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Archinect remembers Mike Davis

2022-10-26T16:33:00-04:00

Who was Mike Davis? Many know him as a prolific American writer, storyteller, and brass tacks commentator on all things history, urbanism, politics, labor, activism, and society. However, for many, his words and work were grounding stones for their own perspectives on architecture, urban planning, theory, culture, and social discourse.

A few months prior, our editorial team learned of Davis' health condition when he spoke with The Guardian's Lois Beckett in September. Knowing he was terminally ill added more weight to his words and responses with Beckett. They discussed his previous work, California, climate change, and, as staff writer Josh Niland explained, the "early warnings of the state’s slow-motion social and ecological demise that has taken three decades to manifest." Adding, "True to form, Davis was critical of everything..."

Man...

'Despair is useless': Mike Davis reflects on California, the climate crisis, life, and legacy as he faces his own mortality

2022-09-13T18:44:00-04:00

I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless.

The terminally-ill City of Quartz author sat down recently with The Guardian to discuss his waning health and look back at prescient early warnings of the state’s slow-motion social and ecological demise that has taken three decades to manifest. True to form, Davis was critical of everything: from “fascist” LA novelist Raymond Chandler to Governor Gavin Newsom’s penchant for arrogating his administration’s response to the climate crisis that has been exacerbated by even increasingly harmful and foolhardy attempts to mitigate the housing crisis in Los Angels and other non-urban areas across the state.

Related Feature Interview on Archinect: Meeting Mike Davis

“Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future,” he said. “A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan. It’s not just global warming, and drought, it’s the fact that two...

30 years of Mike Davis, the clairvoyant, Talmudic and Hibernian, public intellectual

2020-07-22T15:24:00-04:00

You can’t overstate the importance of City of Quartz...it remains the best socio-political critique of modern L.A, the first book you’d recommend to someone seeking to understand the dark nativist currents and unyielding avarice that still shape a city so easily stereotyped but rarely understood. It is noir to the core...Even Vince Staples insisted that I read City of Quartz had I not already.

On the 30th anniversary of the dystopian L.A. touchstone, Jeff Weiss talks to the prophetic author and oft-misunderstood activist about political uprisings, the pandemic, and what gives him hope for the future.

In related news, back in 2015 Julia Ingalls reported on the third installment of The Third L.A. series, "which focused on the influence on city politics and culture of Mike Davis' frothy, passionate, anti-booster classic".

The New Yorker interviews Mike Davis "In the Age of Catastrophe"

2020-04-26T13:26:00-04:00

Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.” -Mike Davis

Dana Goodyear of New Yorker had a conversation with Mike Davis on the occasion of his upcoming new book "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties."

The article, particularly summing up Davis' own "being there" through the social and political upheavals of Southern California, starting from the sixties onward and speculating on the possibility of the more uprisings in LA's case.

A Boom Interview: Mike Davis in conversation

2017-01-02T18:19:00-05:00

“The middle class has finally come downtown but only to bring suburbia with them. The hipsters think they’re living in the real thing, but this is purely faux urbanism, a residential mall. Downtown is not the heart of the city, it’s a luxury lifestyle pod for the same people who claim Silverlake is the ‘Eastside’ or that Venice is still bohemian.”

Jennifer Wolch and Dana Cuff track down elusive writer Mike Davis for Boom California.

A previous conversation with Mike Davis for Archinect, "Meeting Mike Davis"

The Days of Infinite Thinking: What "City of Quartz" means for Los Angeles 25 years later

2015-03-10T20:19:00-04:00

If you conceive of Los Angeles as having three distinct historical periods – as Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and the driving force behind The Third L.A. series, does – then the first period encapsulated the 1880s to the 1940s, the second the 1940s to the new millennium, and the third from 2000 to now. It is this current period which The Third L.A. series situates itself. It's also the era which fascinates Hawthorne: specifically, his series investigates how the city's denizens are conceiving of and working toward creating an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented Los Angeles. In partnership with southern California public radio station KPCC and Occidental College, Hawthorne assembled Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, Occidental Art History Professor Amy Lyford, and fellow L.A. Times book critic David Ulin to discuss the influence on city politics and culture of Mike Davis' frothy, passionate, anti-booster classic City of Quartz, a book w...

The Embers of April 1992 by Mike Davis

2012-04-30T13:32:00-04:00

When the hotel workers released a short film a few months later that vividly made the connection between poverty and the uprising, there was a memorable freak-out in the Convention Bureau and City Hall. Instead of a comprehensive investigation that documented events, took public testimony and probed underlying causes, the Christopher Commission was coaxed to finish its superficial report on reforming the LAPD. No one wanted to hear the voices from our own intifada.

Mike Davis reflects on 1992 Rodney King "uprising" deceivingly known as L.A. Riots. He refers it as "our own intifada." I agree with him since witnessing first hand the black smoke covering the city few hours after the events start to unfold.

It was the most socially important event I witnessed in my life and in my 37 years in this city, even though I have seen military coups, born on a nation wide curfew and lived through memories of empty streets with occasional military truck or a tank rolling by. But as an adult, it was something else to see machine gun holding National Guard soldiers behind the post modern columns of Pioneer Market in Echo Park and seeing Los Angeles turning dark under the soot clouds in the middle of the day. At one point, there were 4000 fires going. Something was wrong, unjust and very telling in megalopolis.

Mike Davis on the Global Economic Dystopia

2011-07-26T13:32:10-04:00

From the air, where those Iowa cornstalks don’t conceal the pattern of blind convergence, the world economic situation looks distinctly like a crash waiting to happen. From three directions, the United States, the European Union, and China are blindly speeding toward the same intersection. The question is: Will anyone survive to attend the prom?

From City of Quartz and teaching architecture students how to write, Mike Davis is now looking beyond Southern California.

Let Malibu Burn: A political history of the Fire Coast- Mike Davis

2007-10-21T17:06:00-04:00

In the heat of ongoing Malibu fires, Mike Davis' now classic essay originally published in LA Weekly, once more comes to mind. radicalurbantheory / update
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