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Mike Davis

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT

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One of few urban scholars who have had a genuine impact outside the academy, Mike Davis is an uncompromising critic of the urban and environmental impacts of American capitalism. He owes this reputation to a prolific set of writings on the US city - City of Quartz (1990), Ecology of Fear (1998), and Magical Urbanism (2000) which chart the conflictual evolution of Los Angeles over the twentieth century, and latterly, a series of polemics addressing a range of urbanized political geographies. With his writing conveying a deep sense of political immediacy - much of the material i n his books began life as shorter, topical articles - he is nonetheless an urbanist w i t h a deep sense of radical social history. Born i n Fontana, California i n 1946, Davis has worked variously as a meatpacker, lorry driver, and manager of the Communist Party's Los Angeles bookshop. He was a militant in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but his formal academic career began in the early 1970s, when an interest in Northern Ireland took him to the UK, where he studied Irish history at the University of Edinburgh, and undertook research on Irish nationalism i n

Belfast. For the first half of the 1980s, Davis worked full-time for New Left Review, i n the pages of which would appear many of his most seminal essays. His first book, Prisoners of the American Dream - a pessimistic but carefully theorised analysis of the American working class - appeared i n 1986, yet this was quickly overshadowed by the appearance of City of Quartz i n 1990. By 2001, when he published Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis had been widely acclaimed as one of the most controversial, yet also most original, urbanists. His chosen site for his best-known work - Los Angeles - was highly conducive to enhancing his reputation, for both scholarly and political reasons. Firstly, during the 1980s and 1990s a cluster of influential urban theorists began to project Los Angeles as a prototype of how all cities might develop in coming years. Here, Davis sat alongside the so-called 'LA School', composed of theorists such as Michael Dear, E d Soja, and Allen Scott, each of whom offered influential theories of post-Fordism and post-modernism based on readings of the changing geographies of Los Angeles. Secondly, the publication of City of Quartz came only a couple of years before the explosion of urban unrest in Los Angeles in 1992, following the acquittal of police officers implicated i n the Rodney King beatings. For academics, journalists and politicians seeking to understand the conflagration, Davis's careful - if startlingly

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

rendered - analysis of gangs, landgrabbing power elites, extremist policing and highly poli-ticised conservative homeowners provi-ded the context of an uprising waiting to happen. By 2000, Davis was expanding the geographical scale of his examination, seeking new places through which to explore the urban consequences of uneven development. This work displayed a fascination w i t h the social polar opposites of contemporary urbanism, most notably through a fiery examination of Dubai's glaring social inequalities (published i n a collection on these 'evil paradises' - see Davis, 2006a; Davis and Monk, 2007). By contrast, i n Planet of Slums (2006b), he set out a sweeping critique of the conditions of slum dwellers i n cities worldwide, and the policies and governments that place so many i n 'marginal' urban conditions. The book met w i t h much critical praise from the liberal press, but also received significant scholarly critique, as discussed below. In The Monster at Our Door (Davis, 2005), he provided an important urban-based analysis of the looming possibility of a globalised flu pandemic, highlighting the poor and cramped housing conditions that helped to foster close human-animal viral transmission. In Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Davis, 2007), he provides a similarly combative 'alternative history' of urban terrorism. Davis's academic career has been far from straightforward, arriving relatively late as a university teacher. Awarded a Mac Arthur Foundation grant i n 1998, he has gone some way to silencing the conservative backlash against his more polemical narratives. I n his university teaching role, he has followed through the radical messages of his books and articles with politically engaged fieldwork. Yet, it is through his books and articles that he has proved most influential, spawning

and provoking a series of interventions that seek to understand the politics of urbanism i n our biggest cities.

SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS

If one were to pigeonhole Davis, it may be as a social historian, yet it is clear that he has had a wider impact on urbanism, opening up a way of seeing the city as a very real terrain of political struggle, both a microcosm and process of contemporary capitalism. And so it is the tenor of his critique, rather than his disciplinary location, that is most characteristic of his work. Known best for his empirical work, Davis nonetheless has always had a clearly grounded theoretical framework through which to analyse cities. I n an interview, Davis claimed that City of Quartz was a fusion of three competing perspectives:
I had this daydream of Walter Benjamin finally coming to LA and sitting in a bar with Fernand Braudel and Friedrich Engels. They decide to write a book about LA and divide it into three projects. Benjamin is going to get at all the complex and lucid fragments about power and memory. Braudel will explore its natural history, the larger world-historical forces that made it possible. And Engels will report on LA's working classes. [Davis, cited in Schatz, 1997: no pagination)

