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Garber/American City Reporting from the Scene of the Accident: Mike Davis on the American City JUDITH GARBER I ntroduction Reading Mike Davis's work on Los Angeles 1 is like passing by a train wreck-it's too awful to look at, but you just can't tear your eyes away. That Davis has set out to examine the physical destruction of the city over time (due to, among other environmental and human forces, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes, vermin, plagues, riots, paramilitary policing, de-industrialization, public-sector disinvest- ment, and lots and lots of bulldozers) makes the train wreck anal- ogy especially resonant; his exquisite accounts of the social and political destruction of Los Angeles, however, prove to be the far more unbearable attraction. This perverse fascination with the aftermath of catastrophe after catastrophe is not a function of how, or even whether, one is invested in Los Angeles. The preoccupa- tion with details that dominates the denunciations of Davis's 1998 book on the city, Ecology of Fear, suggests that conservative city- boosters must be at least as caught up in the sight of blood and twisted metal as progressives who believe that everyone would benefit from gazing upon the ruins he has uncovered. Even without the scenes of disaster and mayhem Los Angeles would still be endlessly fascinating, if only because it is such a hyperactive producer of its own mythology. Prior to the 1990 pub- lication of his first book on Los Angeles, City of Quartz, Davis was known in socialist quarters as a labour historian at New Left Review, and he continues to write about labour, environmental, and urban issues beyond Southern California's borders.2 Nevertheless, Davis is identified with, and has taken pains to identify himself with, a city that has a special place in both the popular and Studies in Political Economy 60, Autumn 1999 99

City of Quartz

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Garber/American City

Reporting from theScene of the Accident:

Mike Davis on theAmerican City

JUDITH GARBER

Introduction Reading Mike Davis's work on Los Angeles 1 islike passing by a train wreck-it's too awful to look at, butyou just can't tear your eyes away. That Davis has set out to

examine the physical destruction of the city over time (due to,among other environmental and human forces, earthquakes, fires,mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes, vermin, plagues, riots,paramilitary policing, de-industrialization, public-sector disinvest-ment, and lots and lots of bulldozers) makes the train wreck anal-ogy especially resonant; his exquisite accounts of the social andpolitical destruction of Los Angeles, however, prove to be the farmore unbearable attraction. This perverse fascination with theaftermath of catastrophe after catastrophe is not a function of how,or even whether, one is invested in Los Angeles. The preoccupa-tion with details that dominates the denunciations of Davis's 1998book on the city, Ecology of Fear, suggests that conservative city-boosters must be at least as caught up in the sight of blood andtwisted metal as progressives who believe that everyone wouldbenefit from gazing upon the ruins he has uncovered.

Even without the scenes of disaster and mayhem Los Angeleswould still be endlessly fascinating, if only because it is such ahyperactive producer of its own mythology. Prior to the 1990 pub-lication of his first book on Los Angeles, City of Quartz, Davis wasknown in socialist quarters as a labour historian at New LeftReview, and he continues to write about labour, environmental, andurban issues beyond Southern California's borders.2 Nevertheless,Davis is identified with, and has taken pains to identify himselfwith, a city that has a special place in both the popular and

Studies in Political Economy 60, Autumn 1999 99

Studies in Political Economy

scholarly imaginations. At this point, it is fair to say that LosAngeles's and Mike Davis's mystiques are intertwined. This asso-ciation with Los Angeles has presumably been both a blessing anda burden for Davis who has been made famous, feted," and madeinfamous because of it (and who is presently migrating to NewYork).

Naturally, Davis's popularity and notoriety are not equivalentto the scholarly or political significance of his three books andmany dozens of articles. This body of writing can be evaluated invarious ways, because Davis plays the cross-over role of criticalpopular scholar and because his interests range so widely. In thisessay, I place his work, and the reaction to it, in the context of itsboundary-spanning character. Davis has the most to say about LosAngeles, but he also comments presciently and perceptively on thelarger picture of politics in the United States, and especially urbanpolitics. He is a Marxist who does not necessarily privilege eco-nomic relations and he is a postmodernist (despite himselt),although gender is absent from his analyses. Ultimately, whatmakes Davis a significant intellectual force is that he has suc-ceeded in entering into the public record critical accounts of thedynamics and origins of Los Angeles's compelling disasters, andplacing them in the bigger picture of a quarter century of anti-urbanism in American politics and political economy.

City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear Davis's epic books onSouthern California are the foundation of his work since his returnto the United States from Britain in the late 1980s, and the heartof his work on urban matters. Intended as the first installments ofa trilogy, City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear take an ency-clopaedic and etiological look at the panoply of maladies that havecome to afflict the whole region, and the poorest parts ofmetropolitan Los Angeles above all. (Davis has promised that, incontrast, the third book "will be devoted to the radical, construc-tive forces in the city's future and past.t'<)

City of Quartz is primarily a political economy of present-dayLos Angeles, but it opens and closes in the early twentieth centu-ry, and far from the city's downtown. The book begins in thedesert in a fleeting socialist commune whose ruins are perched onthe edge of suburban development by the 1990s. It ends in Davis'shometown, where idyllic farmland for the middle classes becamea steel town then a decrepit symptom of economic transformation

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and failed real estate schemes. In between is Los Angeles, theculmination of the historical forces that wash over the wholemetropolitan area. Political power constructed around property,wealth, and pedigree defmes the physical and social landscape ofLos Angeles, though the local founding elites now have rivals inforeign investors and activist middle-class property owners.Racial and ethnic inequality has taken two quantum leaps forward,with the evaporation of urban working-class jobs from the area'sglobally-integrated economy and with the production of (inDavis's most-cited words) "Fortress LA"-the triumph of priva-tized, commodified, policed, and ultimately carceral space. LosAngeles's image veers between utopian "sunshine" which ignoresthe devastation wrought by the economic changes, and dystopian"nair" which abets the clamour for the fortified city.

Ecology of Fear explores a defining characteristic ofSouthern California-a social ecology built upon a fear of thewild. This fear gets transferred from natural to social threats, andfrom factual to fictional dangers. The vast human sprawl that takesup much of Southern California is a centrepiece of this ecology offear. Davis presents this pattern of settlement (i.e., rapid, nearlyunrestricted development that is increasingly divorced from theestablished urban core of Los Angeles) as environmentally unten-able, and as distributing its costs and benefits in an uncon-scionably inequitable fashion. He meticulously documents overtime: the extreme tendencies of Southern California's natural ecol-ogy; the attempt to thwart those tendencies by expanding the builtenvironment and then to demonize them because they cannot bethwarted; and the identification in literature, film, and politics ofurbanity as nature's co-conspirator.

