The unfulfilled American dream stalks Mike Davis’s dystopian Los Angeles in his masterful City of Quartz
- Written by Ian Tyrrell, Emeritus Professor of History, UNSW Sydney
In an occasional series, we look at books that have become cultural touchstones.
The death of the radical historian Mike Davis, on October 25 in San Diego, brings back memories of Los Angeles, and of Davis’s landmark book on that city.
When I first picked up City of Quartz[1] (1990), I wondered at the title, which was left unexplained in the text. Davis later explained it[2] to London Review of Books’ US editor, Adam Shatz. Quartz is
something that looks like diamond but is really cheap, translucent but nothing can be seen in it.
This was the essence of the Los Angeles Davis had excavated.
City of Quartz explores political and economic power in 20th-century Los Angeles. It shows how the contest of power shaped, under the promise of progress through endless growth, the city’s spatial and social development in ways that presaged a dystopian future.
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Land, power and ‘Fortress LA’
An acerbic and brilliant dissection of that city’s urban history, City of Quartz is an interdisciplinary work of magnitude and significance. Davis’s second book, it propelled his career to juggernaut status, as a cultural critic and environmental historian. By the time of his death, he had written or edited more than a dozen books on urban, environmental and global history.