ancient cities

206 Davis, Mike
he has an expansive understanding of the forces
affecting cities. Davis tackles such core urban
issues as land uses, crime control, and ethnic politics,
but also less obvious topics that range from
pandemics to avocado farming. Throughout, Davis
insists on the class-based, materialist core of
Marxist analysis, although a non-orthodox version
that replaces the proletarian revolution with pessimistic
scenarios for workers and the poor and
grants spatial relations some independence from
the economy. Although Davis was among the academics
who conceived of the Los Angeles School of
Urban Studies (and reportedly was the first to use
that name, in City of Quartz), his attachment to
economic structure and uneasy relationship with
postmodernism leaves him somewhat outside the
school as it has evolved.
Davis began a PhD at the University of California
at Los Angeles, then left for Britain and worked
during the 1980s for the socialist journal New Left
Review. His intellectual influences include key
thinkers such as the Marxist historian Perry Anders on
and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. While in
Britain, Davis published his most theoretical book,
Prisoners of the American Dream (1986). It is an
account of the party system’s abandonment of
the working class in light of a White, suburban,
middle-class electoral majority—ultimately, the
Ronald Reagan coalition—along with organized
labor’s hostility to African Americans, women,
and immigrants.
In the late 1980s, Davis returned to the United
States and turned his attention to the ills of Los
Angeles and the widespread erosion of central cities.
Davis’s best-known and academically most
celebrated book is City of Quartz (1990), now an
urban studies “classic.” Davis makes a scathing,
sweeping, and historically grounded indictment of
the control of Los Angeles by business and political
leaders, property developers foremost among them.
He highlights the mobilization of the police state
against, especially, young minority males, homeless
people, and illegal immigrants—among the compelling
images in City of Quartz is that of “Fortress
L.A.” Although affluent White homeowners and
international investors increasingly competed for
power with the traditional local elites, all shared an
interest in fortifying Los Angeles against perceived
threats coming from lower-class “others.”
City of Quartz appeared in paperback in 1992,
the year of the Rodney King rebellion in Los
Angeles. Among Davis’s most angry and captivating
works is an informal coda to City of Quartz
(and to Prisoners of the American Dream), “Who
Killed Los Angeles?” There, Davis detailed the “federalized
and federally driven”—heavily militarized—
strategies that were already used in antidrug,
antigang, and anti-immigrant efforts but that were
perfected in reaction to the breakdown of law and
order. At the same time, the bipartisan consensus
in California and in Washington against spending
for public employment and services “figuratively
burned down the city a second time.”
In several pieces collected in In Praise of
Barbarians (2007), Davis shows that this governing
experiment was both employed and abandoned
in federal, state, and local responses to New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans,
like Los Angeles, has been denied the resources
sufficient even to address its predisaster needs, let
alone to rebuild its economic, social, and physical
infrastructure. Ironically, however, in New Orleans,
the federal government and military were glaringly
passive, to tragic effect. And unlike Los Angeles,
which epitomizes the cities being recreated through
Latina/o (and Asian) immigration, as Davis argues
in Magical Urbanism (2000), an evacuated New
Orleans is being “deliberately murdered” by public-
and private-sector efforts to remake it as a
wealthier, Whiter city.
Davis is fascinated with the disjunction between
the “sunshine” image of Los Angeles purveyed by
the recording, film, and tourism industries and the
“noir” reality of its social and environmental conditions
elaborated in grimmer, yet popular, genres
of film and literature. This theme unifies Ecology
of Fear (1998), the beginning of a continuing
exploration into why and how capitalist-inspired
human settlement patterns have intervened in natural
phenomena. Davis views southern California
as defined by fear of the wild, whether in nature or
society. His core, most contentious argument is
that much of the real danger—filtered as it is by
popular culture, political discourse, and the news—
has resulted from development patterns that are
ignorant of the workings of the ecosystem.
Critically, “malice towards the landscape” includes
animus toward cities and city dwellers. Davis’s