Two themes link the books: One is the hostility towards "oth-erness," which manifests itself in outward movement to the edgesof the metropolis and inward movement to defensible enclaves;the other is the cultural and intellectual production of LosAngeles, which occurs in conjunction with the political, spatial,and economic processes shaping the city. Davis's attitude is alsoa powerful unifying theme. Both books have regularly beencalled pessimistic and cynical, and not without cause. Davis'sstriking attachment to Southern California's possibilities-fornatural beauty, social justice, and cultural richness-however,always hovers in the background of his disappointment with theways things have turned out thus far.

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L 'affaire Mike Davis The publication of Ecology of Fear touchedoff a furious conservative reaction, launched by a Malibu realtorwriting under the name Brady Westwater, which in tum producedan outraged response from the left. What is now ubiquitouslycalled "the Mike Davis controversy" has been fought on the levelof personality, methodology, and ideology. Westwater's manifestois a litany of disputed facts from the book and a broad attack onDavis's honesty.t (Very few persons who consider themselvessympathetic to "Davis's overall project" have questioned his"gaffes."6) For their parts, Davis and his supporters have publiclydefended his facts as well as his (admittedly occasionally cre-ative)? method of fact-gathering. Because many of the "factual"issues under dispute are actually matters of interpretation, andbecause they are not central to Davis's larger argument, this aspectof the controversy is not terribly interesting for those who are notactive participants in it. Davis's allies have also been quick topoint out that the real complaint against him is ideological.Westwater and company clearly have been motivated to act byDavis's unrelievedly bleak portraits of Los Angeles and his acidassessments of how it got to be that way-capitalism, racism,political corruption, and hubris, in roughly that order. While I donot wish to downplay the importance of this ideological dispute,both sides of it are more or less predictable, and so this has alsonot been a very enlightening dimension of the "Mike Davis con-troversy. "

The controversy attending Ecology of Fear has thus far insin-uated itself into and displaced more serious consideration of thisbook in particular and Davis's oeuvre in general. I believe thatsomething subtler than either methodology or ideology is at issue,and we can better approach it by asking this question: What is itexactly about Ecology of Fear that moved the Los Angeles cheer-leaders to strike back? After all, Davis's previous writings can beevery bit as subversive as Ecology of Fear-in the context of con-temporary North American cities, it is difficult to imagine a moreserious indictment of the status quo than his early-1990s accountsof the mobilization of the local police state against poor, Latino,African-American, and young Angelenos.t One answer to thisquestion is that Ecology of Fear can be seen as Davis's mostprovocative work because it has the audacity to question the verypremise of Los Angeles. It is probably not incidental to the reac-tion that Davis telegraphed draft sections of the book in magazine

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articles with such demure titles as "Let Malibu Burn"? and "HellFactories in the Field."!" Furthermore, the argument of Ecology ofFear is relatively overt and consistent, especially compared withCity of Quartz, which is rather like a collection of core samplestaken at sites around greater Los Angeles.

A second answer to the question about the timing of the attackon Davis is that Ecology of Fear, whether because of its accessi-bility or the wide interest in environmental matters, has been toosuccessful. Davis is playing a role, as critical popular scholar (or,as his dust jacket biography would have it, as meatcutter-become-journalist/professor of urban theory), that conjures up what mustbe one of the worst dreams of the right: that compelling leftistscholarship will be read by a substantial non-academic audience.The urbanist, Robert Beauregard, who has lamented how few con-temporary scholars are producing work that "arous[es] passionateurban debate"l1 within the public sphere, regards as "the excep-tion" Davis's "boundary-spanning contribution."12 Indeed, Davisis the archetypal public intellectual who, through his writing andpolitical activism, aims for exposure and political influence out-side of the academy. And Davis does not merely dabble in cross-over writing; since publishing the theory-driven, rather densePrisoners of the American Dream's in 1986, he has been definedby it. Ecology of Fear has been widely received as a popular,though erudite, work.

As I will discuss later in this article, the influence of Davis'scrossover work must be judged from more than one perspective,since he is attempting to reach multiple audiences in a variety offashions. From the perspective of those who feel moved to defendLos Angeles's virtue, with Ecology of Fear Davis may now havecome close enough to succeeding at the role of critical popularscholar within the Southern California milieu to require a concert-ed response. Or, as one professional Los Angeles-booster isreported to have despaired, "We'd like to ban that book."14

Los Angeles Writ Large Davis's detractors appear to comprehendthe subversive possibilities contained within his critical popularscholarship, and their efforts to embarrass him publicly rather thanengage with him on intellectual grounds reflect this understanding.Curiously, though, in certain ways they also underestimate theforce of Davis's work. By placing what he says specifically aboutLos Angeles under a microscope, his critics behave as if his

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insights and observations apply only to Los Angeles. In fact,Davis's work leaves little room for doubt that Los Angeles is a lab-oratory for American politics and social relations. This is, ofcourse, particularly true with respect to urban matters (in thescheme of which Los Angeles is not as distinctive as we might liketo believe), but it is also true at a higher level. If they were taken asseriously as they deserve to be, Davis's insights about thebankruptcy of American social values and political practices-notthe possibility that he is defaming Los Angeles-ought to be at theforefront of conservative resentments.

Davis's Los Angeles is not, ultimately, meant to be sui generis.This is not to deny that the primary lure of Davis's work is hismagnetic stories about a collection of specific places, people, andrelations that make up something called "Los Angeles," or that hisrespect for the distinctive Southern California historical context-a context rooted in the colonial-mission project of domination, thecriminal appropriation of water in the service of capital, and thedisrespect of a climate and geology prone to cataclysm-is woventhroughout these stories.t> Davis's portraits of Los Angeles aremost powerful, however, if the city is read as a frequent recipientor site of national- and state-level experiments in public policy andpolitics, rather than simply as a generator of what is different andnew. 16

Los Angeles has been the proving ground for a portfolio ofpolicy initiatives aimed at locating the repressive functions of thestate at the level of the city. It is not the case that this governingexperiment lacks the assent of some portion of Los Angeles's cit-izenry and officialdom; to the contrary, it has been received all tooenthusiastically by too many people. Rather, what is important isthat it uses Los Angeles-and specific groups of Angelenos-toadvance more general types of goals whose interests are deter-minedly anti-urban and that "prefigur[ e] the ultimate absorption ofthe welfare state by the police state."!"

