City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis

Oct 21, 2007 Howard Olsen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My favorite song about Los Angeles is “L.A.” by The Fall. It’s got an ominous synth line, a great guitar riff, and Mark Smith’s immortal lyrics: “L.L.L.A.A.A.L!L!L!A!A!A!” It’s the perfect soundtrack for reading this excellent book. Davis has written a social history of the LA area, which does not proceed in a linear fashion. Instead, he picks out the social history of groups that have become identified with LA: developers, suburb dwellers, gangs, the LAPD, immigrants, etc. By the end of the boo...more My favorite song about Los Angeles is “L.A.” by The Fall. It’s got an ominous synth line, a great guitar riff, and Mark Smith’s immortal lyrics: “L.L.L.A.A.A.L!L!L!A!A!A!” It’s the perfect soundtrack for reading this excellent book. Davis has written a social history of the LA area, which does not proceed in a linear fashion. Instead, he picks out the social history of groups that have become identified with LA: developers, suburb dwellers, gangs, the LAPD, immigrants, etc. By the end of the book, you have a real grasp on how LA got to be the way it is today.

If you’ve ever read any of Davis’ other books, you know he has an agenda, just like Howard Zinn or Ann Coulter. Davis’ information is not suspect; this book is well-sourced. However, it puts across a worldview, for which the reader must adjust accordingly. Davis writes in the post-structuralist style that was in fashion at the time. Politically, Davis is a doughy bourgeois leftist, who harbors the progressive’s Walter Mitty fantasy that he is a Bad Ass Street Rebel. If you can read past this, you can learn some absolutely fascinating info.

The longest chapter is Davis’ discussion of LA’s intellectual and cultural life. Don’t laugh. By the time you are finished with this, you will have a strange new respect for the Wasteland down south. Davis traces the groups of thinkers drawn to LA: creative people hired by Hollywood, PhD’s and engineers hired by the aerospace & defense industries; the noir novelists who created the modern detective story, cutting edge musicians, &c.

Davis also has long chapters about LA’s underlass. He traces the history of LA’s Catholic diocese, and uses it to discuss LA’s immigrant community. He also has a long discussion about LA’s gangs, and the LAPD’s campaign against them. His history of the Crips is very compelling. Davis unflinchingly details the bloody rise of the Crips, and their connection to the Black Power movement, a connection most commentators are loath to explore. Davis also gives us the rise and fall and rebirth of the town of Fontana, an honest-to-God LA steeltown that was so bluecollar that the Hell’s Angels were founded there, but which eventually became a chaotic blend (due to corrupt planning) of junkyards, truckstops and high end “second homes.” These chapters alone make this book worthwhile. Not coincidentally, they are the ones least infected by Davis’ po-mo cant.

Davis’ only false note comes in the chapter titled “Fortress L.A.” It's so filled with semiotic clichés and cultural referents as to reach the saturation point. It will be virtually unreadable by 2050. The theme is also weak. Davis argues that LA architects are creating buildings and public spaces that are intentionally meant to drive the poor and oppressed out of the city. He practically calls Frank Gehry a fascist Speer clone. He becomes especially exorcised over a South Central mini-mall, which the developer would build only after the city agreed to install an LAPD substation on the premises. Before the mall was built, ghetto folks had no place to buy food in the neighborhood, but no business would move in without some way to protect its investment. Davis finds something untoward in all of this, & rumbles darkly about the alienating design of the substation and the machinations in the mayor's office. But, the mall was so popular with the neighborhood that it made twice as much money as the equivalent suburban mall, so the people shopping there did not feel particularly oppressed by the architect. I'd say it was win-win for everyone. 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. You can easily skip this chapter, and I would suggest that you do so.
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Apr 05, 2009 Sarah rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: los-angeles

Reading this book alarmed me so much that I didn't know what to do with it, although I've been finished and sitting on it for over 2 months now.

So there I was, 350 happy pages into Davis's verbose, rejected PhD dissertation, totally into it anyway because it was a big book about Los Angeles (so not like I could have helped myself) and because it was legitimately fascinating at times, and because Davis looked to be a nice academic who took the time to wonder who the rich Jews and WASPs were scre...more Reading this book alarmed me so much that I didn't know what to do with it, although I've been finished and sitting on it for over 2 months now.

