5 Stars for the middle chapters ex. Power Lines, Fortress LA, etc

A materialist history largely devoid of jargon (though you may have to look up "latifundian") but dense with detail, unsparing, lacking all romance yet still dramatic and thrilling in its scope, this is the book to read if you want to truly understand Los Angeles

This is as good as I remember it…though more descriptive, less theoretical, easier to read. I guess practice (as a reader of such things) does make perfect.

This is a story of the ‘contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society’ (vi), but written in very unexpected ways. No doubt why it has become such a classic, and why so many people I’ve met here in London know Los Angeles through this book. I grapple with what exactly it says about globalisation, and it is primarily about a restructuring economy, the offshoring of industry, the plant closures. A little about L.A.’s new place in a Pacific Rim economy – but not enough, though I suppose that was new. In some ways this is like a set of different short stories that start with a little of the global, but are almost entirely about the local.

I love that it opens in the desert looking out towards LA. Llano – once a site of utopian socialist dreams, now another remote suburb of tract housing and social problems. I also love that the first chapter is the literary chapter – the inventing, debunking, mythologizing of L.A. From Morrow Mayo:

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash (17).

I still find it funny the iconic status that people claim for L.A., though Davis is nothing like Ed Soja or Michael Dear. Still, he writes ‘Los Angeles in this instance is, of course, a stand-in for capitalism in general. The ultimate world-historical significance—and oddity – of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism’ (18). Some claim it is where everything comes together, in the tradition of noir it is ‘the terminus of American history’. But I love this: ‘I am interested…not so much in the history of culture produced in Los Angeles, as the history produced about Los Angeles—especially where that has become a material force in the city’s actual evolution’ (20). Thus, he says, Los Angeles has only been planned or designed to a very small extent, ‘but infinitely envisioned’ (21). Neo-Marxist geographers as much as gangsta rappers remain part of this ‘official dream machinery’ (24).

It all begins with the boosters of course, that cabal of magical real estate investors led originally by Colonel Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler that practically reinvented L.A. as a union-free paradise, and using Charles Lummis and Helen Hunt Jackson and a coterie of other writers as literary mythologisers. White supremacy was prevalent among them: Lummis himself and the arroyo seco set, Abbott Kinney who was a fervent eugencist, Joseph Widney, early president of USC , booster, and author of Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (1907), arguing L.A.’s destiny was as the Aryan capital. All ‘investing real-estate speculation and class warfare with an aura of romantic myth’. (30) Some things never change. Then come a subset of heroes, the debunkers: Adamic, Mayo Morrow, McWilliams, muralists like Siquieros. Then a section on the writers of noir and those amazing films, my own personal favourites. The improbable presence of refugee intellectuals during WWII – somehow you imagine them all in NY, but Adorno was hanging out in LA, Horkheimer, Brecht. The close connections between corporations and scientific institutions, the mad mix of religious nutters. The current work of the L.A. School and a nod to UCLA’s Scott and Soja and Dear and the rest, working against today’s boosters of downtown money.

The chapter Power Lines is a great introduction to L.A. politics in broad strokes – there’s lots out there with all the details and it feels like they miss some of the big picture that way (I’m thinking Fogelson, or Sonnenshein). But I like that both things are out there…and it’s true that ‘Political power in Southern California remains organized by great constellations of private capital’, the more conservative old(er)-money downtown business interests (Otis and Chandler and the L.A. Times), the differently conservative and sometimes Liberal and a bit more Jewish Westside, and now as part of the Pacific Rim, the rise of a third head in the form of potential new competition. We can’t forget the good old days of the 20s and Harry Chandler, when L.A. was ‘in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail’ (114). Wealth was based on real estate and a ruling white elite kept its distance from a very large and diverse population. The 1950s saw the emergence of the Westside to challenge downtown’s dominance, partly around the wealth of S&L king Howard Ahmanson emerging from L.A.’s growing suburbanization along with other developers and bankers like Eli Broad and Mark Taper (their names are all over downtown buildings). They bankrolled Jesse Unruh’s time in the Assembly – his hold on CA politics was fairly astounding for a while there in the 1960s. Of course, land became less plentiful and developers and S&Ls consolidated or died out and then the Japanese came…real estate remains a central profit generator as industry has come and gone.