Los Angeles is a temptation. As the host in a single genera-tion of two historic urban rebellions, staged mostly by poorAfrican-Americans and Latinos, and as a city whose character isincreasingly defined by Mexican, Central American, and Asianimmigrants, the American political logic of the day fairlydemands negative state attention. Davis sums up this attention asthe New Urban Order,ls in which the federal government (assist-ed by the State of California, localities, and quasi-governmental

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bodies) avails itself of all opportunities to practise-that is, to testout and refine-a treasure chest of repressive governing strate-gies. The New Urban Order revolves around the control of immi-grants (legal and undocumented), street gangs, criminals, and thepoor. This degree of control requires advanced law-enforcement,incarceration, and surveillance techniques, as well as the contrac-tion of public space and public services available to the largerpopulace. Undergirding this is the creation of a societal "consen-sus"-whether based on retribution, bias, or fear19-in favour of"big government" but for the purposes of social control instead ofsocial welfare, and in favour of local autonomy but not necessar-ily for older, poorer cities.

Since the Watts uprising of 1965, urban riot preparednessacross the United States has involved military-model local policingand the military itself.2o Recent years have seen, however, astepped-up and more broadly-construed federal interest in lawenforcement in American inner cities, one that is not reserved forcrisis situations. This interest entails greater presence in traditionalareas oflocal (and state) prerogative (primarily policing, criminallaw, education, and community development) and the intensifica-tion, especially for urban use, of powers in existing areas of feder-al jurisdiction.

Again, Los Angeles serves as a model for what can beachieved with this governing strategy. Davis documents draconiancampaigns in the late 1980s against drugs, gangs, and immigrants.These were carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department; theywere, however, complemented and encouraged by moves at thefederal level. These include: the siting of penitentiaries and immi-grant detention centres around the city, and Army anti-terroristmanoeuvres conducted over downtown21 and miscellaneous poli-cies aimed, for example, at expelling families of drug offendersfrom public housing. This strategy was perfected in the reaction toLos Angeles's "Rodney King" riot of 1992, which Davis calls "fed-eralized and federally-driven."22 The federal presence was indeedextensive and multifaceted: the Marines and Army were deployed;agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau ofAlcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Border Patrol, Immigration andNationalization Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation wereinserted into the African-American South Central and Latino Mid-City areas of the city;23 and United States Attorneys were set towork searching for crimes to prosecute under federal statutes.a

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Southern California's wildfires since 1992 have also attracted afederal police presence, under the assumption that such natural dis-asters must actually be the work of an "incendiary Other. "25

Los Angeles must be seen as part of a more extensive patternof governance. Since the mid-1990s, by joint agreement of bothpolitical parties, the passage and enforcement of a network of lawsagainst immigration, crime, and welfare has figured conspicuous-ly in the business of the federal government. Measured in terms ofsuperfluous punitiveness (more, and younger, people in prisonserving harsh sentences; more citizens and legal immigrants with-out social assistance; more illegal immigrants stripped of due pro-cess rights and public services), this legislation represents the non-crisis version of the federalization described above. It goes beyondeven what Davis predicted in the grim year after the urban riots of1992-the historic abolition of welfare entitlements would notcome until 1996-although it is in essence a flourish on the storyof anti-urbanism that Davis has been narrating since the 1980s.Because the people attached to untolerated immigration, crime,and welfare-at least as these categories are conceptualized in thedominant political discourse-are concentrated in central cities26and inner-ring suburbs, these policies are, in practice if not inname, the leading edge of American urban policy.27

This experiment is founded, politically, on the large cache ofelectoral resources embedded in newer suburbs and in the "edgecities" where high-end post-industrial economic activities areincreasingly concentrated.st Such a political foundation is notunique to Los Angeles, even if Southern California is among theplaces that are most receptive to these politics. The shift in popu-lation on a local scale to wealthy, largely white localities (and ona national scale, to the South and West) has meant more repre-sentation in state legislatures and Congress for these places andtheir residents' interests. Davis was not the first to point out theshrinking representation of central city concerns in national poli-tics,29 but early on he understood the forces animating what wasbecoming a bipartisan electoral majority in the United States. InPrisoners of the American Dream, Davis argued that this was a"broad right" of the professional and entrepreneurial beneficia-ries of post-Fordism, built at the expense of refugees from thedeclining industrial economy.w

In this geographical reconfiguration of urban politics, loca-tion within metropolitan areas correlates with a set of variables

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including economic positioning, racial and ethnic composition,ideology, and political resources. In short, power and wealth flowoutward from the old urban centres to the peripheries of themetropolises. As Davis points out in the Southern California con-text, explicit policy tradeoffs follow that are traumatic for centralcities and close-in suburbs. These tradeoffs occur becauseRepublicans and Democrats follow easy electoral resources, andthey adhere to a common, post-industrial economic logic that sortscities and neighbourhoods into winners and losers. For example,Davis reports that whereas Los Angeles officials cultivated shop-ping and hotel development downtown-and thus low-end,tertiary-sector jobs for Latino(a) and African-American resi-dents-it let slip away to white suburbs and "edge cities" the"back-office jobs" that provide an entree into the informationeconomy for people in cities "hard-hit by plant closings."3l

Politicians are willing, even, to exacerbate their cities' disas-ter scenarios. Davis offers that, after the Los Angeles 1992 riot,"the governor and legislature in Sacramento figuratively burneddown the city a second time with billions of dollars of school andpublic-sector cutbacks."32 In fact, years-or, in California's case,decades-of massive withdrawal of public-sector funding havevery literally destroyed streets, parks, and buildings in wholecities or parts of cities. At the national level, disaster relief fol-lowing the series of grand-scale fires, floods, earthquakes, andhurricanes in the mid-1990s was framed by Congress and theAdministration as a trade-off; first, among affected communitiesand, second, against regular social programs. Inevitably, the pre-vailing political configurations meant that there would be lessmoney for poor urban (and rural) communities, either in the formof disaster relief or social spending.P

The Urban and the City These tales of Los Angeles's recent his-tory, and of the war on American cities, are revealing and com-pelling. They may also be problematic because they encourage theinclination to frame urban issues in the United States in terms ofmutually exclusive propositions-suburb or city, rich or poor,white or black, developer or environmentalist. Clearly, though, no"either/or" framework can capture the tremendously complex rela-tionships that are at issue in the politics, geographies, economies,environments, and cultures of cities. While Americans have con-sistently resisted facing up to the relational aspects of urbanity,

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Davis is always aware that they exist, in combination with theirreconcilable interests at play in the scenarios described above.

