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

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the Lakewood Plan and the Bradley-Burns Act gave suburban homeowners a subsidized ‘exit option’ as well as a powerful new motive for organizing around the ‘protection’ of their home values and lifestyles.

I also read, with great enthusiasm, Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective.Some claim it is where everything comes together, in the tradition of noir it is ‘the terminus of American history’. 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.

It was just that the lines of vigilant patrol had shifted, even as investment capital from New York and elsewhere "reinvigorated" "DTLA" with restaurants, some of which I eagerly visited, hoping to taste dishes recommended by my food writing hero Jonathan Gold, of the L. I recommend this book to anybody interested in contemporary urban space - how we negotiate it, how it came to be the way it is - and for anybody interested in getting a peek beneath the surface of this most enigmatic of cities. Now you choose the shackles of an illusion making you believe you belong to an elite grown by opportunism, pride and lies.Davis shows how Fontana has become a “junkyard of dreams,” where symbols of Southern Californian promise and prosperity have decayed irreparably (434). Everything sleeps quietly in here - The toad keeping its watch on earth - The ogre eats those he meets - The knife waiting patiently for the child’ windpipe. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. When I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. Although the market determines Los Angeles’ immigration and urban design, the wealthy elites and middle classes who live in the more affluent parts of town have sought to remain faithful to the Boosters’ dream by campaigning to incorporate their neighborhoods and pass laws that make them inaccessible to the less affluent and nonwhite.

Wealth was based on real estate and a ruling white elite kept its distance from a very large and diverse population.Davis makes no secret of his political leanings: in the new revised introduction he spells them out in the first paragraph. The aftermath of Los Angeles homeowners' slow growth crusades in the 1980s has been a massive crisis of housing unaffordability, where racialized refusals to allow multi-family and other denser forms of development in their neighborhoods alongside stagnating wages have made affordable housing scarcer and resulted in devastating displacement of the city's working-class communities, disproportionately Black, Latinx, and Asian. What is the solution: Better urban planning, less development/more development, forced integration, what? WHITE THRASH KIDS = REDNECK GEEKS Seven pm at “the white trash” in Berlin (we’re) borely in the place that we glimpse. Davis’s second book, it propelled his career to juggernaut status, as a cultural critic and environmental historian.