Brilliant context for the world that I live in and that has shaped me. Does anyone know if there is a follow up that brings Davis’ work more up to date?

Davis analyses the minutae of Los Angeles city politics and its interactions with various interest groups from homeowners associations, the LAPD, architects, corporate raiders of old Fordist industries, powerful family dynasties, environmentalists, and the Catholic Church that moulded LA into an anti-poor urban hellscape.

Bit like the Romford Recorder.

This is the sort of book I recommend to friends when they ask me about why I'm interested in geography as a discipline. Davis maintains theoretical rigor while still presenting us with a readable, even journalistic account of the postmodern city. My sole major reservation is that Davis seems excessively pessimistic. While the postmodern city is indeed a fucked up environment, Davis really does ignore a lot of the opportunities for subversion that it offers, even as it tries to oppress us.

Mike Davis is from Bostonia. It's a community totally forgotten now but if you must know it was out in El Cajon, CA on the way to Lakeside. It had an awesome swapmeet where I spent a month of Sundays and my dad was a patron of the barbershop there. I like to think that Davis and I see things the same way becuase of that. He's a working class scholar (yeah, I know he was faculty at UCI and has a house in Hawaii) with a keen eye for all the layers of life in a city, especially the underclass. Utterly fascinating, this book has influenced my own work and life so much. It's social history, architecture, criminology, the personal is political is where you live and lay your head and where you come from and don't you know it's all connected. Some factual inconsistencies have come to light and Davis' other work (I've read it all) doesn't do much for me at all, but this book is amazing.

Mike Davis a scarily good – he's a top notch historian, a fine scholar and a political activist. His analysis of LA in City of Quartz is excellent – he unpacks the political economy of the sprawling suburban mass that takes up so much of southern California and influences so much of the world by delving into the lives, the influences, the cultural and economic existence that is the past and present LA. As one who avoids the place like the plague, Davis is one of the few reasons why I'd go: he makes me want to see, and at the same time points to world beneath the glitz.

"Los Angeles - far more than New York, Paris or Tokyo - polarizes debate: it is the terrain and subject of fierce ideological struggle."

Mike Davis's City of Quartz, provides a very detailed, if often rambling, history of the City of Los Angeles, from its early farming days when the arid desert land was essentially useless and one could buy all the land in Los Angeles County (adjusted for today's dollars) for less than Jeff Bezos paid for his recently acquired Beverly Hills mansion to it's rapid expansion - detailing the city's nimbyism, political dealings, real estate speculation, racism and so much more.

Having lived in Los Angeles for 10 years I read the book with avidity, a city that has things about it which I like, but many more things that I loathe.

"Los Angeles," Davis writes, "is . . . a stand-in for capitalism in general. The 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 same place, as Brecht noted [in Blakean fashion], symbolized both heaven and hell." Certainly seeing Los Angeles as a heaven or a hell is influenced by one's social class standing, race and ethnicity; but one's cultural lens also plays a role here - the vapidity and one-dimensionalism of Los Angeles culture made it hated by many European intellectual ex-pats in the post-war years (who left Los Angeles as quickly as possible for New York or to go back to Europe). It is a city with little or no respect for its history - it does an appalling job of preservation, where plans are always in the works for the next best thing, often the next more lucrative thing.

It's a city, like many large cities in the world, where there is a lot of wealth concentrated in very few hands and where those who own land of worth have a considerable influence in future development plans, even when such plans come at the expense of Angelenos as a whole; public transportation plans thwarted because rich neighborhoods don't want metro stops near their homes, parking restrictions in wealthy neighborhoods, the ever-growing homeless population shuffled around here and there without ever addressing the root problems of homelessness.

Davis, who grew up in nearby Fontana and spent most of his life in Southern California until his recent death, writes with a fiery prose, which makes evident that it is a subject he cares deeply about. There are two main ways one can love their hometown (or country) - by blindly supporting it without question through all of its follies or by questioning it and continuously challenging it because one loves it and knows it can be better. Davis, like a Pete Seeger type figure, falls into the latter camp. What he lacks in organization in this work, he makes up for in his passion for the subject, his broad base of knowledge, and for his deep humanism, qualities sorely lacking in the world. Though he left this world in October 2022, his writing lives on and in this there is hope.

3.5 rounded up. singular and idiosyncratic. I understand why this book is so revered, Davis is a great writer. some minor gripes and I didn’t like the ending. ultimately the main shortcoming of this ‘people’s history of LA’ is one that it couldn’t help: it was written before 1992.

