The storyteller of 1001 cities, Los Angeles, Dubai, Lagos, Beijing, Manila, has passed away. American researcher and activist Mike Davis died on Tuesday, October 25, at the age of 76, in San Diego (California), but his fertile and precursory research territories remain in memory, from slums to rich ghettos. Born March 10, 1946, in Fontana (California), the anthropologist, historian, geographer had the art of crossing disciplines (even cinema and science fiction) to shed new light, very dark, the urban future of a planet battered by productivism and the exploitation of humankind.
Unionist and adventurer, before being a university student, Mike Davis grew up near San Diego in a modest family, with a meat-cutter father whom he replaced when he fell ill. Leaving home at 18, he left for New York, joined a radical student left organization (Students for a Democratic Society), and made a brief stint in the Communist Party (1968-1969). To live, he drove trucks from 1969 to 1973, before resuming studies in his thirties (at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA), confronting his new knowledge in the field, over travels in the 1980s. (in Belfast, London, where he works on the New Left Review). In 1987, he got a job teaching one day a week at UCLA. “In one day, at university, I earned more than in six days on board my truck”, he told us in an interview in 2008.
Having thus measured wage gaps himself, he applied himself to revisiting the class struggle in the light of the development of megalopolises. Published in 1990, in the United States, before being translated in France, City of Quartz. Los Angeles, capital of the future (La Découverte, 1997) has become a classic of urban sociology, although the author adopts a tone far removed from the academic style. And this perhaps explains it: Mike Davis had a sense of the formula, and his powerful, accessible writing was able to lead a new generation of researchers. His descents to Downtown Los Angeles with his students detonated, his oratorical jousts filled the amphitheatres. About City of Quartzjournalist and publisher Marc Saint-Upéry wrote this, in the preface to the French edition: “An unidentifiable bookish object, in the vein of Paris, capital of the 19th centurye century, Walter Benjamin. »
Under the pen of Davis, a city became a character, a simple object (the sand of Arabia), the symptom of a frantic race for gigantism and profit, in the United Arab Emirates. Another of his resounding works is a very small book, The Dubai Stadium of Capitalism (Ordinary Prairies, 2007), a veritable water bomb, full of references and analyzes splashing the new “big guys” of this world. Describing a “strange paradise”the author analyzed the price to be paid – ecological, political and social, with exploited workers – to build such architectural debauchery, towers brushing the ever-higher sky, refrigerated swimming pools for tourists overwhelmed with heat.
prophetic author
Selected excerpt: “But where are you? In Margaret Atwood’s new novel, in the posthumous sequel to Blade Runner, of Philip K. Dick, or of a Donald Trump on acid? »wondered the prophetic author, a decade before the American real estate magnate became the 45e President of the United States (2017-2021). Let’s add that The Dubai Stadium of Capitalism strangely echoes other “stadiums”, and the current controversy over the organization of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, a country that cares neither for human rights nor for working conditions Workers.
Mike Davis is also the author of an impressive A brief history of the car bomb (La Découverte, 2012), analyzing how the vehicle stuffed with explosives – a “poor man’s bomber” – has become an emblem of modern terrorism. In one of his last books, The Monster Enters (Verso Books, 2022, untranslated), the indefatigable Davis resumed the writing of a previous work on the history of epidemics – The Monster at Our Door. The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New Press, 2005, untranslated) –, situating the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of past viral disasters, linked to the destruction of wild habitats. Lots of grain to grind.
Mike Davis in a few dates
10 mars 1946 Born in Fontana (California)
1987 Goes to University of California, Los Angeles
1990 Publish City of Quartz. Los Angeles, capital of the future, translated into French in 1997
2007 Publish The Dubai Stadium of Capitalism
October 25, 2022 Died in San Diego (California)