The worst compliment you can give Mike Davis is to call him a prophet—he takes no pleasure in being right. Davis made his name with the 1990 publication of City of Quartz, a series of acerbic, exhaustively researched meditations on twentieth-century Los Angeles. He countered celebrations of LA’s revival—emblematized in its hosting of the 1984 Olympics—with an account of a city fractured by publicly subsidized hyper-gentrification, government disinvestment, white-homeowner revolts, and an impoverished and disenfranchised Latino and Black underclass. Most famously, perhaps, Davis declared that the city’s urban design was governed by an ideology of “spatial apartheid” and cataloged “the emergent liaisons between architecture and the American police state.” Even celebrated Angeleno Frank Gehry comes under fire as one of the chief architects of “Fortress L.A.”
I discovered Davis in my early twenties, just after I’d moved to Los Angeles. I lived in a boxy, low-rise apartment complex just across the street from the million-dollar, faux-Mediterranean bungalows of Beverly Hills. A visible line in the middle of the street divided those tiny mansions (and the rich municipality that sponsored them) from my apartment in the actual city of LA. The Beverly Hills half of the street was paved with pristine black asphalt, while the LA half was composed of cracked gray concrete slabs. The first house on the Beverly Hills side had barred windows and a caged entryway that belied the friendliness of its impeccably manicured lawn. I never saw anyone go in or come out. It occurred to me then that the house might not actually be a dwelling, but instead a kind of border barricade. Considered alongside the lawn signs on other homes that warned trespassers of an “ARMED RESPONSE,” it all amounted to an unambiguous message: stay out. As a result, I rarely went running in Beverly Hills, taking my chances on LA’s considerably more uneven sidewalks instead.
Reading Davis gave me a language to articulate the purposes of the city’s built geography, the ways its urban design enforced the sorting of its more and less worthy citizens. City of Quartz is in part a history of how such features came to be etched so firmly into a metropolis that sold itself as a land of open roads. Even the library where I could check out Davis’s books (the 1984 Gehry-designed Goldwyn branch in Hollywood) was a symptom of this process. Davis argued that the privately sponsored public building—“baroquely fortified” with “bellicose barricades”—was a “beachhead” for the gentrification of Hollywood, a neighborhood populated largely by Central American refugees. It reminded me a lot of the house on the corner.
“As the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles,” Davis observed. The imposing exclusivity of the city’s modern development was, in his view, a middle finger directed at the city’s working poor, who suffered most from the cannibalization of what remained of LA’s public space. (Davis pointed out that the city had fewer public restrooms than any other North American city.) They also suffered from police terrorism, which crescendoed in the indiscriminate mass arrest of fifteen hundred Black youth on a single night in 1988. “Every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming,” Davis would later write of that period.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/excavating-future
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