Homegrown Revolution: long and rambling and in the preface he said he was worried to read it again, but I think it’s one of the key chapters in the book really. No one had looked at this stuff before this way, especially as smart growth remains one of those buzz words. He writes:

The tap-root of slow growth in the South, however, is an exceptionalistic local history of middle-class interest formation around home ownership. Environmentalism is a congenial discourse to the extent that it is congruent with a vision of eternally rising property values in secure bastions of white privilege. The master discourse here – exemplified by the West Hills secessionists – is homestead exclusivism, whether the immediate issue is apartment construction, commercial encroachment, school busing, crime, taxes or simply community designation.
Slow growth in other words, is about homeowner control of land use and much more. Seen in the context of the suburban sociology of Southern California, it is merely the latest incarnation of a middle-class political subjectivity that fitfully constitutes and reconstitutes itself every few years around the defense of household equity and residential privilege. (159)

There it is. And ‘the starting point is to reconstruct the white-supremacist genealogy of its essential infrastructure: the homeowners’ association’ (160). He takes HA’s right back to their beginnings in enforcing racial deed restrictions and preserving neighbourhood homogeneity. He doesn’t forget the move to incorporate towns in order to preserve homogeneity and tax bases for their white occupants, documented so well by Miller in Cities by Contract. He writes ‘The basis of almost every residential incorporation in this era was the existence of a sharp gradient of home values between the inclusive community and the area intended for exclusion’ (167) Continues: ‘These myriad local manipulations of the ‘exit option’ by homeowner groups and business cliques have generated the current nonsense-jigsaw map of Southern California. One consequence of this ongoing process – Lakewood Plan populations now exceed one and a half million in Los Angeles County – has been the extension of residential segregation across a vast metropolitan space’ (168). His summary can’t really be beaten:

the Lakewood Plan and the Bradley-Burns Act gave suburban homeowners a subsidized ‘exit option’ as well as a powerful new motive for organizing around the ‘protection’ of their home values and lifestyles. The ensuing maximization of local advantage through incorporation and fiscal zoning – whether led by affluent homeowners or business fractions—inevitably produced widening racial and income divides. And, by eroding the tax base of the city of Los Angeles, this fiscal-driven spatial restructuring precipitated more bitter, zero-sum struggles between the affluent homeowner belts of the Westside and Valley, and a growing inner-city population dependant upon public services. As we shall see later, part of the logic of the 1978 tax revolt, which burned over the Valley in particular, was to equalize advantages between Los Angeles’s ‘captive’ white suburbanites and the residents of the Lakewoodized periphery’. (169)

Why had I never put together the Lakewood Plan – allowing small areas to incorporate by contracting with the county for services and initially pay for them through sales rather than property tax, ensuring for years that many paid almost no or sometimes no property tax at all – and prop 13?

So all of these efforts were part of what Davis argues was the establishment of Fishman’s bourgeouis utopias, roughly from 1920 through 1960. Since then, homeowners have been working to defend them, both against unwanted development and unwanted people. Whereas the first period saw little conflict between homeowners and development – with developers mobilizing homeowners to establish exclusive enclaves—after 1965, new development became a threat, as remaining open spaces were filled in and apartments and such built to create density. This is when environmentalism is rolled out to preserve space – and value. This provoked the battle to maintain sprawl, and the so-called tax revolt of the late 70s, and it was homeowner associations that led the charge. The anti-tax rhetoric also drew on the need to protect homes from ‘the encroachment of inner-city populations on suburbia’ (183). More and more whites left Los Angeles all together, many citing the need to escape L.A.U.S.D. as the primary reason. Others pointed to an overburdened sewer system, the breakdown of the Hyperion plant, and smog to call for slow growth.