So there I was, 350 happy pages into Davis's verbose, rejected PhD dissertation, totally into it anyway because it was a big book about Los Angeles (so not like I could have helped myself) and because it was legitimately fascinating at times, and because Davis looked to be a nice academic who took the time to wonder who the rich Jews and WASPs were screwing over while battling each other to rule commercial and cultural Los Angeles (ever wonder why there's an east side and a west side? Anti-Semitism! Poor people! Racism! Crack/powder cocaine mandatory minimums! Okay maybe not but it was in there somewhere).

...when suddenly came a visceral, wtf?-esque flashback to first year of law school in Con Law when reading Justice Harlan's dissent in the loathsome Plessy v. Ferguson, where Harlan's going off on how racist and glib his fellow jurists are, upholding this separate but equal nonsense that's fooling no one, and everyone was like, "yeah, Justice Harlan, whoo" when instead of going on about equality and civil liberties, Harlan blows his progressive capital to hell and starts blabbing about how the majority rule in Plessy will lead to the strange abomination of allowing a member of a race so alien as (gasp) the Chinese race, but not a black guy, to sit in the same train car as our white brethren. When clearly everyone knows that black people are American, who else do you think built our forefathers' ancestral plantation homes and picked all that COTTON, a.k.a. the most American fabric in the world? Sure Chinese people built the railroads, but no one rides on trains anymore.

Here's an excerpt from Plessy (I looked it up at work on the law portal): "There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race." Yep, there it is. It's about 3 lines down from where he says, "our Constitution is colorblind." (Justice Harlan. You are not my favorite justice.)

Anyway, there was Davis, having him a nice chapter on the Catholic church and how unfair it was that the white archdiocese was ignoring the fact that 99% of LA Catholics were Latino, refusing to appoint any of the up-and-coming Latino priests to bishop, when he went shades of Justice Harlan: "Unless ways are found to attract more Latinos into seminaries, a strange, new ethnic mismatch may result as (gasp!) refugee Vietnamese or Chinese clergy replace retiring Irish priests in predominately Latino parishes." (parentheticals added). Um, what? Someone please write Mike Davis a memo explaining that (a) Plessy v. Ferguson has been overturned (see, e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), (b) Jim Crow laws are frowned upon, and (c) it might behoove the man to get a new editor.

I may be making hay out of one sentence, but really? What an ambush. Also, Davis does it again a few pages later (yeah I kept reading, I was already on page 350, and the book is really long): "Olivares...did the typically Latin American thing." Again, um? It doesn't even matter what the typically Latin American thing should turn out to be (incidentally, here it was to kowtow to the white man and then continue flagrantly to break the law). Note to Davis: minorities can make as many off-color remarks about themselves as they want, but if you're not in the group, it's probably best to keep quiet, son.

Now that I'm done with that, I'll say that I was fully ready to give the book 4 stars until the abovementioned incidents. Now I will resort to my original complaint, which is that no one actually LIKES academic writing and will someone please put a thesaurus in this poor man's Christmas stocking? Surely there are better words for "adumbrate" and "transmogrify."

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Jan 14, 2013 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

In City of Quartz, Mike Davis attempts the historical equivalent of film noir. He offers a dark, almost unrelievedly oppressive picture of life in a tough, hardhearted city where the ruling elite crushes the poor, whites exploit people of color, public space is turned into fortresses, police abuse the citizenry, and traffic, pollution and urban decay conquer all. "City of Quartz" is the nonfiction equivalent of the novels of Nathanael West at his most somber. Not for Mr. Davis are the idyllic sc...more In City of Quartz, Mike Davis attempts the historical equivalent of film noir. He offers a dark, almost unrelievedly oppressive picture of life in a tough, hardhearted city where the ruling elite crushes the poor, whites exploit people of color, public space is turned into fortresses, police abuse the citizenry, and traffic, pollution and urban decay conquer all. "City of Quartz" is the nonfiction equivalent of the novels of Nathanael West at his most somber. Not for Mr. Davis are the idyllic scenes of fruit trees and mountains painted on California orange crates or of Gidget at a late-night surf party. Rather, he depicts an "ecology of evil," of "Armed Response" signs on Westside lawns, of beaches "closed at dark, patrolled by helicopter gunships."

It's all a bit much. Mr. Davis spends so much energy attacking the big guys that it's small wonder that he has not spent more time understanding the ordinary folks.