These three themes - a fierce class consciousness, a stress on how long-term historical processes impact on everyday life, and a strongly humanised, even individualised, account of the impact of capitalism on the lives of Angelenos are fundamental to an understanding of

Mike Davis

his worldview. Such a method - which fuses minute archival research, much of it newspaper-based, with acerbic observational qualities - has opened up paths to radical geographers hitherto closed off by the overwhelmingly structuralist aesthetic of much urban theory. Such a multi-tooled approach has allowed Davis to explore themes often beyond the imagination of politicaleconomy perspectives, without excluding the power of the latter i n shaping daily landscapes and lives. City of Quartz is a sustained and multilayered discussion of elite power i n the boosterist-nozr representations of the city's historians and writers, i n the reach of the Catholic Church, and in the political clout of the city's suburban homeowners. In Ecology of Fear he contrasts the differing 'fire geographies' i n luxury Malibu w i t h working-class downtown; he traces the 'literary destruction of Los Angeles' through pulp fiction and disaster movies; and he warns chillingly of the impending revenge of nature on a city always built upon the domination of the natural environment. I n Dead Cities (2002), he sets out an eye-opening challenge to future urban geographies:
Very large cities - those with a global not just regional environmental footprint are thus the most dramatic end-product, in more than one sense, of human cultural evolution in the Holocene. Presumably they should be the subject of the most urgent and encompassing scientific enquiry. They are not. We know more about rainforest ecology than urban ecology ... The most urgent need, perhaps, is for large-scale conceptual templates for understanding the city-nature dialectic. (Davis, 2002: 363)

an allusion to the Old Testament prophet of the fall of Jerusalem. His apparent pessimism about the fate of LA is also seen as disempowering by some on the Left. In Metromarxism, Andy Merrifield argues that 'Davis's Marxism bespeaks an urbanism that lacks public space and denies any sense of collective experience. It's a Marxist urbanism that expresses only contempt for one's own city, perhaps for good reason' (Merrifield, 2002: 171). By contrast to the quirky exuberance of Marshall Berman, apparently nourished by the cultural inflections of being a New Yorker, Merrifield detects a 'brooding, doom-laden undertow' (Merrifield, 2002: 171) to the work of Davis. However, this charge might be unfair. It is precisely because of Davis's ability to understand the sprawling contours of Los Angeles - so far away from the cohesive morphology of the Paris beloved of many of Merrifield's 'metromarxists' (such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, and Manuel Castells) - that his work has been so influential.

KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES

With this research agenda being tied to a set of dire projections about the future of urban Southern California, Davis has often been dubbed a latter-day Jeremiah,

Given that Davis is better known for his empirical work than his theoretical stance on space and place, what have been the aspects of his work that have proved most influential? We can perhaps identify four: first, a remarkable ability to weave political analysis that fuses city and nature, categories often treated in isolation and even antagonism; second, a powerful statement of the centrality of class

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politics despite the 'cultural' turn away from structural Marxism; third, his work on the 'fortress' or 'carceral' city; and, fourth, the introduction of what could be called 'activist writing', in the sense that his approach has helped to politicise theory, and make accessible and personal some of the bigger forces that shape the contemporary city. Davis's interest in nature is prevalent, if usually underplayed, throughout City of Quartz, but in Ecology of Fear and Dead Cities it moves centre stage, echoing a growing personal interest in 'shock' nature. In Ecology of Fear he argues that the city's urbanisation is out of step w i t h the region's ecosystem, w i t h its hitherto relatively benign earthquake, fire, and drought potential. Above all, he reveals himself to be increasingly interested in neo-catastrophism, the idea that sudden natural occurrences may have far-reaching consequences for both social and natural history. This phase of his work also began to reveal the influence of Fernand Braudel (1902-85), the famed French historian who emphasised the importance of slow, long-term shifts in climate and technology on historical development. The spectre of an urban-generated global pandemic that he anatomised in The Monster at Our Door has certainly come to pass, and the largely epidemiological (rather than social and political) analysis that has accompanied public debate around avian and swine flu pandemics has certainly vindicated his critique. In relation to the second theme, Davis is perhaps most infamous for the biting renditions of Los Angeles as a 'militarised space'. I n 'Fortress L.A.' (chapter four of City of Quartz) he sets out eight trends i n the ongoing destruction of public space i n Los Angeles, his acerbic style i n full flow. Utilising a series of short vignettes, he argues that ' i n cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

