Last updated on April 19, 2019
Mike Davis is not wholly a professor, an urban theorist or a sociologist, but he is the most controversial of any of those professions. All at once he has been described as a city-hating socialist, a one-time communist, a self-proclaimed Marxist, and an apocalyptic masculinist. Perhaps no academic has been more acclaimed, more reviled, or otherwise more talked about in the past 25 years than Davis. This, of course, makes him the envy of every UCLA professor espousing weightless theory from their endowed chairs.
The root of his notoriety is City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Immediately upon its release in 1990, the book became a sensation. Southern California was lucky. Not only did a homegrown wunderkind publish the most explosive urban study of the late-20th century, that creation was about Los Angeles, about us. Not two years after its release it earned canonical status.
That designation did not come without social consequence. A quick Google search of City of Quartz will reveal that the book is routinely deemed prophetic; it is famous for “predicting” the 1992 riots that swept through the plains of Los Angeles. But City of Quartz is not a documentary. In an updated preface, Davis downplays his clairvoyance, while also reaching down into his endless well of contempt for the Los Angeles Times, saying, “Although the owners of a certain graying newspaper on Spring Street may have missed the obvious omens, every eleven-year old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming.”
Davis goes on to clarify the thesis of his seminal text, “City of Quartz—in a nutshell—is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.” However, it is neither mere reportage, nor abstract ideological treatise, though both are incorporated into the text. City of Quartz, at its core, is an update on the Southern Californians introduced in An Island on the Land. But where Carey McWilliams employs a pen, Davis wields a machete.
Davis’s check-up on McWilliams’s subjects fifty years later reveals a gruesome social landscape: public goods and services are privatized, runaway economic inequality is the accepted norm, the homeless are permanent street refuges, the mentality disabled are jailed away from an increasingly segregated society without proper care, and the working class vies for the few resources the ruling class decided not to accrue for itself.
Viewed from this angle, his predicting the riots was inevitable. The writing was “visible on every graffiti-covered wall.” As the Downtown coterie tripped over itself searching for Japanese investment dollars, Davis looked at parts of the city that no one else cared about, and wrote what no else wanted to pay attention to.
The Hollywood exceptionalism presented by McWilliams provides Davis a perfect foundation to support his findings. The former makes the comparatively genteel observation that “the elite live outside Hollywood [proper] in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Santa Monica, the Hollywood Hills, and San Fernando Valley.” In City of Quartz, the latter explodes that notion open. “We live in ‘fortress cities’,” Davis laments, “brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor.”
Davis digs in further and refuses to let go. “Hollywood’s pop apocalypse and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive, in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface in the wake of the social polarizations of the Reagan era,” he posits. “Images of carceral inner cities [in the movies] only extrapolate from actually existing trends.”
Hollywood is no longer an exception, the self-selecting socioeconomic outlier of Los Angeles. The rest of Southern California society rose to its stratified heights, but, ironically, only the phantasmagoric creations of the movie industry can recognize modern realities.
Davis generalizes the cinematic metaphor and offers a sweeping indictment of the neoliberal cityscape. The sunny veneer—or a “triumphal gloss”—of post-modern, globalized Los Angeles “is laid over the brutalization of inner-city neighborhoods and the increasing South Africanization of its spatial relations. Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles.”
Once, only Hollywood hid behind the Paramount gates and retreated to tony enclaves. Now, nearly every white, non-working class population seeks refuge from the public sphere. They renege on their social responsibilities and cower from the consequences of their imposed segregation.
Davis is obsessively critical of globalization and its discriminatory forces. City of Quartz isn’t a discussion, it’s a scorched earth condemnation of the macroeconomic policy and social philosophy that has taken root since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. His damning sentences rain down like bullets from a machine gun of a mind. His book could be viewed as liberal, if only the Democratic party possessed even a tenth of Davis’s gall.
When Davis breaks from the party he would ostensibly support, he is at his most incisive. Of course, Democrats pay lip service to the poor and minorities, and are critical of the increasing economic equality seen over the past 40 years, but Davis does not give them an inch. The Los Angeles Democratic party, led by the administration of Mayor Bradley, is complicit in—or even at fault for—the revanchism that has taken root in Los Angeles.
Over the past forty years, Democrats implemented an agenda of centrism and pragmatism: a charade of bipartisanship. All the while, conservatives dug their heels into the newly hyper-stratified social landscape, and held fast to their racist, xenophobic ideologies. Democrats were pulled rightward, and they stood no chance by the time foreign investors circled the city’s wagons in the 1980s. The Japanese wanted to build skyscrapers. The wilting liberals certainly were not going to stop them.
The “revitalization” of post-modern Downtown Los Angeles represented by “the emerging Pacific Rim financial complex which cascades, in rows of skyscrapers, from Bunker Hill southward along the Figueroa corridor” is the scene to Davis’s liberal lashing. Not only is its architecture undemocratic— “… the new financial district is best conceived as a single, demonically self-referential hyper-structure, a Miesian skyscape raised to dementia”—so too is its conception. “When Downtown’s new ‘Gold Coast’ is viewed en bloc from the standpoint of its interactions with other social areas and landscapes in the central city,” Davis points out, “the ‘fortress effect’ emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as a deliberate socio-spatial strategy.”
Liberals can espouse the benefits of social programs, recite Keynesian economic data, and build multiethnic voting coalitions, but they prove entirely inept in putting their ideology into practice. In fact, the machinations of their strategy led ironically, even beautifully, to the realization of neoliberal’s fantasy: “to raze all association with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of its future.”
The articulation of these institutional and organizational forces is Davis’s greatest gift in City of Quartz to my progressive peers. The current generation—the “Resistance”—has seemingly given up on socioeconomic ideology and reintroducing a social government. We protest at airports, march for equal pay, and feign incredulity at our president’s tweets. In doing so, we sacrifice nothing, and continue to complain about the homeless infringing upon the sidewalks of our mixed-use, gentrified apartment pleasure-plexes.
Davis implicitly rails against such reformism in City of Quartz and explicitly does so in interviews. Incremental and superficial liberal victories will do nothing to stem growing economic inequality or liberate formerly public goods and services from the private equity enclaves of Beverly Hills or, now, Downtown.
Today’s leftist urbanites may not be struck by Davis’s sarcastic, manic, and even desperate barrage of words—if there is one characteristic that defines Millennial digital literature it is breathless incredulity— but Davis provides more substance in City of Quartz than everything published on Vox combined. He takes nothing for granted in the socioeconomic landscape of near present-day Los Angeles. By doing so, he poses an uncomfortable question to the airport protester: now you care?
As An Island on the Land gives us a past to contextualize the present, City of Quartz gives us a harrowing view into a dystopic future that, despite our greatest rainbow flag-waving efforts, continues to be realized, evidenced by the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, the Great Recession, Ferguson, and the countless murders of minorities perpetrated by the police. City of Quartz will continue to predict social calamities until liberals realize Davis’s story is a not a window, but a mirror.
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