The author makes little mention of the climate, scenery, economic zest and diversity that have made Los Angeles what he calls "the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world." The millions of newcomers to Los Angeles didn't go there for nothing and, having found a place that seems as close to livable as possible in this world, most feel no compelling desire to leave. Many are even glad that they moved there.

As in the case of other large cities such as New York, many Angelenos believe that the world revolves around their hometown. Their aspirations and viewpoints are often remarkably provincial. Although Mr. Davis, who teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, obviously knows more of the world than California, his powerful vision is sometimes dimmed by the same provincialism. He often writes as if he did not know that the problems of crime, pollution, racism and poverty characterize every large American city and, indeed, cities elsewhere. He sometimes writes as if Los Angeles, sheltered by the ocean, mountains and desert, existed alone.

Los Angeles is Mr. Davis's ideal whipping boy for all the sins of capitalism. "The ultimate world-historical significance -- and oddity -- of Los Angeles," he writes, "is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism." He leaves the description of utopia to others; the task he sets himself is revealing the city as the darkest dystopia. The stark, striking photographs of Robert Morrow help the reader understand Mr. Davis's portrayal.(less)

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May 23, 2012 David McCormick rated it 5 of 5 stars

It's great to see that this old book still generates lively debate. "City of Quartz" is so inherently political that opinions probably reflect the reader's political position. Davis makes no secret of his political leanings: in the new revised introduction he spells them out in the first paragraph. For a leftist, his arguments about the geographic marginalization of the Los Angeles' poor and their exploitation, neglect and abuse by civic and religious hierarchies will be fascinating and sadly un...more

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Apr 06, 2010 Lily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book made me realize how difficult reading can be when you don't already have a lot of the concepts in your head / aren't used to thinking about such things. However if I *were* thinking about such things I'd find it really rewarding to see all of them referenced. Really high density of proper nouns. I used wikipedia, or just agreed to have a less rich understanding of what was going on. In fact I think I used just enough google to get by. Anyway now I know that LA was built up on real esta...more

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May 04, 2012 Michael Burnam-fink rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, 2012, academic

What is it that turns smart people into Marxists?

I cannot write this review without prefacing the perspective that I come from: I'm from LA, a member of a West Side Jewish family involved in real estate development, and these days a grad student in science and technology studies. What I was interested in was what Los Angeles means; is it the American dream or the American nightmare? Davis almost gets there, but instead gets stuck reproducing the shibboleths of political economy.

Davis chronicles...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Ben B rated it 2 of 5 stars

This has to be the most painfully frenetic, confusingly concocted book I've ever read. The writer interrupts himself with parentheticals almost every other sentence; he drops names and factoids without ever describing their significance; worst of all, instead of referring to things in plain English, he makes use of an unending stream of unexplained, mixed, and half-hearted metaphors, as though he were undecided about whether this should be a history book or something more "poetic." It's obvious...more

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Jan 01, 2010 Lindsey Bahr rated it 5 of 5 stars

A bit apocalyptic, but Davis is a terrific essayist who has taken great pains to chronicle the history of Los Angeles in a compelling way - from the noir image we're presented by films and books, to the intense class polarization of the city layout. It's from the early 90s though...so now I'm really behind on the progress (?) of the last 20 years.

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Feb 28, 2010 Magda rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repression in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous 'armed response'. This obsession with physical security systems, and collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electro...more

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Feb 04, 2013 Grantimatter rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: People interested in Los Angeles; subculture enthusiasts

Recommended to Grantimatter by: Steve

Every time I pick this book up, I start to feel like it's not really written for me... it's written for some newly arrived L.A. denizen from 1990 or so. And I figure I'll put it down after the next page. And then Davis hits me with some amazing bit of weird trivia from left field - a discussion of urban planning will suddenly veer into a mini-biography of Jack Parsons (Crowley disciple, rocket scientist, free love advocate, explosive suicide), or a discussion of irrigation problems in the San Fe...more

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Jun 19, 2007 Ben rated it 2 of 5 stars

Fun, if you treat it as a work of fiction. Read it like you'd read a dystopian sci-fi novel, like 'Snowcrash.' Which admittedly, sometimes Los Angeles feels like. To paraphrase Royal Blue, "L.A. ain't so bad." Experience it for yourself.