slow-growth Know-Nothingism, by its very nature, seems to be creeping toward Malthusian final solutions. Thus, at a 1987 conference of Not Yet New York, the Westside slow-growth alliance, one group advocated a statewide ‘Elbow Room’ initiative that would seal the border with Mexico, drastically reduce inmigration of all kinds, and impose obligatory family planning. (209)

And then there’s this beauty of a quote from Henry George, 1869

It is a universal fact that where the value of land is the highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution. To see human beings in the most abject, the most helpless and hopeless condition, you must go, not to the unfenced prairies…but to the great cities where the ownership of a little patch of ground is a fortune’ (209)

Fortress L.A.: the argument that ‘we live in ‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor’.(224) Again, this chapter on the rise of a new kind of built environment that through its form disciplines society is incredibly thought-provoking. We see the rise also of private security – ‘less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from ‘unsavory’ groups and individuals, even crowds in general (224). This, then, is the destruction of public space, Davis argues it is the extension of ‘class war (sometimes a continuation of the race war of the 1960s) at the level of the built environment (228).

Davis really is the master of the pithy insight. A favourite quote about downtown L.A.:

The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to raze all association with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of its future (229).

Rather than draw on the past (however horribly, as Faneuil Hall in Boston or the gaslamp district), L.A. chose to raze all of Bunker Hill and rebuild a defensible City Core there, fleeing from the old downtown still vibrant through its use by low-income communities of color. It is only now that that is starting to change. Thus in Bunker Hill it is trying to make a safe space that is comfortable for ‘respectable’ people, even as it declares war on the poor and the homeless only a few blocks away. All public toilets have been removed, the benches are now barrel-shaped to make them uncomfortable if used for any length of time. Parks and quasi-public spaces are maintained only inside buildings where they can be controlled in ‘miniature paradigms of privatization’ (234). Frank Gehry is named the architect of the bunker (though in spite of every political feeling I love his design for the Disney Hall), malls become panopticons, walled communities hunker down behind their gates. The LAPD has substituted technology for man power in its own bunkered command center. The boom in prisons has not bypassed L.A. either, with nearly 25,000 prisoners held (at the time of writing) within three miles of city hall (254).

The Hammer & the Rock: Davis doesn’t forget about South Central, about the police, and about crack. The way the epidemic hit South Central, and the way the L.A.P.D. hit it harder with its anti-gang sweeps known as HAMMER, criminalizing not just kids but also their families. Thus, the demonization of an entire generation—though mostly restricted to kids of color of course—and their imprisonment en masse. I love most the sections that talk about the kids themselves, how they’ve tried to organize themselves for better rather than for worse. And he doesn’t forget how this sits in the larger picture, where 40% of families in South Central were living in poverty. That this is the decade of plant closures and the end of decent jobs for working-class youth in these communities of color, both Black and Brown. All that the civil rights struggle had won in getting these jobs and places in the union was wiped out in a single decade. It’s not a big jump to then move on the ‘Political Economy of Crack’.

Since the late 1970s, every major sector of the Southern California economy, from tourism to apparel, has restructured around the increasing role of foreign trade and offshore investment. Southcentral L.A., as we have indicated, has been the main loser in this transformation, since Asian imports have closed factories withour creatuing compensatory economic opportunities for local residents. The specific genius of the Crips has been their ability to insert themselves into a leading circuit of international trade. Through ‘crack’ they have discovered a vocation for the ghetto in L.A.’s new ‘world city’ economy’ (309).

