Mike Davis (1)Besprekingen

Well, that's a thorough book. Could have been slightly shortened for my taste. But at least it's thorough. Only weird thing: after over 400 pages, it just ends. No conlusion, no outlook. After such an in-depth analysis, this end came unexpected. But Davis' style is incredibly readable, given the topic's complexity.

took me ~4 months on and off but i finally finished it!!!!! i liked this book a lot but it was Very long and at times unfocused, so i found myself taking regular breaks. i was particularly unimpressed with the chapter on women's lib, tacked on towards the end, that mostly covered the early 70s - it's like... okay to acknowledge that women's lib wasn't a major issue in LA in the 60s and leave it there... i would prefer that to feeling like an afterthought! but that said all the content was interesting, and in particular the two chapters which recounted events for which mike davis was present were absolutely riveting reading. if you have the time and patience, much of this is essential reading for understanding the social climate that shaped not only LA but america in the latter half of the 20th century.

Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth.

Thoroughly researched...

"This multi-dimensional approach [of the UN in what qualifies as a slum] is in practice a very conservative gauge of what qualifies as a slum... UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million slum dwellers in 2001 and more than 1 billion in 2005." p.23

The filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, the auteur of the toilet documentary "Bunbay," told a startled interviewer that in Bombay "half the population doesn't have a toilet to s*** in, so they shit outside. That's 5 million people. If they s*** half a kilo each, that's two and a half million kilos of s*** each morning." p.140

Meanwhile in China, where Urban shantytowns reappeared after the market reforms, many in-migrants live without sanitation or running water. "There are reports of people," writes Dorothy Solinger, "squeezed into shacks in Beijing, where one toilet served more than 6,000 people; of a shantytown in Shenzhen housing 50 shelters, in which hundreds subsisted without running water; and a 1995 survey in Shanghai revealed that a mere 11% of nearly 4,500 migrant households actually possessed a toilet." p.140

Just a couple of quotes from this terrifying book, that was published in 2006, to share in my review. I was going to quote another one about Kinshasa, but it's just too lengthy. ...From the beginning of time, men force or coerce women into having sex with them, and nine months later, ready or not, a baby comes. In Asia and Africa, the birthplace of Homo (not so) sapiens, this has multiplied faster than we have noticed, here, in our stolen country. The result in the 21st century, where the globe is ruled by crony capitalism, is a "planet of slums." No place is any longer planned for the poor of the world, who must squat wherever they can, as close as possible to a place where they can grub their scanty living. The rich obviously hope that by "dividing and conquering," i.e. letting the poor fight it out with each other for the crumbs, that they will kill each other off. To a great extent, this will happen, but the upper classes simply can't wall themselves off completely from the problem--there will be overspill. Since this book was published 13 years ago, the problem is horrifyingly so much worse today.

What can be done? Because the governments of the world, first through third, will do nothing about the problem of overpopulation and poverty, it becomes up to the individuals, who are critical thinkers, to do something about this. The only thing I can see to do, is simply do not reproduce. For the children that are already here, educate them about the world that surrounds them, so that they can be at least prepared psychologically for what they will be required to face in their lifetimes. Any child that is born into this world today, is born into an out-of-control ecology, where climate change can reach a tipping point at any moment, where no longer are jobs available for the vast population reproducing more everyday, where fresh water, air, and sufficient food simply cannot be guaranteed for the masses, where seemingly nobody is in charge. To have a child today, is to condemn them to a life that would be no life.

It's like reading the first 5 pages of google search results for "slums+marxist". Maybe that's how it was researched.

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"The atmosphere was charged with the special excitement that occurs when a group of people can see and visibly measure their potential power for the first time."

I wish this could've been the epic sprawl Mike Davis and Jon Weiner hinted at in the beginning of the book (the main text is ~640 pages, the rest being references and notes). Instead, due to publisher concerns—and maybe lack of endurance—we're provided with an account that mostly focuses on the city proper. A damn good one, mind you.

This slim volume is not Davis's best, but ably retells the history of the car bomb from makeshift device to wanton tool of indiscriminate terror. I'd be interested to read an updated version, given the proliferation of the ad hoc, lone wolf car bomber since 2007. I'd also welcome Davis's take on ISIS and the shift in tactics, from the vehicle as explosives transport to a tool of kinetic destruction itself. But reading this, you realize a) the car bomb has been around longer than one might realize, and b) it portends increasing lethality ahead.

A magesterial tour through the worst and (limited) best of the urbanizing third world, in all its horror and potential. The global order, and neoliberalism in particular, still hasn't managed to devise any strategy for incorporating a billion sub-subsistence laborers into formal economies, not a way to provide infrastructure or public services.