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Mar 08, 2010 reverend dak rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wow, this was an interesting read. I'm glad I got this edition because it came with an updated (2006) forward. The book is clearly dated (1990), which isn't good for a "history" book. I guess it's good in the way that it's written in the "then". I think I would have liked the forward to have been longer, in a "Revisited" vein (ala Brave New World Revisited.)

Mike Davis has a lot to say, and it's pretty clear that there are things he really hates. The hate comes off pretty abrasive, so it would b...more

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Oct 27, 2010 Jeremy added it

Shelves: sociological

I found this really difficult to get through. While Davis's approach is very wide ranging and comprehensive, I often found myself struggling to keep up with all of the historical examples and various people mentioned in this account. Having never been there myself and knowing next to nothing about the area's history, I often felt myself overwhelmed, struggling to keep track of the various people and institutions that helped shape such a fractured, peculiarly American locale. I think it would hav...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A reliably lefty history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz was a fascinating read for a recent transplant from the east coast. Mike Davis' collection of essays eschews the day-to-day history, choosing instead to focus on several underlying factors to the ur Angeleno character: Architecture-as-fortress, crime-as-byproduct-of-disenfranchisement; the Catholic church as institution of greed, power, and racism; the boom/bust of manufacturing; etc. Davis makes a compelling case for why the city operates...more A reliably lefty history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz was a fascinating read for a recent transplant from the east coast. Mike Davis' collection of essays eschews the day-to-day history, choosing instead to focus on several underlying factors to the ur Angeleno character: Architecture-as-fortress, crime-as-byproduct-of-disenfranchisement; the Catholic church as institution of greed, power, and racism; the boom/bust of manufacturing; etc. Davis makes a compelling case for why the city operates the way it does - or, rather, why the city in the 90's, at the height of its various tensions, operated as it did; the revised edition isn't much revised at all in that sense - but he's short on solutions.

Cronyism, greed, and an inferiority complex to the more established power centers of the east coast are portrayed as the perennial animating factors for Los Angeles' worse angels, but aside from a lot of hand-wringing there's not much that, seemingly, can be done retard these drives or focus them on a more positive bent. I often avoid politicized books (and I admit that it would be tough to write a non-politicized book about any major American city, especially L.A.) for this very reason. I get all worked up and then there's no vent for my frustration or righteous indignation. What is the solution: Better urban planning, less development/more development, forced integration, what?! Davis anemically raises the point that perhaps the way forward is through more local control of capital and markets; he blames a lot of the income disparity of the 80s and 90s on foreign investments in the city, but its not as clear cut as that. From Davis' point of view, one of the first villains on the scene was the very local LA Times. But surely there are benefits along with the negatives. After all, something keeps driving people to this city. I think the truer path here is one that is not so polarized. And, to his credit, Davis presents a more balanced argument in the final essay, the one about Fontana. 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. Solutions, though, are in short supply, and maybe that's the take away message here: Nobody knows how to fix things.

At the end of the day, I enjoyed this book very much (despite the fact that it took me months to read). City of Quartz was a great primer in the history of a city that I find fascinating, but know precious little about. A more dispassionate tone may have broadened the appeal a bit, but undoubtably some of the fire would've been lost. I recommend this book to anybody interested in contemporary urban space - how we negotiate it, how it came to be the way it is - and for anybody interested in getting a peek beneath the surface of this most enigmatic of cities.(less)

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Sep 02, 2011 James rated it 3 of 5 stars

Davis was a man on a mission - he wanted you to know how deeply awful was the travesty of justice that is southern California. He largely succeeded, though I have problems with how easily he equates in value all his citations. A scholarly paper will carry the same weight as an article in a neighborhood weekly. He also perhaps starts from a baseline of moral expectations that is too severe. It's an imperfect work. But it has lots of information, and his tracing of the Fontana steel story is fasci...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Camille rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

