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

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The difficult social question is how people can come together — if and when they come together — around the resulting contradictions, and work to overcome them. While professing to be the cause of 'responsible planning', they have in fact sponsored a sweeping legal offensive — the second prong of their strategy — to reaffirm the untrammeled rights of private development against any communitarian regulation. Since then, homeowners have been working to defend them, both against unwanted development and unwanted people. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

When I first picked up City of Quartz (1990), I wondered at the title, which was left unexplained in the text. The ultimate 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.And on the side of the know-it-all, the coolest one is always the most cynical, and the most bored of them… so that our fucking scene can outlive them! WHITE THRASH KIDS = REDNECK GEEKS Seven pm at “the white trash” in Berlin (we’re) borely in the place that we glimpse. The tap-root of slow growth in the South, however, is an exceptionalistic local history of middle-class interest formation around home ownership. The world stops turning, taking its time beholding the “artist” putting on air and the principles of transfer of myth of long ago.

In other words, City of Quartz became part of the subject of Los Angeles’ peculiarity and particularity – part of its very own myth of the city’s splendour, which Davis had contested. No doubt why it has become such a classic, and why so many people I’ve met here in London know Los Angeles through this book.Davis makes no secret of his political leanings: in the new revised introduction he spells them out in the first paragraph. CITY OF QUARTZ We may only have time to - Count the square yards offered to us and those we'll never thread upon - Dream of spaces our brain can no longer imagine - Talk about happiness in the past tense, with colors that we no longer can see - Count the one not left anymore to live. What is the solution: Better urban planning, less development/more development, forced integration, what?

I seriously doubt that any of the professors on his dissertation committee have written anything as popular, interesting, and provocative as "City of Quartz". No one had looked at this stuff before this way, especially as smart growth remains one of those buzz words.

A new edition of Mike Davis’s visionary work on Los Angeles and the transformation of the modern city. He presents both the good and the bad about that city's evolution from agrarian eden to industrial polluter and finally commuter suburb in a calm, rational light. Or it controlled the poor – through measures such as security cameras, reducing the number of public toilets, and installing uncomfortable seating at public transport shelters. When I read Davis, I am reminded that the work of translating the complex and often difficult to parse convolutions of history, capital, and state violence is first and foremost a mode of organizing that must be tethered to clear political and community commitments. But I can also see rich, seminal insights from City of Quartz reflected in other vintage Davis works.