City of Quartz : Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Rating:
Summary: Despairing
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Forgettable
Review: As a student of urban development and politics, I can confidently say that this book is a forgettable work of a parochial mind. Davis offers a hardline Marxist view of Los Angeles that, by employing simply economic analysis, does not allow for the intricacies of the city's problems. Class warfare plays a much smaller role in the sprawl of Los Angeles -- anyone outside of the ISO should be discouraged from reading this baseless drivel.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, flawed
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: A Visitor's Viewpoint
Review: I have lost count of the number of times I have visited LA (privately, never on business) over the last 39 years. My own little piece of the city, up on the bluff by Loyola Marymount, has hardly changed in all that time. Playa del Rey beach has gone rather quiet because of the extension of the runways at LAX and that's about it -- until you go down the hill on Lincoln, a matter of a few hundred yards, and then you're into the real LA with a city within a city under construction, the Marina bigger than ever and the skyscrapers visible when the smog permits. In 1963 City Hall was the highest building in town.

Every visit has taken me downtown. Plenty of it is still scruffy like in 1963, but in recent years I have been able to go to Otello and symphony concerts. I have been to east LA and I have been to Bel Air, I have watched the ethnic mix visibly change and I have seen people become more careful than before even in placid Westchester. The most interesting new building seems to me the Taj Mahony as I have seen it called in the LA Times, and one of the most interesting chapters in this book is concerned with Cardinal Roger M. himself. Padre Rogelio came up on the left, (not the Marxist left obviously) as a champion of the hispanic poor and I wonder why he needs a new cathedral. Was the damage to the old one in the North Ridge quake really that bad, or is ostentation necessary if you are going to count at all in LA? Are those skyscrapers really earthquake-proof (I have read Arthur C Clarke's Richter 10) or do you just have to have skyscrapers to be taken seriously as a city? I am not religious, but the most interesting question of biblical criticism has always seemed to me to be 'What did they do in Gomorrah?'. If the rich barricaded themselves in fortress-compounds and builded themselves towers even unto the sky and the high priest joined them in a not inconsiderable effort of his own it is not hard to imagine a few parallels if, God forbid, the Big One ever strikes. Mike Davis's basic theme is not too far from this. LA has had its share of natural troubles over the years I have known it -- fires, floods and some mercifully 'minor' quakes, but the 1992 riots illustrate his main thesis which is that LA could be riding for a bad fall through social tensions, and high-profile instances of repressive policing are further grist to his mill. Whether any of this counts as neo-Marxist etc I neither know nor care, and I cannot comment on his accuracy or otherwise but it's hard to think of a viewpoint that could see all this as anything but plausible. I can quite understand the reservations that have been voiced about his tone and his style, but these are side-issues. This is not fiction.

Me, I love the place. This is mainly because of the people I am privileged to know there, but it has magic just for itself, for me anyway. On the other hand that just makes me privileged too in my own degree. The first thing that struck me on my latest visit to America, for some reason, was the omnipresent injunction 'Eat, Eat, Eat'. A sociologist friend tells me that
80% of Americans are clinically obese. Whatever one's views about inequality, repression and what have you, the underlying issue seems to me to be that our rate of consumption is simply unsustainable, and that a world economy based on growth has to come to an end somewhere. This is not music to my own ears let alone American ears, but Galbraith has been arguing it for long enough and if there is any answer to the point overall, as opposed to disputing details, I have not yet seen it. It makes me think of ostriches. When the ostrich takes her head out of the sand she can run very fast. She passeth the horse and his rider, the scripture tells us. It also tells us that God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding. I hope this is not us.

Rating:
Summary: Blowing the Whistle on the City of Angels
Review: Mike Davis's white hot rant gives the great anti-city precisely the rhetorical slapping around it deserves. Don't be put off by the author's undisguised, unvarnished, old-fashioned Marxist biases--Chairman Mao once observed, "we Marxists disdain to conceal our views," and Davis makes his clear--because he's spot on: this is a city built by scoundrels on a foundation of perfidy and despoliation. Not a novel observation, true; mainstream historians, scores of journalists of every persuasion, and, yes, Roman Polanski also point this out, but Davis's narrative has far splashier colors and a high entertainment quotient. Alas, the book drops one star for what I judge to be its unevenness--the first two chapters are brilliant, the concluding chapter on Fontana is very fine, the remainder simply less so but still worthy. (Another, minor, beef--the excellent photographs, and there are many, are not given very respectful reproduction.) That said, City of Quartz is an indispensible tour of some of the darker corners of LA's famous story and an informative guide for those who have long looked for help in articulating precisely "why I really, really don't like Los Angeles."

Rating:
Summary: A political analysis of LA in the 70s and 80s
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Antiquated representation of LA
Review: This book presents a very antiquated and negatively biased view of LA. I am left doubtful if many of the scenarios in the book were as "bad" as the author leads the reader to believe.
It is naive on the part of the author to separate the actual problems of LA from other large American cities, and present them as mutually exclusive to LA.
This book panders to a seemingly worldwide hatred of LA, and a kind of love affair with the notion of a eventual LA apocalypse.
What a disappointment that the author investigates no deeper than what the popular opinion of Los Angeles is, and panders to this misconception.

Rating:
Summary: City of Quartz
Review: This book was my frist read into the realm of urban threory. What an eye opener. Mike is using LA as an example to show the relationship between cultural beliefs and our built environment.

Rating:
Summary: Tough Love
Review: This is an essential and brilliant book. Davis tells stories and expresses thoughts with an energy and incisiveness that's I've never seen matched in this kind of criticism, intelligent and though-out enough to run the risk or being dry, but presented with such passion and skill that it's never an issue. Other reviewers have addressed Davis's actual topics, but there seems to be a sense that this is a handbook for hating LA. I live in LA, and I love LA, even if it is despite itself. I suspect Davis feels the same way. This book isn't just LA-bashing; it's truth-telling, and the kind that seems to me to be the product of a kind of obsessive (if slightly damaged) love for the city. And it's an essential book precisely because LA is such an essential and defining American city.

Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor and skip it!!!
Review: To call this book a Marxist rant would be an understatement. Davis spends over 400 pages verbally demolishing a great city. I've lived here my entire life and I could not imagine living anywhere else. Nothing escapes his wrath. He engages in the same tiring class warfare arguments all Marxists value; Rich against poor, black and latino against white, religion against secularization. Everyone who has a position of power in Los Angeles is raked across the coals. Never mind that he does not provide any of his own solutions for the supposed problems of our city. If you are looking for a balanced well-argued book do not look here, but if you are looking to read a leftest diatribe you'll feel perfectly at home.