With his books “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear” Mike Davis wrote classics of urban sociology. He has now died at the age of 76.
Mike Davis (1946–2022)CC BY-SA 4.0/archinect.com
His fascination with urban spaces was always linked to their threat and dissolution. In his famous biography of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, Mike Davis unfolds a social history of the megalopolis from its inception to the present, while at the same time portraying it as a dystopia for urban space, a future fragile in many respects. The privatization of public institutions forced by neoliberalism encounters growing migration, violence and tribalization, exclusion and obsession with security. “City of Quartz” is about the uprisings of the marginalized and their drift into a drug economy. What the film “Pretty Woman” with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere had garnished as a modern fairy tale with fantasies of getting out and rising, Mike Davis brings back into the gloomy urban sociological reality, albeit in a language that can be connected to the usual pop sounds.
And no matter how bleak Los Angeles, as Mike Davis described it, might be, he always had a keen eye for the productive forces lurking in the destructive economy. In a short essay about Kinshasa, published in the taz in 2006, he not only describes how Congo was plundered by the Mobutu regime. With benevolent curiosity he also observes the energies of self-organization and the magic of muddle-through. “Faced with the death of the official city and its institutions, the Kinshasaers – especially mothers and grandmothers – fought for their very survival by turning their city into a village: they returned to subsistence farming and traditional forms of rural self-help.” the discovery of a brave makeshift under the conditions of the so-called Global South, is now being described under the heading of economic shrinkage as a forward-looking economy after the end of capitalism.
Sunk around 150 times – Los Angeles
For Mike Davis, however, Los Angeles always remained the reference point for his inspirational writing. In “Ecology of Fear” he compares the real catastrophes of his city with the fictional scenarios of doom. Los Angeles has gone under in film and literature around 150 times in the past 100 years – pulverized by devastating earthquakes, melted in fires and also socially dissolved in gang wars and civil wars. In the fictional disasters, Mike Davis recognized the fears of a shrinking white upper class.
Born in Fontana, California, in 1946, Mike Davis was forced to drop out of high school as a youngster and work in a meat plant to help support his family. Some of his essays and books are now considered classics of urban sociology. Mike Davis passed away on Monday at the age of 76.