For three days, I trod the largely soulless streets of a then-dilapidated section of downtown, without realising the City of Angels was partly fringed by mountains.

All of this was designed to deter the poor and homeless from congregating in the vicinity of better neighbourhoods, or downtown commercial districts. 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.Thus, he says, Los Angeles has only been planned or designed to a very small extent, ‘but infinitely envisioned’ (21). To drive across Los Angeles is to traverse both large zones of structurally abandoned people and occasional "Elysien," those resource-rich, oft-gated zones where the fortunate reside. 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’ (18). No one had looked at this stuff before this way, especially as smart growth remains one of those buzz words. But one of the striking things about rereading City of Quartz decades later is that it shows how complexity and clarity of view can coexist with political commitment, which need not align every fact and argument in the same direction, as if they were iron filings organized by a magnetic field.

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! Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, and Magical Urbanism. I would later come to question all this, and to seek more subtle ways to understand the relationship between writing and political life. But I like that both things are out there…and it’s true that ‘Political power in Southern California remains organized by great constellations of private capital’, the more conservative old(er)-money downtown business interests (Otis and Chandler and the L.There's not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself. And, to his credit, Davis presents a more balanced argument in the final essay, the one about Fontana. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.

City of Quartz, released two years before the 1992 LA riots (pictured) that followed the Rodney King verdict, was seen as prescient.He tells a lurid tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States. In its angry and political way, it describes how cities arise out of an incredibly complex and difficult set of uncontrollable forces. Such structural arrangements, themselves the legacy of United States settler colonialism and racial slavery, have only intensified and taken on new shape due to the particular historical contingencies of postwar deindustrialization, the weakening of unions, ascent of globalization and neoliberal policymaking, and the financialization of metropolitan governance. The improbable presence of refugee intellectuals during WWII – somehow you imagine them all in NY, but Adorno was hanging out in LA, Horkheimer, Brecht. Since the Boosterism era, real estate speculation and empty space has been Southern California’s most profitable export.