's not the "real LA" either, whatever that is.

Wow, this was an incredible read. Stories of the nitty gritty of what makes LA.

This recontextualizes every story I know of California on stage, screen, and on the page.

Cool deep dive into LA's history. Lots of cool stories including the emergence of LAPD's surveillance state and the prisons in the middle of DTLA, the close linking of Caltech's founding with that of Scientology (a science school tangled with the only religion based on science fiction and the literal explosions that ensued), the influence of HOAs and how NIMBYism shaped LA and eroded its tax base through the Lakewood Plan, etc.

My favorite song about Los Angeles is “L.A.” by The Fall. It’s got an ominous synth line, a great guitar riff, and Mark Smith’s immortal lyrics: “L.L.L.A.A.A.L!L!L!A!A!A!” It’s the perfect soundtrack for reading this excellent book. Davis has written a social history of the LA area, which does not proceed in a linear fashion. Instead, he picks out the social history of groups that have become identified with LA: developers, suburb dwellers, gangs, the LAPD, immigrants, etc. By the end of the book, you have a real grasp on how LA got to be the way it is today.

If you’ve ever read any of Davis’ other books, you know he has an agenda, just like Howard Zinn or Ann Coulter. Davis’ information is not suspect; this book is well-sourced. However, it puts across a worldview, for which the reader must adjust accordingly. Davis writes in the post-structuralist style that was in fashion at the time. Politically, Davis is a doughy bourgeois leftist, who harbors the progressive’s Walter Mitty fantasy that he is a Bad Ass Street Rebel. If you can read past this, you can learn some absolutely fascinating info.

The longest chapter is Davis’ discussion of LA’s intellectual and cultural life. Don’t laugh. By the time you are finished with this, you will have a strange new respect for the Wasteland down south. Davis traces the groups of thinkers drawn to LA: creative people hired by Hollywood, PhD’s and engineers hired by the aerospace & defense industries; the noir novelists who created the modern detective story, cutting edge musicians, &c.

Davis also has long chapters about LA’s underlass. He traces the history of LA’s Catholic diocese, and uses it to discuss LA’s immigrant community. He also has a long discussion about LA’s gangs, and the LAPD’s campaign against them. His history of the Crips is very compelling. Davis unflinchingly details the bloody rise of the Crips, and their connection to the Black Power movement, a connection most commentators are loath to explore. Davis also gives us the rise and fall and rebirth of the town of Fontana, an honest-to-God LA steeltown that was so bluecollar that the Hell’s Angels were founded there, but which eventually became a chaotic blend (due to corrupt planning) of junkyards, truckstops and high end “second homes.” These chapters alone make this book worthwhile. Not coincidentally, they are the ones least infected by Davis’ po-mo cant.

Davis’ only false note comes in the chapter titled “Fortress L.A.” It's so filled with semiotic clichés and cultural referents as to reach the saturation point. It will be virtually unreadable by 2050. The theme is also weak. Davis argues that LA architects are creating buildings and public spaces that are intentionally meant to drive the poor and oppressed out of the city. He practically calls Frank Gehry a fascist Speer clone. He becomes especially exorcised over a South Central mini-mall, which the developer would build only after the city agreed to install an LAPD substation on the premises. Before the mall was built, ghetto folks had no place to buy food in the neighborhood, but no business would move in without some way to protect its investment. Davis finds something untoward in all of this, & rumbles darkly about the alienating design of the substation and the machinations in the mayor's office. But, the mall was so popular with the neighborhood that it made twice as much money as the equivalent suburban mall, so the people shopping there did not feel particularly oppressed by the architect. I'd say it was win-win for everyone. Davis’ worst qualities come out in this discussion, He comes across as one of those liberals who says they want to “help” the ghetto, but then throws up every possible procedural and philosophical roadblock in front of the police, developers, and bureaucrats who would have to be involved. You can easily skip this chapter, and I would suggest that you do so.

Every time I pick this book up, I start to feel like it's not really written for me... it's written for some newly arrived L.A. denizen from 1990 or so. And I figure I'll put it down after the next page. And then Davis hits me with some amazing bit of weird trivia from left field - a discussion of urban planning will suddenly veer into a mini-biography of Jack Parsons (Crowley disciple, rocket scientist, free love advocate, explosive suicide), or a discussion of irrigation problems in the San Fernando Valley will turn into the forgotten white-supremacist writings of L.A.'s leaders at the turn of the last century.

It's a book I keep picking up again. A dense, terribly dated thing (NWA is described in detail as the vanguard of this new co-opted form of protest called "gangster rap"), with occasional flashes of brilliance.

Amazing decoding of oppressive infrastructure in L.A. Extremely dramatized, thick with conspiracy - but is never far from the truth about spatial control.

I like my urban histographies like I like my housing: dense, throughly placed in its historical setting, and built to serve the underepresented. Mike Davis delivers. City of Quartz is brimming with detsils spanning from the Hollywood myth-making of noir films like The Big Sleep, to the complexities of racial representation of the archdioses of LA, and even further into the hostile architecture of Frank Gehry (validated in my hatred for his work btw). This book while dense, is endlessly informative; more so than anything I'm more in awe with the level of research Davis put into this work. After reading his work, I feel more knowledagble about a city I don't even live in. Additionally, the knowledge of the continual resistance to neoliberal planning paints a potrait of how to build coalitions to drive effective urban movements. And while I will never forgive him for spelling NWA incorrectly (it's with an az not an ers sir), Davis writing and complete mastery over the L.A. landscape is informative, awe inspiring, and frankly a bit of fun.

Mike Davis is my hero!!!