I finished it. It is the most difficult Mike Davis book I have read. I read small portions of it in graduate school, a class on Theories of Urban Design. It is the concluding book of the trilogy I decided to read on my return from a trip to visit family in LA. The first was Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, number two - Reyer Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies," and thirdly, this monstrosity! On a return trip, without a doubt, I will look at the city with a radically different and more attuned eye to the spacial apartheid and class struggle that was so apparent in this book - chapter after chapter. It is very entertaining and is a smack up-side the head wake-up call to the reality of how the built environment of Southern California is controlled by a coterie of waspish downtowners - the Chandler Family of the LA Times, Jewish west-siders via the entertainment industry, the Catholic Church and the LAPD - Parker Center of Dragnet fame.

I can't help but think that since this polemic was written more than 25 years ago, things have gotten better. And because I want to believe that it has, I will have to read the 2006 updated version to see if the dark and depressing vision that Davis examined has had some sunlight.

Well, I just read the Preface of the 2006 edition of the book, written by Davis in April of that year in San Diego. Here are some quotes that I found stimulating and worthy of introspection
1. City of Quartz - in a nutshell - is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.
2. By the time I sat down to write City of Quartz, on the eve of Southern California's great postwar recession, Bradley's growth coalition was still intact, even triumphant, but it was fast losing control of its social landscape.

Davis goes on to address seven topics, or update what he wrote about in the original book as well as its reprinting in this 2006 issue. The seven are: REGIONAL (IM)MOBILITY, BRANCHVILLE, MANUFACTURING DECLINE, THE NEW INEQUALITY, TERMINAL SUBURBS, SPURNING THE PEACEMAKERS, CITY OF ORGANIZERS.

There is this comment from the last section on the organizers, about the labor movement, quite successful in LA, according to the author,
3. It requires an expansive vision and comprehensive program, yet the labor movement has mortgaged its future to a democratic party, large elements of which are in full retreat from traditional Democratic New Deal commitments. Thomas Frank wrote a scathing book about that very topic, and not just large elements, the entire fucking party is in full retreat!

And like those children in Aleppo, he concludes with this. At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, a lot of them, and that should be intolerable.

(4.5)

Obviously dated, but serves well as a “how did we get here” history. Not like things ever change anyway. It’s slanted and absent of solutions, though comprehensively detailed in its areas of focus. I’m happy to have my lefty assumptions pandered to. Sometimes I wish I’d been more worldly as a teenager—a SoCal baby commie—so I could have read and reflected on this in the present tense. But I suppose I should be happy for the years of blissful and privileged naïveté and ignorance, as opposed to getting an early start on soul-crushing cynicism.

A must-read for a resident or anyone even remotely interested in the history of Los Angeles.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker was the definitive book for understanding the modalities of power in the 20th century city. In Caro's story, power was anthropomorphized (and vilified) in the despotic person of Robert Moses, master-builder of New York City. City of Quartz updates that sprawling, kaleidoscopic depiction of the city on the west coast. But in some ways Davis' mural is more complex, more subtle. In L.A., power is ephemeral and fragmented; substance is ephemeral; reality (this is L.A., people) itself is ephemeral. And if we are to believe the subtitle of the book "Excavating the Future in Los Angeles," this book is not just about L.A.

Each chapter works as a self-contained story within his sprawling, imagistic, Michelangelesque mural of the city, which is made all the more stunning in that it's not a work of fantasy but of reportage. Through first-hand reporting, supported by exhaustive research, Davis travels into every dimension comprising L.A. and tells us how it fits into the whole: the ganglands, the orange groves, city hall, the hyper-securitized gated communities, the Catholic diocese, Skid Row, the Church of Scientology, the aerospace industry. This

This book made me realize how difficult reading can be when you don't already have a lot of the concepts in your head / aren't used to thinking about such things. However if I *were* thinking about such things I'd find it really rewarding to see all of them referenced. Really high density of proper nouns. I used wikipedia, or just agreed to have a less rich understanding of what was going on. In fact I think I used just enough google to get by. Anyway now I know that LA was built up on real estate speculation, once around 1880s (I think, not looking it up) with people coming in from the midwest, and again in the 1980s from Japanese investment. I also learned the word antipode, which this book loves, and first used to describe the sunshine/ noir images of LA, with noir being the backlash to the myth/ fantasy sold of LA. I wish the whole book were about the sunshine myth. The chapter about conflict between developers and homeowners was interesting, I previously hadn't thought about that at all. I did have some whiff of it from when my town tried to mandate that everyone's christmas lights be white, no colored or big bulbs or tacky blowup santas and lawn ornaments. And more recently a big to do about a Dunkin Donuts being built on Main Street and what it would look like. It looks very nice. Like a house. What else. A lot of the chapters by the end just seemed like random subjects, all of which I guess were central ideas pertaining to the city-- the Catholic church, a steel town called Fontana, some other stuff. None of which I had any idea about before. So it was fun to find out about it, and at some point I want to read this book's New York corollary.