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Book Reviews on...

City of Quartz by Mike Davis
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City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

Recommendations from our site

“Davis built on the history and arguments that Carey McWilliams proffered in An Island on the Land half a century earlier. City of Quartz, which was actually a PhD dissertation that he turned into book form, looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them together into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs along the way. He was wary of air pollution and what would happen with the ever-increasing number of automobiles clogging the freeway system. Sadly, a lot of his predictions have come to pass.” Read more...

The best books on Los Angeles

Dennis McDougal, Journalist

“Mike Davis is getting increasingly vociferous about development and climate change, and in a way this is one of his milder books. I found City of Quartz when I went to Los Angeles for first time. In its angry and political way, it describes how cities arise out of an incredibly complex and difficult set of uncontrollable forces. When I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. I was thinking what the hell is going on here? It wasn’t just to do with the freeways and the smog, and Hollywood – there was something very strange about it. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. It made sense of things; why the railways have gone and why freeways had proliferated for example (the railways in LA were brought up by a conglomerate made up of companies in the car industry, who just shut them down because they were competition, which in time meant the freeways popped up). It’s a book about understanding the relationship between the built and the un-built, the physical fabric and social fabric.” Read more...

The best books on The Context of Architecture

Jeremy Till, Architects & Architectural Historian

Other books by Mike Davis

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis

Late Victorian Holocausts
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