City of Quartz can at best be called a loose collection of essays and falls short of proposing an encompassing conclusion about the vast and various subjects covered
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Davis opens with a chapter focusing on his usual obsession with the Los Angeles constructed by its boosters’ and blasphemers’ (Davis would later pervert this obsession into an endless, unwieldy chapter on LA’s destruction via science fiction in Ecology of Fear, utilizing an orgy of drawn out plot descriptions of various alien invasi...more City of Quartz can at best be called a loose collection of essays and falls short of proposing an encompassing conclusion about the vast and various subjects covered
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Davis opens with a chapter focusing on his usual obsession with the Los Angeles constructed by its boosters’ and blasphemers’ (Davis would later pervert this obsession into an endless, unwieldy chapter on LA’s destruction via science fiction in Ecology of Fear, utilizing an orgy of drawn out plot descriptions of various alien invasions). In chapters 2 through 5, we might see some continuity as Davis moves through discussion of Westside/Downtown hegemony and local, city, and county politics entrenched in homeowners’ associations and connects them to the subsequent warfare on urban public space and the roots of LA’s unique gang culture and drug trade. His exposure of paramilitary tactics practiced by the notorious LAPD brilliantly framed the fermenting turmoil which would explode into the LA Riots of 1992, but as in actuality the extension and escalation of police brutality and institutional racism that had remained unaddressed since the Watts Riots of 1965. Chapters 4 and 5 are the meat of City of Quartz, where Davis most compellingly executes prose as a dissection of LA’s social turmoil with surgical incisiveness.

In most of his other chapters, however, Davis betrays a tendency to get caught in minutiae and plot details of minor conflicts (i.e. drawn out homeowners’ association sagas). As you slug through these chapters of Davis’ prose (marred by his penchant for throwing around French and Latin phrases like chicken feed), you will often find yourself asking, “And what is the point?” This is perhaps the fundamental flaw of City of Quartz: its meandering introduction and lack of a conclusion fail to tie together Davis’ schizophrenic research.

After building up to the apocalyptic tone of Chapter 5, Davis analyzes the growing Latino presence yet lack of power in Los Angeles through the lens of the still-missionary Catholic church. Davis’ last chapter then unceremoniously drops us in Fontana, a strange microcosm of LA’s history of pastoral/citrus/rancho idylls’ evolution into attempted industries eaten away by foreign capital and suburban octopi, compacted into a narrative of 40 to 50 years.

However, Davis fails to affirm any conclusion, leaving the readers and dissatisfied and confused about his use of a laborious history of a fringe city 60 miles from the urban/suburban warfare discussed by most of the book. Here is the thesis that I would give to readers to consider both before and after reading City of Quartz:
Los Angeles was never a proper city that evolved as a natural convergence of trade routes, natural resources, and industrial production. It has always laid its foundations in mega-development and the unnatural diversion of resources. In essence, Los Angeles’ main commodity has always been its potential rising real-estate values, aided by the eternal vision of suburban citrus ranchos. This overarching definition of LA will continue to encourage white/middle class suburban flight further and further into the desert at an ever-rising cost to the environment and the rotting urban core cast off to LA’s black and Latino populations. As the example of Fontana shows, attempts to industrialize or in some way provide for LA’s poor will are eventually overturned by the “not in my backyard” ethic of the suburban power structure that defines, drives, and will eventually destroy Los Angeles.(less)

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Sep 18, 2011 Andy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I've been interested in reading more about the history of Los Angeles since having read Lou Cannon's Official Negligence, a book that's rich with L.A. history. City Of Quartz seemed as good a place to start as any. The first few chapters, which deal with the founding movements and philosophical ideas (e.g. Socialism, Boosterism, and the obsession with "Mission" culture) that form the roots of much of L.A.'s gestalt, were fascinating, and seem to hold the polemic to at least a somewhat reasonable...more I've been interested in reading more about the history of Los Angeles since having read Lou Cannon's Official Negligence, a book that's rich with L.A. history. City Of Quartz seemed as good a place to start as any. The first few chapters, which deal with the founding movements and philosophical ideas (e.g. Socialism, Boosterism, and the obsession with "Mission" culture) that form the roots of much of L.A.'s gestalt, were fascinating, and seem to hold the polemic to at least a somewhat reasonable level. The chapter "Sunshine Or Noir?" in particular, is something of a masterpiece, and the crowning achievement of this book.

The subsequent chapters are a bit dicier, however. "Power Lines" and "Homground Revolution" are worth reading, though the massive cornucopious ocean of minutiae in these chapters does get a bit mind-numbiing. The leftist polemic begins to swallow the book whole, with terms like "holocaust" and "My Lai" tossed about, by the time we get to "Fortress L.A." and "The Hammer And The Rock". The police are invariably the villains, and the street gangs the victims. The lionization of street gangs, especially The Crips, is especially disturbing. I'm not arguing with the facts so much as the extreme bias, which draws the tensions in L.A. during this period in strictly black-and-white terms, in which law enforcement, and citizens who are justifiably a little freaked out about crime, are caricatured as bogeymen. It's a shame that Davis gets so off the rails, because he has legitimate things to say about the militarization of the LAPD and the creeping tyranny that often come with an overemphasis on security, but his points get lost in the storm of polemic.