post-modernity one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort' (Davis, 1991: 224). Some of his villains are predictable. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) he presents as 'space police', combining air power (helicopters) w i t h communications systems imported from the Californian military aerospace industries. Others are less obvious. The inner-city malls of Alexander Haagen, the employment of armies of private security guards that guard the burgeoning gated communities, the designers who contribute the rounded, sleep-proof 'barrel-shaped benches' to ward off the homeless, and the celebrity architect Frank Gehry (a 'Dirty Harry' for his provocative "Beiru/tized" Goldwyn library i n the city), are all cited as contributors to the creation of spaces of fear in LA. This - for many, exaggerated - vision is taken to its logical extension in 'Beyond Blade Runner', the concluding chapter to Ecology of Fear. Taking the famous Chicago School/Burgess 'concentric ring' model of the archetypal structure of the North American city, he provides an inimitable up-date: ' M y remapping takes Burgess back to the future. It preserves such "ecological" determinants as income, land value, class and race but adds a decisive new factor: fear' (Davis, 1998: 363). The Davis diagram represents LA as a fragmented city, with a 'gulag r i m ' of privatised prisons on the distant reaches of the city, a surrounding ring of gated, affluent suburbia linked orbitally to a series of edge cities, a variegated set of inner rings dominated by suspicious blue collar communities, 'homeless containment zones', drug- and gang-free parks subject to specific legal regulation, and a downtown scanscape, as opposed to landscape, dominated by highly developed surveillance technology.

Mike Davis

In these two chapters, undoubtedly the most frequently quoted parts of his LA work, Davis sets out a plausible account of a city fractured by the 1992 riots. Third, Davis is strongly defensive of the importance of class politics and labour exploitation at a time when other perspectives have grown in significance for geographers. His interest in ethnicity is primarily driven by the subordinate position of Latinos or African Americans in the labour market; his exploration of the dramatic contrast between Malibu and downtown LA in terms of fire and state policy is about access to housing and policy influence; his discussion of gang culture is aligned with the Black Panthers and a 'revolutionary lumpenproletariat' which has been fractured by internecine fights over drug vending territory. Yet, in his later work he moved beyond the urban, and applied his interest in class exploitation on a grander scale. In Late Victorian Holocausts he argued that the droughts and famines that caused mass death in India, Brazil and China in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were exacerbated by the aggressive imperialist capitalism inflicted on a global peasantry (famine occurring at a time of unprecedented grain production i n India, for example) - a searing indictment of imperialism and the birth of today's 'third world'. Such an understanding fits w i t h Davis's dystopian take on today's 'global cities', a 'dialectic of securitised versus demonic urban places' (Davis, 2006b: 206). This is epitomised by his essay on Dubai (Davis, 2006a, also contained in Davis and Monk, 2007), which exemplifies the ambiguity that many feel towards his work. On the one hand, this is a coherent and far-reaching critique of the economic, social and political inequality that underlies the Emirate's skyscrapers, artificial islands, and shopping malls. On the other hand, it repeats the breathless, and

often superficial, denunciations of this city which have become commonplace in recent years, being heavily reliant on secondary sources, and often dependent on caricature to convey its message. As a consequence, this version of global capitalism as being polarised between a class of super-rich, shaping urban space in a way that protects their lifestyles, and a global class of marginalised slum dwellers w i t h a weak hold on both terrain and livelihood, has been criticised from several directions. Writing from a left perspective, some critics have argued that Planet of Slums is overly apocalyptic, effectively depoliticising and homogenising urban slum dwellers as lacking in political agency. Angotti (2006: 962) presents an excoriating critique of this book, which he sees to be full of 'condemnation and moral outrage, not serious analysis', containing a blend of anti-urban bias and simplistic dualisms regarding slum dwellers. It is argued that his use of 'slum' as terminology is itself racialised; that he is excessively reliant on the economistic data of the World Bank in drawing his conclusions; and that he lapses too often into the apocalyptic tones that marked (or marred) much of his writing on Los Angeles (Angotti, 2006; Pithouse, 2008). This leads to a fourth important contribution made by Davis: his trademark writing style, which has arguably become increasingly tendentious, but which certainly has helped to inspire a legion of followers. I n many ways it fits into a tradition of noir writing on the city (Gregory, 1994), where the dark realities of political life are hidden from everyday view, only accessible through the hard-boiled, fearless detective. His writing on Los Angeles is self-consciously positioned against what he sees as the boosterist rhetoric of many orthodox LA historians, such as Kevin Starr (1991). The opening chapter of City of Quartz is entitled 'Sunshine or Noir?',