I doubt many people are asking themselves, where is the church in all of this political economy? But Davis argues they should be, New Confessions helps explain why, through outlining the power wielded by the Catholic Church. An important consideration in a city that has such a large population of latinos (though more are deserting traditional Catholicism for more charismatic forms), apart from the church’s own substantial holdings in real estate and over 15,000 employees. Apart from the split within the church itself between support of liberation theology and struggle with the poor for their rights as against the more powerful faction (and the faction in power) which has supported the status quo and the establishment, clamping down on its own ranks. Another layer of politics, and an important one.

The book ends with Junkyard of Dreams, a fascinating look at the suburb of Fontana, once billed as a small farmer’s Eden, until the chicken farms and orchards were turned into a Steelmaking company town. Industry has left but the town still hangs on, it even spawned the Hell’s Angels. Here, Davis states, Soja’s description’s of L.A.’s ‘depthless present’ are undone as the past is never fully erased (376). Fontana is where the KKK rode, where activist O’Day Short was murdered with his young family in a fire for attempting to breach the color line. The home of Kaiser steel, long since converted into the health care giant. The attempt to redevelop the town, which forced locals out and brought angry KKK members back out onto the streets. The bubble rose brightly for a time, but then burst. These last two chapters make this book feel as much a mosaic as Soja could ask for though, an attempt to tell a number of widely disparate stories to give some idea of the whole sprawling extraordinary conglomeration that is L.A.

There is no conclusion. I hate writing them myself, so I applaud this really. Yet part of me wants a reassembling of all of these parts, a reminder of the argument that ties them all together. This is all about globalization, right? But it doesn’t feel that way. It is more, way more, and also maybe a little less.

So I go back to the newest preface, as this reprint is ten years on from the original. He looks at the major characteristics and reasons for pessimism for L.A.’s future, I think above all this book is one of pessimism, and that is perhaps my greatest critique. Having lived and fought there for so many years, it is a bleak place that will break your heart into pieces. At the same time, the activism that is happening there is some of the most interesting and most vibrant I have seen anywhere, it certainly outstrips anything happening in the UK, I can’t even describe by how much. He does mention it, but an aside can’t do justice to it. Still, all of these troubling facts are certainly true:

1. Regional (im)mobility – new development and no adequate infrastructure

2. Branchville – all those mega-corporations are still headquartered elsewhere

3. Manufacturing decline – by 1990 most of the fordist industry that once provided thousands of good jobs were all gone, and many of the light industrial jobs that had replaced them in the 1980s were also going to maquiladoras and China. California’s military-industrial economy had once brought in the Federal dollars, but now LA is like Detroit and other struggling cities, paying more in taxes than they get back from the federal government.

4. Growing inequality – hospitals are shutting down, the educational system isn’t working, real household incomes are falling and ‘Luxury lifestyles are subsidized, as it were, on both ends: by a seemingly infinite supply of cheap service labor, and by the tax advantages that accrue to real-estate and sumptuary consumption’ (xiv)

5. Terminal suburbs—‘Fifteen years ago it was apparent that residential development had reached the last frontier of available land within an hour of the coast…The dirt is almost gone.’ (xiv-xv)

6. Spurning the Peacemakers—‘Homicide is still the largest cause of death for children under eighteen in Los Angeles County’ (xv)

The only optimism? (7) A City of Organizers, and it is that. There’s some amazing stuff going on in L.A.

Un travail rare, qui combine à la fois sociologie urbaine et géographie, histoire et histoire des idées. Mike Davis revient sur l'histoire de la cité des Anges depuis la fin du XIXème siècle, une histoire faite de spéculateurs fonciers, de racisme, et d'urbanisation à outrance. Los Angeles, de ville pour ainsi dire sans grand intérêt devient une métropole tentaculaire, qui matérialise la lutte des classes (je veux dire par là via l'architecture et le mobilier urbain, notamment le mobilier dit "anti SDF"). Le chapitre qui m'a le plus marqué est consacré à la militarisation de la police de Los Angeles notamment suite aux "émeutes" (Davis, à l'image des Black Panthers préfère le terme de rébellion) de Watts.
Pour Davis Los Angeles est le prototype de la ville du futur, un futur qui n'a rien de particulièrement joyeux, puisqu'il est caractérisé par les pauvres (c'est à dire les latinos et les Noirs) parqués dans des ghettos, soumis au harcèlement policier constant, et par les plus aisés (notons que la classe moyenne tendait à l'époque de l'écriture du livre, à disparaître) qui vivent dans des véritables forteresses urbaines, avec milice privé et des murs de "protection" à la clé.