Davis's taking for granted the relational qualities of urbanitymust be a major contributing factor to his unnerving tendency totreat everything from the Mexican border to northern Los AngelesCounty as Los Angeles. On the one hand, this approach is concep-tually and analytically sloppy, and it misses (or at least does notexamine) the experience of many Southern Californians who donot consider themselves within Los Angeles's orbit. On the otherhand, even formerly remote desert and mountain areas (now urban)are part of a reaction to Los Angeles, or perhaps part of its logic. Insome senses Southern California is all urban. Davis clearly knowsthe difference between Los Angeles and the whole of SouthernCalifornia; by enticing us to conflate them, Davis draws us, para-doxically, to contemplate the crucial point that "the urban" is notequivalent to "the city." For the purposes of broader considerationsof urban form, Los Angeles can stand for Southern Califomiat-because what is urban spills out far over its city limits.v

A primary message of Ecology of Fear is that an entireregional ecosystem is implicated in Los Angeles's profligate atti-tude towards the land, water, and wildlife. When SouthernCalifornians are not expressing outright "malice towards the land-scape,"36 they are becoming inured to the inevitable cycles ofnature (e.g., settling upon fault lines where catastrophic earth-quakes-maybe even the Big One-are destined to occur) orinterfering with the natural environment in ways that increase itsdanger (e.g., so shrinking the natural habitat of mountain lions andcougars that they end up roaming suburban neighbourhoods).Sprawl itself has widely, though certainly not evenly, distributedimpacts on cost and quality of living. Even for those who chooseto live and work farther from the city and its problems, signifi-cantly spread-out development diminishes livability, and it sets inmotion the creeping political disempowerment of older suburbs.Significantly, because sprawl increases social segmentation, italso catalyzes the very social tensions that drive movement out-ward}? This is one aspect of the "ecology of fear," and it takesvarious forms-besides the regulation of those who are feared-among which are self-incarceration in fortified, armed communi-ties and the reduction ofunmediated, uncorporatized public space.

Los Angeles also exists within a regional economy encom-passing at least the Southwest United States, Latin America, and

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the Pacific Rim. This economic system requires the importation toSouthern California of domestic, sweatshop, and casual workersfrom Central America and China; the exchange of goods, tourists,and culture across all borders; the importation of fmance capitalfrom Japan and Hong Kong to West Coast cities; and even themovement of workers between cities like Los Angeles and LasVegas.38 At the cities and maquiladoras on the United States-Mexican border, economic exchanges also entail a densely wovenfabric of households, poverty, pollution, and policing.s? Here, too,the urban and the city are not equivalent-Los Angeles owes its"world city" status directly to this large urban economy and therole and status differentiation within it.

It is impossible, as Davis suggests, for wealthy white home-owners to completely seal themselves off from the implications ofunfettered development in places that perhaps ought to have beenleft alone, or at least treated gently. The fact that the wealthy try toinsulate themselves, and are significantly more successful at itthan undocumented Guatemalans, poor African-Americans, or anylaid-off defense workers, does not negate the ultimate futility ofthe project. Stated somewhat differently thanks to CNN and therappers NWA, we might be able to envision brutal landscapes inSouth Central Los Angeles and Compton.sv but when the wildfiresrage and the earth shifts, Malibu and Beverly Hills are not prettysights either. Davis's insights about the relationship between thecity and the urban go well beyond "we're all in it together," notsurprisingly. Instead, he comes to question the sustainability ofthebasic ethic of Southern California, and believes it cries out to beexamined even by those who have benefitted from it or haveattempted to escape it. Given the evident pattern of "natural" dis-asters that Davis documents, the logical starting point for a dis-cussion about a regional consciousness might be how to mitigatefuture disasters through such undramatic measures as prudentland-use planning and attention to environmental needs. In otherurban settings in North America, where geological and climaticcatastrophes are not what is implicated in overdevelopment, simi-lar discussions are beginning to take place around regional quali-ty of life, environmental protection, and economic viability.s!

The Reluctant Postmodernist However impressively broadDavis's scope of interests and knowledge may be, and howevermuch his panoramic outlook is crucial to adequately capturing as

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complex an entity as Los Angeles, it remains difficult to resist thetemptation to pigeonhole him. Davis is declared "postmodernist"somewhat less often than he is called "Marxist." Nearly everyonewho reviews his work, whether appreciatively or disparagingly,uses those labels, but few feel the need to justify them. This, Ithink, merely indicates that Davis's work encompasses patentlyMarxist and postmodern elements, depending on where you lookand what you are looking for.

It is easiest to see Davis as a socialist because those are hisroots and what he wears on his sleeve. Class started out as andremains the constant in Davis's work-it plays a starring role inthe American political economy as topic of inquiry, explanator,and explained. Central to his analysis of Los Angeles is the dev-astating impact ofpost-Fordist restructuring on male members ofwhat was formerly the urban working class. Two components ofrestructuring-the absence of living-wage jobs and governmentcutbacks-account for the geo-political shifts discussed above, thetum of inner-city African-American and Latino youths to the glob-al business of drug-dealing, and levels of frustration and anger thatculminate in group violence.42

Davis's Marxism operates in the foreground but it is quitepermissive in that it takes race and ethnicity as parallel and insome senses co-equal to class as producers of injustice.O As LauraChernaik has commented, Davis also refuses to privilege classover spatial relations and practices, most evidently beginning withCity of Quartz. This non-monolithic and non- determinant view ofclass gives him some postmodern credibility.w Whether he wantsthis credibility is another issue. Davis is contemptuous of post-modernism as a style---of architecture, of spatial governance anddesign, of social arrangements, of culture-because it celebratesthe theme park inclinations of the postmodern era as if they wereinevitable and inviting. Similarly, he is cool to postmodern cri-tiques that, "by hyping Los Angeles as the paradigm of the future(even in a dystopian vein), ...glamorize the very reality they woulddeconstruct"45 and deny "the rebellious subject." 46A case can bemade that Davis's methodology-which Chernaik characterizesnicely as "a thick description, not a meta-theory'<t-i-also is post-modem, because he is so deeply ensconced in the task of bringingto the fore the symbolic value and political significance of popu-lar cultural (novels, film, music, art, etc.) and urban spatial forms.Davis plays with, and thus "problematizes," the reality he reports

