Customer Reviews

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Haymarket)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This may be a book only LA natives can really "get". Judging by some of the other reviews, not getting it seems pretty common. For me, it was a hilarious/horrific view of the city in which I grew up. The message is - LA is the city of the future and this is why that's bad. Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with everything he says, but everything he says provokes thought.
As to the inaccuracy of his facts - I'd love to hear what he's wrong about. The picture he paints certainly reflects the LA I grew up in - the ponzi-like real estate development industry, the general disregard for the region's history, including the marginalization of the region's native "resident aliens", the monumental mismanagement of the city's downtown. You can call it all Marxist crap, but it you grew up in the unpleasant, incongruous, LaLaLand that sprouted as a result of the non-Marxist crap, this book might strike a chord with you.
It is a bit preachy, and the writing is not universally exceptional, but when it hits the mark, it hits the mark.

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

I noticed a phrase used by one of the reviewers above, which prompts me to write. That phrase concerned Davis' alleged ignorance of Orwell's rule concerning the writing of clear prose. In reality, Davis' writing is remarkably clear, and as a matter of fact for some people that counts as a point against Davis. That is, the major debate among university leftists today, especially in disciplines like literature where, oddly enough, Orwell is thought of as a kind of reactionary, following Adorno and Horkheimer's denunciation of clear writing as a tool of the "culture industry" and a tyrannization of thought. The problem is however that by increasingly spending their time on problems like this, intellectual leftists have very little time left over for books like Davis', which is maybe why the right-wing has such power in setting the terms of the debate today. On the other hand, of course, it is hard to know how we are going to get beyond the terms of our present debate without the work being done in our universities. Still, I think that Davis' book is a good one, and as for these alleged mistakes of fact, well, that is what everyone always says about leftist books-even though after a while they usually check out. Davis in short is in a tough position: to the academics he doesn't look radical enough, while to everyone else he looks plenty radical. I would say that I would like to see more books like Davis'; I think there needs to be more popularization of the sorts of ideas being kicked around in the hallways of our universities. To academics, that risks the purity of their thought, but that sort of thinking seems to me to put the cart before the horse. Keep it up, Mr. Davis, and let there be more like you.

Mike Davis writes a well-researched, fascinating, insightful account of the evolution and culture of "post-modern" Los Angeles from the perspective of the political/cultural left. His book is filled with gold nuggets of information and interpretation regarding the inner workings of one of the world's most fascinating metropolitan areas. However, what bothered me about the book was the haughty, sanctimonious tone of much of Davis' prose. Apparently, Davis believes that only people from the neo-Marxist left are motivated by a genuine desire for social justice or environmental quality. Everyone else is portrayed as having a hidden agenda of self-interest, one way or another. The wealthier classes are presented in reductionist fashion as selfish persecutors of the less fortunate, and the underprivileged themselves are one-dimensionally victims of this persecution. This myopic aspect of leftist interpretation is insulting to the actual people of greater Los Angeles, who in reality are motivated by a complex mixture of individual ambition, fear, idealism, and "class interest," and are hardly the shallow stereotypes that Davis portrays them to be. The holier-than-thou tone of Davis' narrative becomes tiresome after a time, and reflects one major reason for the continued unpopularity of leftist thinking in this country.

Mike Davis excavates the history of the future as lived and dreamed in Los Angeles. Davis is a gifted writer, and a gifted intellect. But, he doen't let his intellect blind him to the social complexities of life in the new urban spaces. While other contemporary intellectuals are busy flattering themselves or those they would identify with, the upwardly mobile, Davis offers a completely other possibility for culture and the intellect; his intellect is not window dressing nor the mark of some ersatz high culture crudely associated with money and class, his gift is work, hard work. You know how much hard work he has put into trying to understand and excavate his beloved, no less beloved for being so ugly, Los Angeles, from the first sentence of the book. And his work is a gift to the rest of us, that we may begin to humanize our cities again. We may, if we realize just what a hell we have created for ourselves and how it could be different. The story of how the postmodern city came to be is not written in stone nor was it ever predetermined; it is idiosyncratic and contingent and vulnerable to change in the future.

The fine crafting of the sentences, the tremendous intellectual dexterity, and the insights into just what it is we are living are the product of hard work. This writer is a laborer, one whose work inspires hope even as he uncovers a truth that many would forever bury: We are at war against the poor and not only do we not care, we don't even notice. Why? Read this book.

