City Of Quartz Excavating The Future In Los Angeles Mike Davis by Mike Davis 9781844674862, 9780860913030, 184467486X, 0860913031 instant download after payment.

This is a history and sociological study of Los Angeles. Davis looks at the city from two perspectives: that of the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his city's life, and of the urban guerilla aching to see the whole thing blow. He believes that Los Angeles has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. With an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust, and the dangerous, he evokes Los Angeles as "a real place with a rich concrete history and a vivid, recognizable everyday life, and a system of public transit to the urban sublime." Davis deals with real estate development, ethnic groups, home-owners' associations, youth gangs, and the police. His elegiac tale points to a future in which the sublime and the dreadful are inextricable. ISBN 0-86091-303-1 : $24.95.