There's a lot to say about this book! It is a somewhat left-leaning history of Los Angeles that was written in 1990, and is split into eight sections (counting the prologue): The story of socialist suburb Llano del Rio; the history of LA's dueling narratives as epitomizing either the American dream or a futuristic dystopia; history of LA's regional political and economic elites; the political rise of the Homeowners; the rise of police state architecture; the story of the LAPD's war on poor and brown people; the history of LA's Catholic Diocese; and finally, Fontana.
City of Quartz has aged pretty well. It puts events just a few years later, such as the Rodney King Riots and even the OJ phenomenon in perspective, and it even illuminates our current economic and political difficulties (especially the real-estate feeding frenzy crisis). The in-depth cultural and historical commentary (and the footnotes) reminded me of Infinite Jest.

The ultimate world-historical significance -- and oddity -- of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.

The enormity of the subject is reflected in this protean book, one of such distinct (almost disparate) chapters, each almost at odds with each other in an assemblage as pasted-on as the utilities must be in the emerging communities which are tacked on to the greater metropolitan area. The opening section on the art of LA, or perhaps the art against LA. The section is very intriguing and then suddenly after exploring the exiled auteur and writers who washed upon its shores, there are digressions into the phenomenon of noir and the marginalized poetry swarms which coexisted amongst the minorities, the destitute and other rank and file preterit. This occurs until the fortress LA mentality chases out the homeless, the communists and the narco-terrorists. Art then isn't mention for a couple hundred pages until an anecdote about Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann walking near the bay when they noticed the beach covered which is first assumed to be caterpillars but is then recognized as thousands of condoms washing ashore from a water treatment plant.

Land development and property speculation are the engines of Los Angeles. Water is the hidden history, everyone can assume their John Huston accent here in recounting such. Keeping despised communities enclosed in their areas isn't cost effective and the consequent strain on infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. I am afraid I am being euphemistic. Mike Davis is screaming disaster is nigh; he does this on every page. we are watching much of it in real time. yet the City of Angels with its storied dream factories is still a sufficient magnet for folks to stream to from across the globe despite all these attendant risks.
3.2 stars -- rounded up

Polemical but so so so insightful. Just read chs 1-5 and come learn about malice and power throughout the history of Los Angeles.

As a native of Los Angeles, I really enjoyed reading this great history on that city - which I have always had an intense love/hate relationship with. At times I think of it as the world's largest ashtray - other times I am struck by the physical beauty and the feeling I get when I'm there, (which is largely nostalgic these days).

But Davis starts in the days when LA was little more than Mexican farmland and deconstructs the political history of the place - revealing the east side - west side rivalries, intrigue among scientologists, the imperialist architecture of the barrios, and construction of prisons, among many other topics. Highly recommended for anyone desiring to examine the extremes in society, politics and culture that inhabit this enormous west-coast city.

“I tried to imagine how a native of Manhattan would feel, suddenly discovering the New York Public Library’s stone lions discarded in a New Jersey wrecking yard. I suppose the Sesig lions might be Southern California’s summary, unsentimental judgment on the value of its lost childhood.”

Unapologetically left. I knew that heading in, but did not realize how explicitly Marxist it was! It starts off by setting the scene of the real-life early-century socialist commune. Which reminds me of that great MAD MEN quote: “They taught us at Barnard about that word, 'utopia'. The Greeks had two meaning for it: 'eu-topos', meaning the good place, and 'u-topos' meaning the place that cannot be.” Davis knows this though! He’s not lamenting it, he’s just contrasting it against modern LA, where he says the capitalist rot has set in.