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on. Finally, though he has undeniable attachments to such concretemodernist signposts as land and political action, his perspective onthem is enriched by his analysis of narrative, symbol, and myth inpopular culture, religion, and political discourse. Davis may be apostmodernist despite himself.ts

Gender in the City of Quartz The stylistically postmodern ele-ments in Davis's writing are also reminiscent of feminist andqueer scholarly forms. Because Davis has been notably inatten-tive both to gender and to the significant body of gender-basedurban theory and analysis, however, his work could never betaken seriously as feminist or queer. The presence of this vacu-um in such comprehensive accounts of Los Angeles as Davis'shas been vexing, for the city is a fruitful source of research onrelationships between gender, immigration, economic restructur-ing, and geography.s? as well as other aspects of gender and ofsexuality at the local level. Women (though nobody identified aslesbian or gay) figure in his tales: they are labour organizers atLas Vegas and Los Angeles hotels; they ride buses to their jobsin suburban houses; they make activist art; they perish in tene-ment fires; they choose pets over maids when evacuating theirburning neighbourhoods; they serve on city council; they writeapocalyptic books about Los Angeles. Still, gender (the socialrelationship, not the biological category) has not until veryrecently entered into Davis's calculus, and so we are left in thedark about the meaning of the gendered division of access toemployment, welfare, housing, transportation, space, and politi-cal power in Los Angeles.

Of all of Davis's publications, Prisoners of the AmericanDream and his recent article on the "Latinization" of big cities-?grant the most attention to the possible importance of gender,though it is in fact slight. In the book, Davis argues that becauseof the "failure to extend union organization to the ...female clericalproletariat and to Southern workers in general," by the postwarperiod "racial and sexual divisions in the workforce"51 came todominate. As a consequence of discriminatory unions, labour sol-idarity was broken and women and African-Americans were notfully integrated into the mass consumption economy. 52 He doesnot go beyond this observation, however, and gender remains, asin classical Marxist analysis, an enigma at best and a wrench in thelabour movement at worst. Davis's hopes for a kind of "rainbow

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coalition" of labour and civil rights social movements defines thelatter exclusively in racial and ethnic terms. 53

In the article, Davis refers briefly to the particular, local cir-cumstances of Latina immigrant communities. He notes, forexample, that Puerto Rican immigrant and African-Americanwomen in New York remain in economic ghettos because of theexclusionary practices of unions.w echoing the criticismexpressed in Prisoners of the American Dream. Davis goesbeyond that observation to a recognition that Latinas constitute asignificant immigrant group in and of themselves and that, com-pared with both immigrant men and white non-immigrant women,they face disadvantages in the labour force and at home.v The rolethat these female immigrants might play in coalitional progressivepolitics remains unexplored, however.

In Davis's urban analysis, the absence of any sustained or fullconsideration of gender begs a number of questions: space wasmore democratic in Los Angeles when it was not gated, armed,and privatized, but how open was it ever to women and gays? Wasthe previous division between public and private in the city evenrelevant to those groups? As African-American men disappearfrom their nuclear families because of imprisonment or prematuredeath, what are the consequences of cities composed increasinglyof poor women and children? As women become a majority ofLatin American and Asian immigrants to some United Statescities,56 how does their economic and geographic concentrationshape their potential political power? How has the feminization ofservice workers in the textile, garment, and hospitality industrieschanged the complexion of union organizing, and how should it?

Questions like these are meaningful because taking genderseriously (or taking it into account at all) would enrich or perhapseven shift Davis's analytical and normative frameworks. First,factoring in gender would more completely explain the particularkinds of punitive policies such as "welfare reform" and cuts topublicly-assisted housing that are directed broadly at the poor andurban-dwellers, but whose impact falls sharply and dispropor-tionately on women and children. Societal antipathy towardsfemale heads of households, especially if they are African-American, immigrant, or poor, would also help account for themovement of such policies to their present extremes. These poli-cies make even more sense if we pay heed to the electoral powerof the neo-conservative, as opposed to the neo-liberal, branch of

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the "new right." The importance of feminist or queer frameworksmay also lie in the solutions they suggest (for political action).Analyses emerging from these frameworks could make moreexplicit the possibilities contained in coalition-building across anarray of intertwining interests, whether for the purposes oflabour-union organizing or for more general political goals.Ironically and unfortunately, one of Davis's hardest-line conser-vative critics, Joel Kotkin.s? seems to have internalized moredeeply than Davis58 the current importance to labour of solidari-ty around lesbian, gay, and feminist issues.

Davis's Influence To return to the matter of Davis's critical pop-ular scholarship, what is its influence? This is a difficult question,for he attempts to make three distinct kinds of contributions-tointellectual discourses, to public debate, and to political and socialcauses. 59 If citations and book reviews are any indication of schol-arly impact, Davis's writings on Los Angeles appear to have madea big impression on left-leaning academics across the social sci-ences, space and design disciplines, and cultural studies.References to Davis's work on the city show up not only in theexpected places (i.e., urban studies and ideologically left jour-nals), but also in the literature on ethnicity studies, regional stud-ies, criminology, law, fiction, and popular culture.w Though it isperhaps early in the game for such judgements, City of Quartzdoes lend itself to being christened a "classic," which at least onecommentator has already done.s!

In terms of influence in the public sphere, Beauregard doubt-ed (before the publication of Ecology of Fear) that Davis's workhad migrated far enough outside academia to effectively stimulatewidespread debate.62 It is true that books as challenging as Davis'sare unlikely to provoke the kind of national discussion about thestate of American cities that Beauregard would desire. By morelocal standards, there is reason to say that Davis has made animpact beyond academia, stirring heated (if sometimes uninspir-ing) debate. Ecology of Fear has reached farther into the publicrealm than City of Quartz; furthermore, its success revived inter-est in City of Quartzst If penetration into the channels of popularculture and electronic communication signifies recognition andrespect outside academia, Davis seems to have his credentialsthere. Websites from several European countries are among thedozens where Davis shows up; he grants interviews in on-line

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magazines; and he has received mentions in Rolling Stone andBillboards- for his influence on musicians-no minor sign ofmainstream popular cultural cachet. A dubious distinction alongthese lines is the fact that a significant portion of the campaignagainst him has also been conducted via the Internet, beginningwith Westwater's tract and accompanying e-mail messages tojoumalists.s> and including many articles in electronic publica-tions like Salon Magazine.