I found the chapter dealing with the Catholic Church nearly unreadable, but the final chapter, "Junkyard Of Dreams", provides a useful illustrative example of what can happen when a municipal area (Fontana, in this case) gets caught between the various forces of commerce.

So, for all of its flaws, CoQ is worth looking at, though at times should be taken with a grain of salt. And if you want a good time capsule of the way that L.A. was seen in the pop culture zeitgeist of 1990, this book will take you there.

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Jan 14, 2012 Alex rated it 3 of 5 stars

After moving to L.A. this year, I decided I had to read this book so that I could have some historical and sociological contexts in my head whenever I left the house - it's too overwhelming otherwise. I probably should have opted for lighter fare, though; the tone throughout is pretty smarmy and pretentious, and the author is more intent on delivering polemics than objective analysis.

That being said, Davis does an excellent job of isolating and examining the root dysfunctions of the region. Eve...more

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Jul 04, 2011 Athena rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: cities-space-place, read-summer-2011

Despite having been an urban studies major in college, I put off reading City of Quartz for a long time because I was under the impression that it contained a lot of minutiae about Los Angeles politics that I didn't care to learn about. I was right about that, and struggled through the two chapters of the book ("Power Lines" and "Homegrown Revolution") that focused primarily on local politics -- the ten or so pages of these chapters that were interesting to me were buried in 40+ pages of excruci...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Suzanne rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Kerry

Shelves: l-a

Angelenos – who we are and how we got that way-- or rather Southern Californians, as this book really covers the whole region. As a second generation native, found this exhaustively researched and wide-ranging commentary really fascinating. A three-month project and I learned a lot! It was published in 1990, so is missing the last 20 years, which would be instructional, but it is still valuable to see how we got on the road we’re on.

Chapters are thematic and the book covers huge amounts of terri...more Angelenos – who we are and how we got that way-- or rather Southern Californians, as this book really covers the whole region. As a second generation native, found this exhaustively researched and wide-ranging commentary really fascinating. A three-month project and I learned a lot! It was published in 1990, so is missing the last 20 years, which would be instructional, but it is still valuable to see how we got on the road we’re on.

Chapters are thematic and the book covers huge amounts of territory. The culture of sunshine and noir, how utopia and dystopia myths co-exist, the intellectual influences of both “debunkers” and “boosters,” European exiles, JPL and aerospace scientists and scientologists, jazz in South Central and bohemian artists in the 1940s and 1950s, with art later becoming the realm of big money and big real estate. Davis discusses the influence and power of different factions, Downtown money vs. the Westside, real estate development through the ages and the local community politics attached to it, the disintegration through neglect of South Central (setting the scenario for the riots of ’92, an event that doesn’t seem surprising after reading Davis’ analysis of the sociopolitical scene in the 1980s), and the influence of the Catholic Church throughout the region and warring factions within it (interesting too to hear what our controversial Cardinal Mahoney was up to in the 70’s and ’80s). There is a short history of gangs and of the LAPD and their clashes, and discussions of class struggle and urban design. The weakest section to me was the last chapter, a history of Fontana, from agrarian utopian possibility to boom steel-town to wasteland. A little too much detailed history of the union movement there and the fall of Kaiser Steel. It seems a little out in left field, but is the author’s home town, and may have been meant also as a metaphor for the destiny of rest of the area.

There is definitely a very liberal bias throughout. Conservatives, beware --This book is part of the Haymarket Series, which focuses on social justice and the labor movement. However, the facts are interesting, and verifiable facts are facts. Davis’s interpretations of various events and their apparent consequences are something to seriously consider, even when one does not buy in 100%.

My only major gripe is the pedantic language and foreign language phrases very liberally sprinkled throughout. Davis’ vocabulary is impressive if you like that kind of thing, but too many big and obscure words make it seem he is trying too hard to overcome his blue collar roots. But overall, a fascinating read for any serious student of California history.

