{"id":194,"date":"2011-07-11T21:27:30","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T21:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=194"},"modified":"2012-05-12T16:48:33","modified_gmt":"2012-05-12T22:48:33","slug":"celebrating-city-of-quartz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating ‘City of Quartz’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It was good to notice that Mike Davis\u2019s classic book has just been written up by Los Angeles Times <\/em>architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne as part of his \u201cReading LA<\/a>\u201d series. In fact Hawthorne identifies Quartz<\/em> as one of the three most important treatments of Los Angeles urbanism ever written. \u00a0Davis’s book has long been required reading in my Culture and The City<\/a> course, where it anchors the unit on The Fortress City.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s little to disagree with in Hawthorne\u2019s assessment of the pros and cons of Davis’s book. \u00a0He describes it as a necessary reality check that usefully counters a century of \u201cmindless\u201d LA\u00a0 boosterism.\u00a0 On the other hand, he notes (as many others have) that the book requires some fact-checking.\u00a0 That’s why I always pair it with Veronique de Turenne\u2019s important critique<\/a>.\u00a0 I also agree with Hawthorne that it would be really interesting to get Davis\u2019s take on what\u2019s happening in Los Angeles today given the city\u2019s efforts to renew and better thread together its public and shared spaces. \u00a0Is the post-suburban LA built environment still complicit in an \u201curban cold war\u201d on the poor, the ethnically different, and the disempowered?<\/p>\n

Whatever the result of such an analysis it would not threaten Davis\u2019s central position in my course reading list.\u00a0\u00a0City of Quartz<\/em> not only has continuing appeal for the reasons that Hawthorne notes, but also enduring pedagogical value.\u00a0 For me this stems largely from Davis\u2019s provision of a checklist of what Foucault<\/a> might call the \u201clittle tactics of habitat\u201d that shape and constrain human interaction within urban environments. \u00a0My 10 favorite tactics (as described by Davis) that can serve to separate, surveil, and subjugate include:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The superblock<\/li>\n
  2. The megastructure<\/li>\n
  3. The sentient skyscraper\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. The elevated pedway<\/li>\n
  5. The panoptic mall<\/li>\n
  6. The \u201cDirty Harry\u201d civic building<\/li>\n
  7. The fortified dumpster\u00a0(aka the \u201cbag-lady-proof trash cage\u201d)<\/li>\n
  8. The bum-proof bus bench (at right)<\/li>\n
  9. The stealth prison<\/li>\n
  10. The Gulag Rim<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Of course, some of these tactics are not so little. \u00a0I also alert students to the fact that they are not necessarily sprung from conspiracies among developers, politicians, and the police. \u00a0They can simply be borne of accumulated, culturally inculcated \u201curban ways of doing.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0What’s certain is that Davis provides a specific set of physical elements that students can look for as they experience cities at home and abroad in their efforts to evaluate urban health and livability. \u00a0In practice students do<\/em> discover versions of these tactics existing in different mixes in different urban fabrics.\u00a0 In so doing Davis\u2019s work immeasurably enriches their understanding and appreciation of urban form and its cultural effects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It was good to notice that Mike Davis\u2019s classic book has just been written up by Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne as part of his \u201cReading LA\u201d series. In fact Hawthorne identifies Quartz as one of the three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-38","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1247,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/1247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}