LAT: Mike Davis, 'City of Quartz' author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies

When it was first published in 1990, Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” hardly seemed a candidate for bestseller status.

There was its author, for starters. Davis was a Marxist urban scholar whose primary contribution to the public discourse at the time consisted of a little-read book about the history of labor in the U.S., along with dispatches on related subjects in the LA Weekly and the New Left Review.

There was also the book itself. Released by the lefty publishing house Verso, it was 462 dense, unsparing pages about the ways in which powerful interests in Los Angeles — namely, real estate developers, aided and abetted by politicians and the Police Department — had ruthlessly molded the landscape of the city to their whim, principally at the expense of the working class and people of color, all while promoting myths about backyard living.

“City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” was almost irrationally ambitious. The book contained a kitchen sink’s worth of subject matter covering the design of corporate superblocks, cul-de-sac NIMBY-ism and the ongoing faceoff between the cultures of boosterism and noir, buttressed by copious footnotes and references to Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. And its cover? A looming image of the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles by photographer Robert Morrow.
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Davis, a writer whose work exposed L.A.'s social fractures and disquieted its most ardent boosters, and whose mark on the intellectual history of Southern California remains indelible, died Tuesday at his home in San Diego from complications related to esophageal cancer, according to his daughter and literary agent Róisín Davis. He was 76.