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Jan 25, 2010 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Robert Caro's The Power Broker was the definitive book for understanding the modalities of power in the 20th century city. In Caro's story, power was anthropomorphized (and vilified) in the despotic person of Robert Moses, master-builder of New York City. City of Quartz updates that sprawling, kaleidoscopic depiction of the city on the west coast. But in some ways Davis' mural is more complex, more subtle. In L.A., power is ephemeral and fragmented; substance is ephemeral; reality (this is L.A.,...more

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Nov 13, 2008 Deron rated it 3 of 5 stars

Full confession: I read about 80% of this book. I skipped over a lot of the developers chapter, all of the Catholic chapter and most of the final chapter on Fontana. After the introductory chapter that talks about the failed socialist city of Southern California, Llano del Rio and the first chapter titled "Sunshine or Noir?" which deals with the cultural image of L.A. created by movies, fiction, and its first residents I thought I was going to love the entire book. As I've said before I have a d...more

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Jan 12, 2008 Tannya rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: People interested in architecture

Another required book for me, but really cool. I wasn't looking forward to reading this book AT ALL. Its small type and pretty long and of course since it is something I have to do instead of by choice I instinctively don't want to like it. However, it is really interesting. It is about the history of the city planning of how LA came to be, how literary figures, architects, artists have been involved with the love/hate relationship of the oxymoron of how LA is one of the biggest cities in the na...more

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Jun 20, 2007 Justino marked it as to-read

factually lacking: mike davis, in an interview, admitted that he does not let the facts stand in the way of his arguments. city of quartz demonstrates this tendency to the fullest. in a previous work, davis pulled a passage out of a work of fiction and cited it as fact. he shows similar inventiveness in this work, citing studies that were never conducted, inventing interviews, and displaying a creativity with statistics that would be admirable if it weren't for the frightening fact that many who...more

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Mar 25, 2007 Adrian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: urbanecology

According to Davis, more so that any other city, Los Angeles is a microcosm for America. All the trends that define America socially, economically and culturally are present and in them, Davis sees our future. This future is not a utopian 1950s vision of sun-drenched prosperity. The struggle for access to water, gated communities for well to do whites, ghettoized and encircled minority populations, and huge police overreach have been features of Los Angeles life for decades. These social arrange...more

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Mar 20, 2007 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Thus far, the book is really enjoyable to read, but that should really be the lowest-priority quality to evaluate for a person like me. I'm more concerned with the points that the author is trying to make, no matter how "dry" the book is. (My foray into the world of fiction as of late is part of an effort to appreciate different styles of writing that might be amenable to otherwise "dry" nonfiction.) The book seems quite far-ranging, but I've yet to come across anything that seems really substan...more

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Oct 21, 2012 Wendy Bishop rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book walks you through the "evolution" of Los Angeles. Being born and raised in the Los Angeles area as well as my ancestors, I've grown up with stories involving the history of the area, the provocative financial decisions leading to the Los Angeles of today, and the geographic distribution of cities. City of Quartz recounts the journey of Los Angeles past and future and everything in between. Not exactly a page turner, but very interesting nonetheless in showing the creation of Los Angele...more

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Jan 06, 2010 joey rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: lit-nonfict

A weft of painstaking research interwoven with the warp of personal passion; as if it ghost-written by Pynchon as a doctoral dissertation for a degree in a field that, like its subject, has yet to be invented. Ecology, sociology, architecture, film (especially film), TV, literature, music, crime statistics, homeowner associations, stray animals, actors, zoning laws, court rulings, reservoirs, riots, windstorms, droughts, murderers, migrants, obscure newspaper clippings, gang graffiti--each of th...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-history

This is the best book I have ever read on the history of the development of Los Angeles. It has it all: water wars, the destruction of the public transportation system in favor of the freeways, payoffs, bribes, insanity, and death. I found it sbsolutely fascinating, and not just because this is my home town. If you've ever wondered about the real story behind the film, "Chinatown," this is the book for you. Very well researched and written. I highly recommend this.

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Aug 06, 2011 Malcolm rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: urban-studies

Mike Davis a scarily good – he's a top notch historian, a fine scholar and a political activist. His analysis of LA in City of Quartz is excellent – he unpacks the political economy of the sprawling suburban mass that takes up so much of southern California and influences so much of the world by delving into the lives, the influences, the cultural and economic existence that is the past and present LA. As one who avoids the place like the plague, Davis is one of the few reasons why I'd go: he ma...more

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/484028.City_of_Quartz?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320409492l/484028.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/484028.City_of_Quartz?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis[/url]

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

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