At the same time, he could master the intricate and prodigious detail of a particular place and the movement of its political economy through time – the machinations of politics, the exertion of state power, the relentless accumulation of capital in the remaking of landscapes. But the tendency by the 1980s was for the plucky homeowners’ associations fighting excessive urban “growth” to unite with developers to control the increasingly diverse populations coming into the formerly White Anglo Saxon Protestant city and its more affluent neighbourhoods.

Charlotte is also a team member of Study and Struggle, an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi. Although the market determines Los Angeles’ immigration and urban design, the wealthy elites and middle classes who live in the more affluent parts of town have sought to remain faithful to the Boosters’ dream by campaigning to incorporate their neighborhoods and pass laws that make them inaccessible to the less affluent and nonwhite. Whenever I find myself resting too easily on the idea that scholarship and activism are incommensurable genres, driven by different motivations, I think of Mike Davis, and of his synthesis of Marxist and environmental thought, and think again, think better.A. was ‘in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail’ (114). Opposition to business-led growth came mostly from the city’s Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) protesters. Keeping despised communities enclosed in their areas isn't cost effective and the consequent strain on infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. At the time of writing, much of Downtown Los Angeles’ power, and even Hollywood’s, is outsourced to wealthy Japanese businessmen.

Mike Davis, a born and bred Angelino, turns his critical eye on the socio-political history of LA, helping to navigate visitors like myself around the baffling contradictions of a city sold to us all in various forms. The epilogue and prologue are united where new names and faces draw the well built lines of the labyrinth sheltering windmills at the feet of which we once laid down our arms. Here, the carceral state's function as a brutal enforcer of manufactured racial and classed hierarchies of difference in service of capital gains is made blaringly transparent. But as one LA Times journalist remarked in 2018, reflecting on Davis's prescient critique in Ecology of Fear of Malibu's affluent homeowners who insisted on building wasteful and exclusivist mega-mansions in one of the most fire-prone regions in the nation, "we now live in Mike Davis's world. See, for example, the school of historiography associated with the late Herbert Gutman, author of Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America and The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom.The master discourse here – exemplified by the West Hills secessionists – is homestead exclusivism, whether the immediate issue is apartment construction, commercial encroachment, school busing, crime, taxes or simply community designation. A work of social criticism shows how Los Angeles's history, hidden power structure, and disparity of wealth will effect the city's future and the future of urban America in general.

You're not less a public figure than the anonymous voice-over in the silencio theater of your angst-ridden life. Environmentalism is a congenial discourse to the extent that it is congruent with a vision of eternally rising property values in secure bastions of white privilege. Gustavo Arellano, "Column: Revisiting Mike Davis' case for letting Malibu burn," November 14, 2018, The Los Angeles Times.

It's quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. In this taut and compulsive exploration, Mike Davis recounts the story of Los Angeles with passion, wit and an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust and, often, the dangerous. After its early Spanish Empire and Mexican origins before 1848, the city had become an Anglo-Saxon Protestant stronghold by 1900. Meanwhile, the city’s homelessness problems grow and continue to be worse than in many other major US cities. This strategy kept the poor out by zoning land to protect areas of single family homes from apartment construction.