But we should be clear that this is a particular, nuanced kindof popularity. Davis's politics are firmly embedded in the grass-roots and in the radical. His writing, however, is not at all populistin terms of style or the venues in which it appears, including theInternet. Davis's reportage is sensational. To point that out,though, is neither to join with his conservative critics in denigrat-ing his disaster-scene focus (as overly-negative, false, and elitist)nor to make any assumptions about the audience for vividaccounts of shootings and firestorms. His tabloid-style intellectu-alism reaches the educated left whether in the academy, the media,or the larger public. It most often takes the form of dispatchesfrom the front, where he both participates in and providesaccounts of the action. The latter function is especially significantbecause it speaks to many readers who might only hear the newsof the politics of gang truces or disaster relief from Davis.

Davis is not the definitive historian of Southern California northe most sophisticated theorist of the urban manifestations ofglobalization. Neither does the breadth of his vision trump ordiminish the work of any of the many other astute students of LosAngeles, some of whom are tilling the same patches of ground asDavis.66 I am aware, however, of no academic or journalist writ-ing on the contemporary United States who has better peripheralvision than Mike Davis. The originality of Davis's work emanatesfrom the fact that he weighs in compellingly on perhaps a coupleof dozen subject areas, and that he can convincingly demonstratewhy they cannot reasonably be viewed in isolation from eachother.

Davis is, by training, a historian, and his renown increasinglyflows from his interest in environmental and cultural issues. Yetfor my money-and I confess my disciplinary bias here-he isfrequently most impressive as a political observer and analyst. His1993 two-part postmortem for New Left Review of the politicalresponse (or lack thereot) to the Los Angeles riot is among Davis's

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very best writing. Although still signature Davis-angry, percep-tive, and wry-it is less mannered than related discussions in otherwritings. Moreover, it is certainly among his most theoreticallydeveloped work and can be read as a disheartening coda toPrisoners of the American Dream, in which he foresaw the impli-cations of the post-industrial and neo-liberal context of the Reaganera for cities, left politics, and racial justice in the United States.

In this pair of articles, Davis places the riot and repressiveresponse upon the late twentieth century American tripod of anti-urbanism (the key component of which is racism), economic glob-alization, and the neutering of both the Democratic Party andlabour unions as political forces for progress. Davis is as devas-tating as anybody when it comes to his urbanist's-eye view of BillClinton. The 1992 presidential primaries were already vacuous bythe time of the April riots, but the profound unwillingness of theDemocrats, including candidate Clinton, to figure cities into theircampaign was especially despicable given the enormity of LosAngeles's need for economic, physical, and social rebuilding.

Davis is also an obsessive chronicler of the politics of controlover land, and how it insinuates itself into the nooks and cranniesof local issues. Even in the shadow of postmodernism's posterchild, Disneyland, this oldest story of North American local gov-ernment retains its instructional value. It is difficult to overstatethe centrality of land and physical space to the business of cities,although it is easy to lose that point within the urge to focus onurban "spatiality" and the metaphorical "spaces" of the city. Davisprovides copious detail about the influence of hometown, thenCanadian, and now East Asian real estate interests on downtownLos Angeles. He also confides that "[a]ffiuent homeowners are thesecret power in Los Angeles,"67 and although this is actually not asecret, it remains a vitally important observation. This is not todeny that, within Southern California, the outcomes of struggles todefine images and discourses increasingly determine the distribu-tion of wealth, political power, citizenship privileges, and punish-ments, as well as the geographic distribution of people and"nature." Moreover, land use policy may well be the agent ofother, distinct compulsions, such as colonialism, social segrega-tion, political control, and accumulation (Davis would certainlyemphasize the latter). Nevertheless, it is difficult to escape theconclusion from his accounts of the politics of SouthernCalifornia's land that the compulsion to develop-to master the

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land and everything that lives on it-is not necessarily reducibleto anything else, and that localities are the primary vehicles forfulfilling such compulsions.

Conclusion Mike Davis is not unaware of Los Angeles's "propen-sity for spectacular disaster"68-whether actual or imagined-andits ability to draw gawkers for just that reason. He writes: "No city,in fiction or film, has been more likely to figure as the icon of areally bad future (or present, for that matter)."69 He is suspiciousof the hostile, anti-urban sentiments that lie behind "Los Angeles'sreigning status as Doom City,"70 and about the marketability ofthat status. Davis notes: "Some people like [Ecology of Fear]because they like the glamour of decay and apocalypse. Thosepeople aren't the people I write for, although they probably helpsell the book."7l

The train wreck that we feel compelled to look at is not somereal, natural Los Angeles. But neither is it a figment of the imagi-nations of those with unsavoury motives towards the city. Davis'scharacteristically pungent images of Los Angeles help create the"spectacle" that even he admits is "difficult to resist."72 His LosAngeles-like every other Los Angeles, including that of itsboosters-is interpreted and sensationalized. What makes Davis'swork so useful is that he has produced for public consumption crit-ical accounts of Los Angeles's tendency towards destruction, andmade the case that this condition is not preordained, apolitical, orseparable from the bigger picture of American cities. The momen-tum of Davis's scholarship has drawn people in both the academ-ic and public spheres to pay attention to Los Angeles in new ways,and this is the greatest accomplishment of his work so far.

Notes

I thank Glenn Burger, Lesley Cormack, Sue Hamilton, and Susan Smith for a fruit-ful discussion of a draft of this article. Laurie Adkin, Caroline Andrew, and BruceCockburn also provided very helpful comments. I am responsible for any errors ofinterpretation or fact.

I. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); "Who Killed LA? A PoliticalAutopsy," New Left Review 197 (1993), pp 3-28; "Who Killed Los Angeles?Part Two: The Verdict is Given," New Left Review 199 (1993), pp, 29-54;City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: VintageBooks, 1992) [London and New York: Verso, 1990]. Also see, for example,"How Eden Lost Its Garden: A Political History of the Los Angeles

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Landscape," in Allen 1. Scott and Edward W. Soja, (eds.), The City: LosAngeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996), pp. 160-185; "Runaway Train CrushesBuses," The Nation 261 (18 September 1995), pp. 270-274; "The Sky Fallson Compton," The Nation 259 (19 September 1994), pp. 268-271;"Chinatown, Revisited.? The 'Internationalization' of Downtown LosAngeles," in David Reid, (ed.), Sex, Death and God in L.A. (New York:Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 19-53; "The Empty Quarter," in Reid, Sex, Deathand God in L.A., pp. 54-71; "The Infinite Game: Redeveloping DowntownL.A.," in Diane Ghirardo, (ed.), Out of Site: A Social Criticism ofArchitecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 77-113.