Given that this came out in 1990, boy was he right about so much! In so many respects was it ahead of its time, especially when it comes to HOAs and NIMBYs. I honest to god didn’t even think these terms existed in 1990! But that’s also depressing too. If folks like Davis were as prophetic about suburbanites’ unquenchable desire for security almost 25 years ago and absolutely nothing has been done to address it head-on in the intervening years, what hope is there?

And even on issues that were very much of its time (like attitudes towards the Bloods and the Crips), the same mentality can be applied to today with things like street takeovers.

And I think he’s careful to not say money and wealth are bad inherently. It’s just that time and time again, the victims tend to be the economically disadvantaged. The wealth is deliberately confined.

Lastly, I cannot express enough how sharp his tongue is. Even if I don’t agree with all of his takes or think the argument is flimsy, Davis writes with such biting humor sometimes, it’s impossible not to be impressed.

A celebrated work, one of the essential readings for anyone interested in the social and political fabric of this most intriguing, beguiling monstrous of urban spaces. The book is certainly scholarly (the footnotes themselves make great reading), and it takes some effort to read. This is no booster-like `fable' about LA.

Interestingly, Davis is a Marxist, and I have not often come across mainstream works by Americans in that political tradition, and that in itself would, for some, make it worth reading. However, ultimately I was a little disappointed in the book in light of first having read Norman Klein's `The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory' (see review under that title).
In the end I find Davis's view unrelentingly bleak. He has no time for urban renewal projects, dismissing them as furthering the interests merely of the middle class and the powerful. Klein by contrast lives in a mixed suburb close to downtown (Angelino Heights) and is enthusiastic about the possibilities thrown up by his experiences there. Davis, I have read, lives in the uppermiddle class enclave of Pasadena.

I agree with Davis's thesis that empowerment and placing decision-making directly in the hands of the dispossessed will ultimately provide the way out, but I felt he was just a bit too dismissive (sneering? Perhaps too strong a word...) of the emergent black middle class, and the desire to escape the `flatlands' - the neighbourhoods in southern LA created through blatant racism and apartheid-like policies.

As for the new barrios of the San Fernando Valley, surely the whole community is ultimately going to have to be involved in finding solutions if the apocolypse is to be avoided. Occasionally I get the feeling Davis would prefer the `scorched earth' solution.

There is a lot to be learned from this book. As an outsider, I was astounded by the social geographic history of this city. Race covenants preventing people from ling in designated towns, suburbs, streets, houses were a stark form of apartheid. The brutality of the LAPD is equally as stark, and a good reminder to a person brought up on a steady diet of Hollywood sitcom and cop shows that reality is far uglier than the image.

Yet, the other global image of LA, as a hell-hole of crime and no-go ghettos (no go to outsiders) is scarily depicted as well. I did experience visiting an LA school in a tough neighbourhood, where armed guard security officers checked you in and out, and jail-like walls surrounded the campus (happily, once inside though, it was a very calm and normal environment). I am not blinkered about the awful side of LA, but I think Davis is altogether too nihilistic.

Nevertheles, I would highly recommend this book for a thought-provoking read

Always a gem of a refresher to re-read Mike Davis and remind myself about the evil machinations of developers (of all kinds), and the role they play in ruining and tainting basically everything: progressive city planning, Public ownership or power, good jobs with living wages, community and youth resources,neighborhoods... just everything! I think it might be a little too Insider baseball for the uninitiated policy/socialist/public goods wonk- font size is also small, dense heavy text, but overall totally worth it if you’re interested in reading L.A. history and city planning. A bit dark and grim to read, but might be the fiery kick in the pants you need to pay attention, get active, and join movement orgs to work!