The author “City of Quartz. Los Angeles, city of the future”, classic of urban sociology, died on October 25, at the age of 76.
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The storyteller of 1001 cities, Los Angeles, Dubai, Lagos, Beijing, Manila, died. American researcher and activist Mike Davis died on Tuesday, October 25, at the age of 76, in San Diego (California), but remain in memory of his fertiles and precursors of research territories, slums with rich ghettos. Born March 10, 1946, in Fontana (California), the anthropologist, historian, geographer had the art of crossing disciplines (up to cinema and science fiction) to light up a new day, very dark, The urban becoming of a planet battered by productivism and exploitation of the human race.
unionist and adventurer, before being an academic, Mike Davis grew up near San Diego in a modest family, with a father cutter of meat which he replaced when he fell ill. Leaving the house at 18, he left for New York, joined an organization of the Radical Student Left (Students for a Democratic Society), and made a brief stint at the Communist Party (1968-1969). To live, he led trucks from 1969 to 1973, before resuming studies in the thirties (at the University of California in Los Angeles, UCLA), confronting his new knowledge on the ground, through travel in the 1980s (in Belfast, London, where he collaborated on the New Left Review). In 1987, he obtained a teaching position one day a week at the UCLA. “In one day, at university, I earned more than six days on my truck,” he told us during an interview, in 2008.
Having thus measured the wage differences himself, he applied himself to revisiting the class struggle in terms of the development of megalopolises. Published in 1990, in the United States, before being translated in France, City of Quartz. Los Angeles, capital of the future (La Découverte, 1997) has become a classic of urban sociology, although the author adopts a tone very far from the university style. And this may explain that: Mike Davis had a sense of formula, and his powerful, accessible writing, was able to take a new generation of researchers. His descents at Downtown Los Angeles with his students detonated, his oratorical jousts filled the amphitheatres. About City of Quartz, the journalist and publisher Marc Saint-Upéry wrote this, in the preface to the French edition: “An unidentifiable book object, in the vein of Paris, capital of the XIX e century, from Walter Benjamin. “
Under the pen of Davis, a city became a character, a simple object (the sand of Arabia), the symptom of a frantic race for gigantism and for the benefit, in the United Arab Emirates. Another of his resounding works is a very small book, the Dubai stadium of capitalism (ordinary meadows, 2007), a real water bomb, full of references and analyzes splashing the new “big” of this world. Describing a “strange paradise”, the author analyzed the price to pay – ecological, political and social, with workers exploited – to build such architectural debauchery, towers brushing the ever higher sky, refrigerated pools for tourists crushed with heat.
Prophetic author
Extract chosen: “But where are you then? In the new novel by Margaret Atwood, in the posthumous suite of Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick, or a Donald Trump under acid?” Wondered The prophetic author, ten years before the American real estate tycoon became 45 e president of the United States (2017-2021). Let us add that the Dubai stadium of capitalism is strangely echoing other “stadiums”, and the current controversy relating to the organization of the World Cup in Qatar, a country which is bothering or the rights of the ‘Man nor the working conditions of workers.
Mike Davis is also the author of an impressive little story of the car bomb (La Découverte, 2012), analyzing how the vehicle full of explosives – a “poor man’s bomber” – has become an emblem of modern terrorism . In one of his last books, The Monster Enters (Verso Books, 2022, not translated), the tireless Davis resumed the writing of a previous work on the history of epidemics – The Monster At Our Door. The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New Press, 2005, not translated) -, re -situating the Pandemic of COVID -19 in the context of viral disasters of the past, in connection with the destruction of wild habitats. Lots of grit to grind.