2. See, for example, Mike Davis, "Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the USBig City," New Left Review 234 (March/April 1999), pp 3-43; "Kajima'sThrone of Blood," The Nation 262 (12 February 1996), pp. 18-20; "FrenchKisses and Virtual Nukes," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7/1 (1996), pp. 55-61; "Water Pirates and the Infinite Suburb," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism7/2 (1996), pp. 81-84; "NASA's Manna from Heaven," Capitalism, Nature,Socialism 7/4 (1996), pp. 31-36; "House of Cards," Sierra 80/6(NovemberlDecember 1995), pp. 36-42; "Local 226 vs. MGM Grand:Armageddon at the Emerald City," TheNation 259 (II July 1994), pp. 46-50.

3. It has been widely publicized that in 1998 Davis won one of the coveted andlucrative fellowships, officially intended to reward individual creativity butcommonly called "genius grants," that are awarded by the MacArthurFoundation in the United States

4. Quoted in James Chandler, "Interview: Mike Davis-Author of Ecology ofFear," The Mining Company (17 August 1998), <http://usnews.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa081798.htm?pid=2746&cob=home>, p. 3.

5. Brady Westwater, "Research Exposes Getty Fellow, McArthur [sic]Recipient Mike Davis as Purposefully Misleading Liar," Coagula ArtJournal <www.coagula.com/mike_davis.html>. A Web site sympathetic toDavis contains an annotated set of links to contributions on all sides of the"controversy," as well as to some articles about and by Davis. See "The Davis'Controversy'," The Locus, <http://www.thelocus.com/LNdavis.html>.Tosearch for H-Urban discussion threads about Davis, Ecology of Fear, and the"Mike Davis controversy," see <http://www.unimelb.edu.au/infoserv/urban/hma/hurban/index.html> .

6. Philip Ethington, "Re: Mike Davis 'controversy'," H-Urban DiscussionNetwork (12 December 1998), <http://www.unimelb.edu.aulinfoserv/urban/hma/hurban/current/0238.html>. Ethington places himself in this cate-gory.

7. For example, Davis wrote a fictional interview whose ostensible subject,Lewis MacAdams, gave him permission to publish as if it had actuallyoccurred. See Lewis MacAdams, "Jeremiah Among the Palms: The Livesand Dark Prophecies of Mike Davis," LA Weekly(26 November-3 December1998), <http://www.laweekly.com/ink/99/0 l/news-macadams.shtml>.

8. See, especially, Davis, City of Quartz, Chs. 3-4; "Who Killed Los Angeles?Part Two."

9. Mike Davis, "Let Malibu Bum," LA Weekly (1996), <http://www.rut.com/mdavis/letrnalibubum.html>.

10. Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex," TheNation 260 (20 February 1995), pp. 229-233.

II. Robert A. Beauregard, "Why Passion for the City Has Been Lost," Journalof Urban Affairs 18/3 (1996), p. 222.

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12. Ibid., p. 227. Similarly, Robert Warren categorizes Davis as someone "whosewriting, speaking, and action are clearly contributing to urban affairs."Robert Warren, "Alternatives to Celebrity in the Rescue of the City, a Replyto RobertA. Beauregard,"Journal of Urban Affairs 12/3 (1996), p. 240.

13. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in theHistory of the us. Working Class (New York and London: Verso Books,1986). A new edition of this book is forthcoming in 1999.

14. Quoted in Jim Newton, "LA Exposed," Washington Monthly 30/10 (1998),p.52.

15. Davis is, and was trained as, a historian, but aspects of his historical analysisof Southern California have been questioned by some scholars, includingpeople who are generally sympathetic to his work. See, for example, StevenP. Erie, "Los Angeles Past Imperfect," Urban Affairs Quarterly 2911(1993),pp. 177-183. But Davis does have a high standing among some urban histo-rians. See Carl Abbott, "Reading Urban History," Journal of Urban History2111(1994), pp. 31-73.

16. This is one way in which Davis parts company with the "LA School" of urbanscholars, for whom a central tenet is that Los Angeles "is paradigmaticbecause its economy is based increasingly on technology-based and/or flexi-bly organized activities" and "as an urban form, a complex fractal geometryof housing, industry, transport infrastructure, a polycentric urban tissue at theregional scale." Michael Storper, "The Poverty of Paleo-Leftism: A Responseto Curry and Kenney," Antipode 3111(1999), p. 39. Also see Davis, City ofQuartz, pp. 84-85.

17. Davis, "Who Killed LA?," p. 7.18. Quoted in CovertAction Information Bulletin, "Uprising and Repression in

LA: An Interview with Mike Davis," in Robert Gooding-Williams, (ed.),Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York and London:Routledge, 1993), p. 150.

19. Davis identifies more than fear of nature as a motive force in SouthernCalifornians' antipathy towards its own climate, geology, and wildlife. Hisexamination of Los Angeles disaster literature and film reveals, too, a run-ning fear of "others," whose encroachment into the city presages the region'sdestruction. Davis, Ecology of Fear, pp. 275-355.

20. Davis, City of Quartz, pp. 250-260.21. Ibid., p. 263 note 33.22. CovertAction Bulletin, "An Interview with Mike Davis," p. 14523. Davis, "Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two," pp. 37-41.24. Davis, "Who Killed LA?"; "Uprising and Repression in LA."25. Davis, Ecology of Fear, pp. 130-136. On the other hand, the FBI also came

in response to a rash of racist hate crimes that were not being vigorouslyinvestigated and prosecuted by the city or county. Ibid., pp. 405-411.

26. I use this term to signify the older cities, of any size, around which residen-tial communities (suburbs) and, now, outlying employment and entertain-ment centres ("edge cities") have developed.

27. See, for example, Robert Pear, "As Welfare Rolls Shrink, Cities ShoulderBigger Load," New York Times (6 June 1999), p. 22.

28. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday,1991).

