When it was published in 1990, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz grabbed national attention by cutting against the grain of an increasingly upbeat conventional wisdom about Los Angeles. The 1984 Summer Olympics had sparked an optimism about—and global interest in—the city, leading to a boom that lasted through the end of the decade. Ambitious architecture was rising across L.A.: Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art had just opened, and plans were underway for Richard Meier’s Getty Center and Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. The city was becoming a magnet not just for artists, designers and filmmakers, as had been the case for most of the 20th century, but for growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, who brought a cultural dynamism to Southern California that enlivened everything from its public spaces to its restaurant and literary scenes.
On nearly every one of its 512 pages, City of Quartz was eager to pierce what its author saw as the thin veneer of that seeming civic renaissance. Davis, who died last week at 76, of esophageal cancer, wrote that the Olympics had relied on a heavily militarized security apparatus that gave the L.A. Police Department not just an injection of funding but a dangerous sense of political invincibility. He implicated, too, the city’s urban planners and architects in a broad campaign to protect the interests of wealthy Angelenos and uphold what he called L.A.’s “spatial apartheid,” producing a city where “genuinely democratic space is all but extinct.”
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