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

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Her dissertation, Carceral Crisis: The Challenge of Prison Overcrowding and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, 1970-2000, examines the history of prisons, punishment, and prisoner resistance in late-twentieth century Pennsylvania. And ‘the starting point is to reconstruct the white-supremacist genealogy of its essential infrastructure: the homeowners’ association’ (160).

I seriously doubt that any of the professors on his dissertation committee have written anything as popular, interesting, and provocative as "City of Quartz". Davis’ worst qualities come out in this discussion, He comes across as one of those liberals who says they want to “help” the ghetto, but then throws up every possible procedural and philosophical roadblock in front of the police, developers, and bureaucrats who would have to be involved. The idea that spaces develop from "logical" or apolitical forces — that they are "innocent" and "free of traps or secret places" — shields any reference to the structures of accumulation, political decision-making, and historical power dynamics that go into and explain the intentions behind the construction of the modern urban built environment.

Broading over it as they’re laying at the table that’s when we realize some incredible shit : School’s football players and geek have given up college uniforms (and) wear John Travolta outfits and yet they still follow the norm. The Red in Tooth and Claw SP808 remix is ethereal, haunting and deeply beautiful in its re-imagining of one of Rosetta's classic tracks.

But as one LA Times journalist remarked in 2018, reflecting on Davis's prescient critique in Ecology of Fear of Malibu's affluent homeowners who insisted on building wasteful and exclusivist mega-mansions in one of the most fire-prone regions in the nation, "we now live in Mike Davis's world. A. was ‘in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail’ (114). Willie Horton-style "moral panics" about purportedly rising crime distort the actual bulk of mass violence conducted by the state through the slashing of social programs, maintenance of business-friendly labor and tax laws, and use of police as the primary anti-poverty policy.

yet the City of Angels with its storied dream factories is still a sufficient magnet for folks to stream to from across the globe despite all these attendant risks. The master discourse here – exemplified by the West Hills secessionists – is homestead exclusivism, whether the immediate issue is apartment construction, commercial encroachment, school busing, crime, taxes or simply community designation. Rather than dismissing gang members, such as the Crips and the Bloods, as senseless criminals, Davis examines the reasons for their violence and shows how prejudice and a lack of employment opportunities available to black men means that a drug-dealing gang is often their only means of gaining money and respect. City of Quartz was a great primer in the history of a city that I find fascinating, but know precious little about. Established in 1991 Pimlico has become leading paperback publisher of specialised, award-winning, high-end non-fiction.

The enormity of the subject is reflected in this protean book, one of such distinct (almost disparate) chapters, each almost at odds with each other in an assemblage as pasted-on as the utilities must be in the emerging communities which are tacked on to the greater metropolitan area.One consequence of this ongoing process – Lakewood Plan populations now exceed one and a half million in Los Angeles County – has been the extension of residential segregation across a vast metropolitan space’ (168). No one had looked at this stuff before this way, especially as smart growth remains one of those buzz words. This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. The nauseous broken record praising the glory of yesterday of which they’re only the witnesses: a chocolate medal for every dreamt victory.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD It's all about savoir-faire: first you learn to read, then you learn to count, then you understand what's expected of you. He takes HA’s right back to their beginnings in enforcing racial deed restrictions and preserving neighbourhood homogeneity.And those commitments are not, despite the efforts of think tanks and bureaucrats and politicians to state otherwise, all that complicated. City of Quartz, released two years before the 1992 LA riots (pictured) that followed the Rodney King verdict, was seen as prescient. Although as a Marxist historian and organizer he has made innumerable contributions to leftist history and political analysis, writing searing and all-too-prescient studies of everything from global pandemics to the history of labor and social movements in the postwar United States to a history of the car bomb (a "poor man's air force," as he provocatively named the tactic), Davis is, I believe, at his best when he is elucidating the vexed political economy of the modern city.

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