29. See John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1983).

30. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 206-221, 301-307.31. Davis, "The Infinite Game," p. 95.32. Davis, "Who Killed LA?," p. 5

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33. Davis, Ecology of Fear, pp. 47-52.34. This general approach to Los Angeles has also drawn attention in other con-

texts, and Davis has been criticized for his '''master trope' of synechdoche,"whereby "the city is...seen as an essential part standing for the whole of cap-italism." James A. Duncan, "Me(trope)olis: Or Hayden White Among theUrbanists," in Anthony D. King, (ed.), Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity,Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1996), p. 259.

35. This approach to "the urban" and "the city" should be distinguished from thefrequent critique of edge cities and other new city-like forms-that is, they arenot genuinely urban because they are often not diverse, are overly consump-tion-oriented, do not contain much public space, and are not democraticallygoverned.

36. Davis, City of Quartz, p. 6.37. Davis, "House of Cards."38. Ibid.39. Davis, "Magical Urbanism."40. Compton is a deeply distressed suburb bordering Los Angeles (just beyond

Watts). It is a home of "gangsta rap" and was immortalized in NWA's 1989hit recording,"Straight Outta Compton." For Davis on Compton politics, see"The Sky Falls on Compton."

41. Christopher Leo, et aI., "Is Urban Sprawl Back on the Political Agenda?"Urban Affairs Review 34/2 (1998), pp. 179-211.

42. Davis, "Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two," pp. 45-47; City of Quartz, pp.302-316.

43. Ali Modarres has, however, criticized City of Quartz for not taking culture,and in particular immigrant cultures, into account as an explanation of thesocial dynamics of Los Angeles. Ali Modarres, "Book Review: City ofQuartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, by Mike Davis," Journal ofUrban Affairs 18/1 (1996), pp. 77-78.

44. Laura Chernaik, "Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the NewSocial Movements," Gender, Place, and Culture 3/3 (1996), pp. 251-275.EBSCO Publishing, <http://www.epnet.com/ehost/login.html>.

45. Davis, City of Quartz, p. 86; also see Davis, "Urban Renaissance and theSpirit ofPostrnodernism," New Left Review 151 (1985), pp, 106·113.

46. Quoted in Mark Dery, "Downsizing the Future: Beyond Blade Runner withMike Davis," Escape Velocity, <http://www.levity.com/markdery/ESCAPENELOCITY lauthor/davis.htrnl>.

47. Chernaik, "Spatial Displacements."48. Sharon Zukin would disagree with this interpretation of Davis as a postmod-

ernist. In a review of City of Quartz, she acknowledges that Davis is part ofthe "rapprochement between cultural studies and urban political economy"but "return[s] to old-fashioned narrative traditions" and "tells a story of mod-ernization and modernism." Sharon Zukin, "The Postrnodern Invasion,"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 1613 (1992), pp. 489-494.

49. See, for example, Cynthia Cranford, "Gender and Citizenship in theRestructuring of Janitorial Work in Los Angeles," Gender Issues 16/4 (1998),pp. 25-51; Rebecca Morales and Paul Ong, "Immigrant Women in LosAngeles," Economic and Industrial Democracy 12 (1991), pp. 65-81.Inattention to gender is not by any means Davis's problem alone. Incredibly,the nineteen-page index to Allen Scott and Edward Soja's 1996 edited vol-ume on "Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century"contains entries for race- and ethnicity-related terms, but no main entry for

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"(fe)male," "feminist," "gay," "gender," "homophobia," "lesbian," "sex,""sexual orientation," "sexism," or "(wo)men." (There are sub-entries for"employment and income: changes in gender and racial composition ofworkforce" and "Latinos: gender roles.") See Scott and Soja, The City, pp.465-483.

50. Davis, "Magical Urbanism."51. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 94.52. Ibid., p. 95.53. Ibid.54. Davis, "Magical Urbanism," p. 41.55. Ibid., pp. 32,37.56. Cranford, "Gender and Citizenship," p. 25.57. Joel Kotkin, "The New Left Takes Over American Unions," The American

Enterprise 8/3 (1997), pp. 58-61, <http://www.theamericanenterprise.orglkotkin.htm>.

58. See, for example, Davis, "Kajima's Throne of Blood;" "Armageddon at theEmerald City."

59. I am not in a position to gauge the success of Davis's more direct politicalinterventions, and so Iwill confine my discussion to the influence of his workin the public and academic spheres. Also, Davis also aims to educate stu-dents, but this is not necessarily distinct from any of the other three goals.

60. See, for example, Roy Coleman and Joe Sim, "From the Dockyards to theDisney Store: Surveillance, Risk and Security in Liverpool City Centre,"International Review of Law. Computers and Technology, 12/1 (1998), pp.27-45; Nazih Richani, "The Political Economy of Violence: The War-Systemin Colombia," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 39/2(1997), pp. 37-81; and Brenda Jo Bright, "Nightmares in the NewMetropolis: The Cinematic Poetics of Low Riders," Studies in LatinAmerican Popular Culture 16 (1997), pp. 13-29.

61. Steven J. Gold, "Review: The Politics of Diversity." Journal of AsianAmerican Studies 1/1 (1998), p. 108.

62. Beauregard, "Why Passion for the City Has Been Lost," p. 222.63. During the months that Ecology of Fear was a local (Los Angeles) best-

seller, City of Quartz also joined the paperback best-sellers list.64. Chris Heath, "R.E.M.," Rolling Stone 745 (17 October 1996), p. 52; Brett

Atwood, "American Finds Deconstruction Addictive," Billboard 106123(4 June 1994), p. 22.

65. Jon Wiener, "LA Story: Backlash of the Boosters," The Nation 267(2 February 1999), pp. 19-22.

66. I am thinking of, in addition to authors cited earlier in this article: MichaelDear, Jennifer Wolch, Susan Ruddick, Ruben Martinez, Michael Sorkin,Raphael Sonenshein, Dolores Hayden, Evan McKenzie, Don Mitchell, GaryMiller, Harvey Molotch, Sumi Cho, Margaret Crawford, Raymond Rocco,Mark Baldassare, Roger Waldinger, and Saskia Sassen, but the work on post-World War II Los Angeles is voluminous.

67. Mike Davis, "Serene and Sterile," TheNation 265 (15 December 1997),p. 34.68. Davis, Ecology of Fear, p. 278.69. Ibid.70. Ibid.71. Quoted in Todd S. Purdum, "Best-Selling Author's Gloomy Future for Los

Angeles Meets Resistance," New YorkTimes (27 January 1999), p. AlO.72. Quoted in Dery, "Downsizing the Future."

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