Mike Davis wrote “City of Quartz”, one of the most important books on the urban history of Los Angeles. Now the Californian urbanist and Marxist has died at the age of 76.
There are few true leftists in America, but Mike Davis was one of them. The man with the white beard, who looked like a trucker, shaped the image of his home city of Los Angeles with his book “City of Quartz”. Now he has died of cancer in San Diego at the age of 76. When he learned of his illness, he said he regretted that he would die in bed and not at the barricade. He is survived by his fifth wife, Alessandra Moctezuma, and four children from two marriages.
Mike Davis – author and activist
Davis was an exceptional figure among US authors, not vain, not interested in the literary circus, but in the cause. The political cause. He was born in a steelworking town in rural California. His family was marked by the poverty of the Great Depression, when his mother stole milk to feed the children. His father died young, and Davis worked as a teenager in his uncle’s wholesale slaughterhouse. He then had various jobs as a truck and bus driver.
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he studied at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). He protested against the Vietnam War and was once arrested at a demonstration and taken to prison in a police truck. He also joined the Communist Party of California at the time and ran its bookstore.
Mike Davis saw connections early on that are common knowledge today
However, he soon turned away from the intellectual left. Once asked why there was no real left in America, he said: “There is; it’s the African-Americans. They are just not recognized by society.” He himself saw things differently: he invited black Crisp gang members into his home. And when the black ghetto of South Central LA burned down in 1992, he went there and spoke to the rioters.
In the seventies, he lived in Great Britain and Ireland for a while. Back in LA, he started working as a truck driver again, but at the same time wrote “City of Quartz”, which was published in 1990. The book is incredibly detailed and he himself was surprised that it found so many readers. “City of Quartz” is almost 500 pages long, full of details about superblocks, rich and poor neighborhoods and their relationships, with Marxist references (Herbert Marcuse was a big influence on him) and the names of those in power in L.A.; developers, politicians, police chiefs. He also wrote about the de facto apartheid that divides L.A. into black and white, rich and poor. And he saw connections early on that are only now common knowledge.
Love letters to L.A.
L.A. remained the city he was obsessed with all his life. His book “Set the Night on Fire” (together with Jon Wiener) is about the race riots in the Californian metropolis in the 1960s. This was followed by “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster”. In it, Davis warns not only of environmental disasters – floods, earthquakes, seaquakes, droughts, massive forest fires – but also of pandemics. Today he has been vindicated; back then he was accused of exaggerating and hating LA. He, on the other hand, considered his books to be love letters to the city.
Davis also called in “Ecology of Fear” for the mansions of the rich in Malibu and on the hills around L.A. to be allowed to burn, instead of using public money to protect palaces built – ignorantly or willfully – in tornado or forest fire zones. This also earned him attacks from the establishment.
Mike Davis published his books with the British publisher Verso. The book “Late Victorian Holocaust”, which deals with the genocides of the British Empire, from India to Ireland, also became a bestseller during his time in the UK. In it, he rejects the often-held view that there could be millions of starvation deaths in any country because a natural disaster had occurred. Behind this, he asserted, there are always political decisions.