(NEW EDITION) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

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Mirages flower to the beat of hearts, stirred by the thousand paged modern tragedy that is hope to which we are leashed like a dog. The tap-root of slow growth in the South, however, is an exceptionalistic local history of middle-class interest formation around home ownership. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. You must also learn to wait for your turn, the turn of the screwed that's given to you - not that you want to.

PANEM ET CIRCENSENS Live from the arena, thirty people listening, it’s the open season to go hunting crown of thorn and pine needles. A. School and a nod to UCLA’s Scott and Soja and Dear and the rest, working against today’s boosters of downtown money. But in this race to reach the first step of a podium made of clay and shit, you forgot arena isn’t any different from those we tried escape. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The nauseous broken record praising the glory of yesterday of which they’re only the witnesses: a chocolate medal for every dreamt victory.

Davis argues that LA architects are creating buildings and public spaces that are intentionally meant to drive the poor and oppressed out of the city. So that we can only shit our rage in a dream and live anarchy through poems, lost in the shithole that sheltered once our good resolutions. But one of the striking things about rereading City of Quartz decades later is that it shows how complexity and clarity of view can coexist with political commitment, which need not align every fact and argument in the same direction, as if they were iron filings organized by a magnetic field. In assessing the book – and Davis – memory and history merge in my own experience of Los Angeles as the 20th-century home of the American Dream.

Not for nothing that in City of Quartz, Banham, despite his brilliant prose, despite his awareness of how the desirability of certain ecologies like the Santa Monica Mountains actually imperiled them, is clearly one of Davis's "boosters," helping to produce myths about the city that accelerated the logic of endless growth into the desert. Mike Davis, a born and bred Angelino, turns his critical eye on the socio-political history of LA, helping to navigate visitors like myself around the baffling contradictions of a city sold to us all in various forms.It is a brilliant tactical move: throughout the text, Davis impales the futuristic, "sunshine" presentation of the city, revealing instead the true, diabolical underbelly of Los Angeles's sprawling landscape, which operates as a "stand in for capitalism in general.

Then come a subset of heroes, the debunkers: Adamic, Mayo Morrow, McWilliams, muralists like Siquieros. Llano – once a site of utopian socialist dreams, now another remote suburb of tract housing and social problems. One consequence of this ongoing process – Lakewood Plan populations now exceed one and a half million in Los Angeles County – has been the extension of residential segregation across a vast metropolitan space’ (168). I also love that the first chapter is the literary chapter – the inventing, debunking, mythologizing of L.Bleating loudly about the plight of the proletariat and 'affordable housing', the pro-growth camp (led by the California Building Industry Foundation) comprises developers opposed to inclusionary housing, builders opposed to unions, realtors opposed to housing integration and landlords opposed to rent control.