When documentary filmmaker Laura Gabbert made her loving treatment of Gold and his version of Los Angeles, the 2015 City of Gold (my favorite documentary film of all time) she featured footage of the wonderfully bearded Banham, lecturing to a hall full of students about how "L. Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. For some of us, skeptical of the value of detached scholarly inquiry, a work had to justify its existence by taking sides; a scholar had to explain themselves, and the luxury of time they seemed to enjoy, by offering up their texts as instruments of struggle. Interest in City of Quartz was also propelled by the growing idea of the United States as an “incarceration nation” par excellence.

But Davis's observations about surveillance still applied; "the occasional appearance of a destitute street nomad in Broadway Plaza or in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art" still "se[t] off a quiet panic. The epilogue and prologue are united where new names and faces draw the well built lines of the labyrinth sheltering windmills at the feet of which we once laid down our arms. While professing to be the cause of 'responsible planning', they have in fact sponsored a sweeping legal offensive — the second prong of their strategy — to reaffirm the untrammeled rights of private development against any communitarian regulation.

City of Quartz might not have prospered without the videoed police beating of Rodney King, just two years after its publication. 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. Homegrown Revolution: long and rambling and in the preface he said he was worried to read it again, but I think it’s one of the key chapters in the book really. Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz , Late Victorian Holocausts , and Planet of Slums .

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. On your way to glory, to fame and suck-cess you'll see that the medal you've been yearning for turns to a one-sided coin once you remove the blue-knotted package.Opposition to business-led growth came mostly from the city’s Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) protesters. You must also learn to make yourself more beautiful than others, to be the clone, to be the polystyrene clone of dead-eyed models. Davis’ worst qualities come out in this discussion, He comes across as one of those liberals who says they want to “help” the ghetto, but then throws up every possible procedural and philosophical roadblock in front of the police, developers, and bureaucrats who would have to be involved.