I'd just like to offer a voice of temperance after reading a number of the reviews here. The boogeyman mentions of Davis' "Marxist" leanings are worthy of the McCarthy hearings. The mock citations of the type "All the other books I read in the field are much better" are proof of the reviewers' pretentiousness rather than a comment on the value of Davis' book. And, the ad hominem attacks against Davis are unfortunate and probably fueled by the envy of the young and non-published towards Davis as a productive scholar who doesn't seem like he's going away anytime soon. All of which is to say, forget the negative reviews and give City of Quartz a read. It was an insightful, even shocking, book when I read it years ago and continues to make for a solid supplement to a lived experience and a wide-range of contrasting readings on L.A. (as well as a good antidote against the boosterism and dreamy-eyed tripe that often goes around about our city).

The spirit of the book is symbolized by the cover photo - a stunning but unusual high rise that upon closer examination turns out to be a high rise prison.

Although Davis is a leftist, he usually refrains from emotional rants, although it's safe to say he never met a person in a position of power that he liked. In any event, the excesses of LAPD have been too extreme for even an ardent conservative to defend. While outsiders think of LA as a bastion of liberalism, Davis describes how every aspect of the city is riddled by hypocrisy as Angelenos pursue selfish (and often racist) goals behind a facade of liberal rhetoric. The greatest flaw of this 1990 book is that its discussion of politics, focusing on the 70s and 80s, has become severely dated.

The seven chapters cover: (1) A history of LA intellectual thought, (2) evolution of the business elite from the 1840s to the 1980s, (3) the role of homeowners' associations as de facto municipal governments and their role of keeping renters and non-whites bottled up in certain neighborhoods, (4) the obsession with crime and how it has exacerbated anti-pedestrian design approaches, (5) the war between the LAPD and Black gangs, (6) internal politics of the Catholic church, and (7) history of the blue collar suburb of Fontana, tracing its evolution from farming community to steel-milltown to rustbelt.

This book is an outstanding synthesis of architectural and urban studies, political and intellectual history, and good-old marxist polemics. The major lesson to draw from this book is that LIBERALISM IN AMERICA IS OVER. This is exemplified most profoundly in the chapter entitled "The Hammer and The Rock," where Davis makes the case that the LAPD's wars on drugs, gangs, and other things a racist might associate with inner-city youth amount to a neo-colonial occupation of poor (mostly colored) LA. This chapter is also widely credited with anticipating the 1992 uprisings.

As to the complaints others have lodged against Davis fact-checking and his general tone: these charges are at best specious and at worst libel. First of all, the book is impeccably documented and annotated, having been originally published by a reputable academic publisher (Verso). Second, his general point of political orientation and critique is unapologetically leftist. Not leftist as most American's (mis)understand the term --- i.e. hopelessly naive, pacificist, "tolerant," and so on --- but leftist in the venerable tradition of Marx and Engels, where it is assumed that there is ultimately no war but class war and never too much to know about the problems with ruling class methods of exploitation under capitalism. This means that Davis compensates for the paucity of justice in the world by injecting his rhetoric with equal helpings of sarcasm, irony, and, above all, humanity.

If you prefer books that find the Aristotelian "happy medium" between competing perspectives, this is not a book for you. If, on the other hand, you want to read a prophetic work of history that exemplifies what the application of good scholarship can be, this is your book.

But the bottom line is books like this are crucial and important. Yes, the book is very one-sided, yes it loses focus from time to time and has the tone of an adolescent striking out at any authority around him, and yes Davis name drops with such profusion it gives his book (especially second chapter) the air of trying to cover gaps in the argument with pseudo-journalistic-intellectualist mystification. None of that makes the stunningly depressing and downright scary story of how LA became the fakest, most hypocritical, most neo-fascist, the most violent, and in many ways the most un-American and simultaneously most American urban "situation" of them all, any less true. The best part of the book is the consideration of public space, the relationship between real estate prices, home equity, tax bases, racism and the proto-fascism of the LAPD. THis is a far more developed and historically informed critique of the racism and obscene consumer paradises based around it than you will ever find in a rap album or a John Singleton movie. A book that will haunt you for a long, long time...

I read in exhilarated confusion Mike's twisted fable. Sure the prose is devoid of the usual rationalism associated with a book devoted to the "serious social sciences," So what! Anyone who has ever tried to create a rational framework in which to study the social phenomena that is LA will soon find themselves amongst a city who social and cultural roots permutate at ever increasing speed. Quite simply, LA cannot be explained rationally. It is in unravelling this chaos through a combination of prose, quasi rationalism and pure conjecture that City of Quartz imposes an order to this city and creates a meaningful perspective from which to view this wonderful city and its peculiar inhabitants.