Los Angeles

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

historian

political activist

urban theorist

innovator in the field of

political urban theorist

urban theory

is a stand-in for capitalism in general whose world-historically significance is that it plays the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.

Los Angeles in this instance is, of course, a stand-in for capitalism in general. The ultimate world-historical significance -and oddity -of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.' (Davis city of quartz p. 18)

is a sunlit mortuary where your soul will rot and you won't feel it.

Los Angeles a sunlit mortuary where your soul will rot and you won't feel it. (Mike Davis: city of quartz)

is the city that American intellectuals love to hate.

Mike Davis calls it 'the city that American intellectuals love to hate.

While Jonathan Raban had famously foreseen the postmodern city as a 'soft city' 'the city goes soft, it awaits the imprint of an identity [ . . .] it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in' (Raban 1974: 11) for Mike Davis, Los Angeles represents, perhaps more realistically, 'the hard edge of postmodernity' (Davis 1992: 155)

is the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.

As Michael Sorkin has emphasized, 'L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers'. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition)By Mike Davis p. 20)

is usually seen as peculiarly infertile cultural soil, unable to produce, to this day, any homegrown intelligentsia.

. . . Los Angeles is usually seen as peculiarly infertile cultural soil, unable to produce, to this day, any homegrown intelligentsia. Unlike San Francisco, which has generated a distinctive cultural history from the Argonauts to the Beats, Los Angeles's truly indigenous intellectual history seems a barren shelf. Yet for even more peculiar reasons this essentially deracinated city has become the world capital of an immense Culture Industry, which since the 1920s has imported myriads of the most talented writers, filmmakers, artist and visionaries. (Mike Davis: city of quartz p.17)

Mike DavisThinkers

Mike Davis