Must we doom the developing world to the Dickensian role of "surplus population"? Mike Davis takes us on a tour and demonstrates how the indomitable human spirit prevails, but barely, and with such immiseration and struggle. No slum is alike, but neither is any slum a "good" one.

Davis includes an interesting epilogue with a brief survey of the US military's efforts to consider the city in the context of future urban warfare, and as one of the few elements of government to do so (particularly in the contemporary timeframe of 2005-2006). It foreshadows Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege, but in a far more intelligible, less postmodern style of prose. That holds true for the rest of the boom as well. Very much recommended.

Typical Mike Davis... fascinating stuff, but dense as a brick. I couldn't make it through the book, despite wanting to know what it was telling me.

Fascinating. DENSE.

The first chapter alone makes City of Quartz a worthwhile read: Davis presents an idiosyncratic outline history of culture produced about Los Angeles, by what he calls ‘fabricators of the spectacle’—littérateurs, filmmakers, musicians and artists—engaged in a series of ‘attempts to establish authentic epistemologies’ for the city.

In the early 20th c., a group of writers and publicists (goaded by a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates) created an ersatz history of Los Angeles that romanticized race relations and a fictional Spanish Colonial past, and promoted the power of sunshine to reinvigorate the racial energies of Anglo-Saxons. The imagery, motifs, values and legends of the Arroyo Set have been endlessly reproduced ever since. In the 1920s, a number of anti-romantic writers and painters and Popular Front-affiliated journalists worked to unmask the booster mythology and to recover the historical roles of labor and oppressed minority groups while originating observations that appeared decades later in the obscurantist vocabulary of cultural theorists.

The most influential counter to the utopist ideology came in the form of noir, first as fiction then on film, as the setting shifted from suburban bungalows to the ‘epic dereliction’ of Bunker Hill downtown. Beyond the conventional works, Davis includes in his capacious discussion of noir the fictions of John Fante, Chester Himes and John Rechy, the autobiography of Art Pepper, and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence, described here as a predecessor to films like “Planet of the Apes,” “Omega Man,” and “Blade Runner.”

Huxley came to Los Angeles between the wars as part of a wave of pacifist and anti-fascist European exiles, most of whom—‘clinging to their Old World prejudices,’ as Davis tells it—responded to the ‘counterfeit urbanity’ of L.A. with melancholy, pessimism and/or panic. (One exception was Huxley, who embraced mysticism, health food and hallucinogens). It is amusing to find out that the whole Frankfurt critique of the “Culture Industry” is based upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s blinkered misreading of their first-hand L.A. ‘data.’

Toward the end of the chapter, Davis sketches a few notes on several ‘heroic’ underground cultural moments around Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman (elevator operator at the Bullock Wilshire), Jack Parsons, Kenneth Anger and others. The moments pass quickly, and with little discernible effect, as the 1970s and 80s were characterized by 'a mercenary, corporate-dominated arts dispensation' and an influx of celebrity architects, designers, artists and cultural theorists arriving for their adventures in hyperreality. pshaw

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947.

This is a harrowing tome, one dense with statistics and cutting with testimonial. The first section details the effects of drought and famine on India, China and Brazil in the late 19C. Their are accounts from notables of the time. The second section examines the science of El Nino. The final section surveys the global economies of the period, citing all the requisite authorities, the conclusion is despairing. Economic and technological advances clearly set the table for despair and calamity. Racism and corruption maximized the effect.

A disappointing book from a gifted writer who often focuses his work on the cultural life of Los Angeles, Magical Urbanism is dated but still worth reading as it is short in length.
Davis puts his considerable talent to good use in the 175 pages of this book on all the versions of Latinos who will constitute the global culture of the future: A Pan-American 21st century.
HIs use of statistics falls into leftist ideology of victimization and blames the “white culture” for past oppression of other minorities. Davis’ use of statistical data always supports these principles of analysis. He is therefore trapped into only seeing any reality of the world in one way and the conclusion is foregone. This book is therefore obsolete although Davis is admirable in that he tries to immerse himself in the local communities to give as honest as possible evaluation of people’s lives while in flux.
The best part of the book (originally published in 2000) is not that he has been an accurate prophet, (he’s not) but that he uses literary and periodical material in his footnotes which would otherwise be lost to other researchers or academics. He also revives some past events which were not as momentous as I remember and locates them in a larger historical context.
The title comes from Davis’ contention that life on the US border towns is a new existence of the interpenetration of cultures. Like magical realism (a Hispanic literary genre), magical urbanism is a new way of impoverished living. He calls it First World meets Third World. Davis says this is the template for the future of America as legal and illegal immigration flows into America from the south. Davis concludes that US labor unions will preserve this magical realism into the future as Latinos migrate further into the interior of the continental US. Strangely, Davis says that unions will not force Latinos to assimilate into American culture (a good thing for Davis’ claim to defend identity of migrants’ culture) while also providing for a standard of living far above what would be possible in their home countries.
This is an important book for the students of the History of Los Angeles, Urban Studies, Sociology,and Latino Culture.