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and is the hermeneutic key to understanding the book. Davis uses this dialectic - between the promotional myths of property developers and politicians of fertile land and a better life, and the competing reading of a city built upon the exploitation of labour and the environment - to structure his narrative, as the following memorable citation demonstrates:
Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions 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 ... Hollywood's pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive [than contemporary urban theory] in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface in the wake of the Reagan era. (Davis, 1990: 223)

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

shake their heads sadly at these confessions. However, it is clear that were these people not to be found guilty, they would not have been summoned to speak their lines. Such is the methodology of the show trial. While this strong narrative structure may lend illusory coherence to the plot, it may fail to produce the degree of 'reality effect' that an account more open to contradictory evidence might achieve. (Duncan, 1996: 261)

This style, which James Duncan (1996) calls the 'Tragic/Marxian' mode of writing, can be accused of being too muscular in its pursuit of narrative coherence and political persuasiveness. While Duncan's own critique may fall guilty of the crimes he sees inherent i n the Davis approach, he nonetheless makes valid observations at how the Quartz narrative progresses:
[Davis] clearly speaks for the underclass. We do not hear from them directly, however. In fact, the only people other than Davis that we do hear from are those whom he parades before us to speak their highly edited 'confessions' and then marches out again with a resounding 'guilty'. The implied readership who stand as jury to the author's prosecutor

The allegation that Davis's writing is powerful but rather tendentious is one that has been voiced by sympathisers and opponents alike. Yet what he does, for students of Marxism grown tired of struggling w i t h abstract theoretical issues, or left doubting the relevance of the Marxian legacy for the contemporary city, is to show that theory can live i n the streets of one of the world's most brutally capitalised cities, and make sense of such diverse subjects as gang warfare, urban Catholicism, street furniture and place myth. Davis's influence on geography and the urban is perhaps still to be fully realised. It is not impossible that the current direction of his theory - with his emphasis on a radical urban ecology - may fall between several established camps. His empirical work on Los Angeles and elsewhere w i l l continue to motivate and inform a wide range of publics, and his intellectual creativity and originality should also inspire new interest i n an urban geography which is too often ignorant of the political. Ultimately, perhaps, the biggest impact of Davis may be through the vibrancy of his writing, suggesting a voice to those academics and activists who see conventional theory too heavy, or too sluggish, to convey the political immediacy of contemporary urban life.

Mike Davis

DAVIS'S KEY WORKS

Davis, M. (1986) Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. London: Verso. Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Davis, M. (1998) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books. Davis, M. (2000) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the American City. London: Verso. Davis, M. (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Davis, M. (2002) Dead Cities and Other Tales. London: Verso. Davis, M. (2005) The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. New York: New Press. Davis, M. (2006a) 'Fear and money in Dubai', New Left Review, 41:47-68. Davis, M. (2006b) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Davis, M. (2007) Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. London: Verso. Davis, M. and Monk, D.B. (eds) (2007) Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. The New Press: New York.

Secondary Sources and References

Angotti, T. (2006) 'Apocalyptic anti-urbanism: Mike Davis and his planet ot slums', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (4): 961-7. Duncan, J. (1996) 'Me(trope)olis: Or Hayden White among the urbanists', in A.D. King (ed.), Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-century Metropolis. Basingstoke: MacMillan. pp. 253-68. Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. MacAdams, L. (1998) 'Jeremiah among the palms: the lives and dark prophecies of Mike Davis', LA Weekly, 3 December (www. laweekly.com/ink/99/01/news-macadams.php). Merrifield, A. (2002) Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York: Routledge. Pithouse, R. (2008) 'Review of M. Davis, Planet of Slums', Journal of Asian and African Studies, 43 (5): 567-74. Schatz, A. (1997) The American earthquake: Mike Davis and the politics of disaster', Lingua Franca, September (republished on Radical Urban Theory, www.rut.com/mdavis/americanearthquake.html). Starr, K. (1991) American Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Donald McNeill, University of Western Sydney