Un livre en deux parties:
- première partie qui porte le titre du livre, écrit en effet par Mike Davis, présentant succinctement mais efficacement et directement et clairement plusieurs aspects assez délirants de la construction Dubaï, où une cinquantaine d'années s'est instauré ce stade bien particulier du capitalisme, sans les différentes étapes qu'ont connu l'occident, entre autres. Très intéressant.
- deuxième partie écrite par un Français - oui, j'ai comme l'impression que ça joue un rôle - partie intéressante aussi, qui décortique plus précisément certains aspects de l'activité à Dubaï, de sa relation au monde, de la construction de son capitalisme spécifique - mais avec une telle profusion de références philosophico-sociologico-que sais-je, c'en devient énervant. Ça m'a nettement donné l'impression que l'auteur ne souhaitait tout simplement pas vulgariser son propos. Pourquoi? Au final on comprend tout de même ce qu'il dit, donc toutes ces références obscures et ce vocabulaire proche du jargon n'étaient sans doute pas utiles. Je déteste copieusement ce faux intellectualisme à deux balles, que je qualifierais malheureusement d'assez typiquement français. Pas que, mais quand même. En plus certains de ses raisonnements m'ont paru limite limite.

Bon, au final, je râle, je râle, mais ce livre est globalement très intéressant, même s'il glace les sangs: serait-ce ce type de société qui nous attend dans le futur? Ce n'est pas délirant de le penser.
Ce livre a déjà 10 ans, je n'ose penser (ou vérifier) ce qu'il en est aujourd'hui...

Same great research and writing as everything by Davis, and suffering from the same problem as works such as Planet of Slums: the desperate need to be updated, 15 years into the turbulent 21st century.

Gli slum sono quelle indefinite distese di edifici di varia natura, dalle baracche ai caseggiati, miseri aggregati di manufatti che si diffondono dai bordi della città verso la campagna. Ma non sono né città né campagna. E neanche periferie. Gli slum sono l¿elemento cospicuo del paesaggio nel sud del mondo – America latina, Asia e Africa. Attualmente – dati dell¿Onu citati da Davis – sono abitati da un miliardo di persone, ma le cifre sono quanto di più incerto possa darsi. Con sicurezza si sa che sono in continua crescita e che assorbono la quasi totalità della crescita demografica mondiale. I ritmi spaventano più dei dati assoluti: nel 1910 Londra era sette volte più grande di quanto fosse cent¿anni prima; Dhaka, Kinshasa e Lagos sono all¿incirca quaranta volte più grandi di quanto fossero cinquant¿anni fa. In mezzo secolo Città del Messico è passata da 3 a 22 milioni di abitanti. Il Cairo da 2 e mezzo a 15. Mumbay (Bombay) da 3 a 19.

As always, Davis' historical info is great, and fascinating, but the economics and social dynamics of global urbanity seem to be morphing too quickly and in too many directions at once for some of the predictions he makes to hold up.

Read this book and the follow up Ecology of Fear - enjoyed both. I would highly recommend both of these titles to anyone even remotely interested in the craziness which is Southern California.

Loved this book and City of Quartz. Highly recommended to anyone interested in LA or southern California.

Read for class.

This is utterly terrifying and damning. These slums are the exemplification of hell. I have seen some of these slums myself, and can confirm, if only to a minor degree, some of the horrors there. You feel oppressed and filthy and sick just seeing them. Your senses are bombarded. Davis certainly gets this depiction right.

I would have loved to have had some answers aside from finger-pointing. It is incredibly frustrating to have a truly nightmarish problem presented and no clear solution, and even being blamed for unconsciously being part of the problem - although I confess his rhetoric is very convincing. But what is to be done in these circumstances? Any caring person would feel despondent or enraged. But what can we do about all this?

I would recommend reading up on books on reducing consumption in order to get some last shreds of hope back from this.

Recommended for anyone who wishes to despair for the state of humanity.

I'm not going to lie: this is dry. Really, really dry. I like dry, as a general rule, or at least it doesn't bother me - but this? Man. Maybe it's because the things he covers are so wrenchingly, horribly emotional and in order to get through it with any objectivity he had to cloak himself in boringness. At any rate, the information is valuable - maybe critical - and well worth wading through the whole of the text. The glimpse of our urban future that Davis provides is one we need to look at, hard. And I tell you: you will never take your toilet for granted again.

A hugely important book. This should be read by anybody who tries to talk about globalization.

A bold interpretation of the interaction of nature and history that ties the impact of El Nino and climate conditions to the globalization of the economy in the late 19th century and how these factors helped create what we now call 'The Third World'. Don't miss this one.