City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“Their enthusiastic labor transformed several thousand acres of the Mojave into a small Socialist civilization. By 1916 their alfalfa fields and modern dairy, their pear orchards and vegetable gardens—all watered by a complex and efficient irrigation system—supplied the colony with 90 per cent of its own food.” 

Davis paints Llano del Rio, the Socialist outpost in the desert, as a utopian civilization that fulfills the American Dream of abundant self-reliance. The community is positioned in counterpoint to the increasingly internationalized, capitalist, market-driven Los Angeles. 

“L.A. already was everywhere. They had watched it every night in San Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cars and saw themselves on television.” 

Two El Salvadorian immigrants, who Davis encounters in the desert, have a fantastical utopian vision of Los Angeles that Hollywood has sold to them. Their dream city is a consumer paradise of newness and youth. The reality of what life in the city is like for poor nonwhites like them is a brusque affront to their ideal. 

“The ultimate world-historical significance—and oddity—of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized heaven and hell.” 

As Davis considers Los Angeles’ reputation in the world intellectual tradition, he notes how the market forces that have shaped the city have made it both the perfect place, or utopia, as well as a hellish wasteland where organic life and connections have been supplanted by the vehicles of advanced capitalism and security. Interestingly, the different incorporations and ghettos in Los Angeles resemble heaven and hell in being enclosed spaces. 

“Unlike other American cities that maximized their comparative advantages as crossroads, capitals, seaports, or manufacturing centers, Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation […] of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the West from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific.” 

Davis illustrates the artificial makeup of Los Angeles, a city that has no geographical advantages, apart from its climate. Its uniqueness both sets it apart from its predecessors and makes it a model for future urban development. 

“Noir was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent […] Hollywood became the ‘Dream Dump,’ a hallucinatory landscape tottering on apocalypse, while in successive Chandler novels the climate […] was increasingly eerie; there were even ‘ladies in the lakes.’” 

The noir genre of cultural production plays to the tension between Los Angeles’ utopian and dystopian reputation, as it shows the darker, Gothic side to each sunny idyll. Interestingly, the turbulent weather and mythic legendary figures of older civilizations on the East Coast and Europe feature abundantly in noir films and novels. 

“Hale and Millikan shared an almost fanatical belief in the partnership of science and big business. It was their policy that Cal Tech be allied to ‘aristocracy and patronage’ and shielded from meddling congressmen and other representatives of the people.” 

Hale and Millikan’s emphasis on the exclusion of congressmen from their work in favor of big business echoes the ethos of Los Angeles’ elite businessmen, who adopted a similar policy of excluding policymaking meddlers. It paints a picture of a town governed by independent, privately funded bodies rather than a cohesive metropolis. 

“Power in Southern California is fragmented and dispersed, without a hegemonic center.” 

While much of Los Angeles’ wealth is concentrated in the hands of a Downtown elite, they have throughout the city’s history been challenged by a Westside Jewish elite, and in more recent years, foreign investors. The lack of a hegemonic center also refers to the distribution of power in Los Angeles’ numerous incorporations. 

“First is the bizarre fact that the region’s leading foreign export by volume is simply empty space; more than half the containers which arrive in San Pedro filled with computers, cars and televisions return with nothing in them.” 

The empty space that constitutes Southern California’s greatest export is somewhat symbolic of the abstract, capitalist nature of Los Angeles as a whole; with empty space as its export, it is difficult to know what the city actually stands for. 

“The acquisition of Hollywood’s dream machinery is a fitting capstone to Japanese capitalism’s humbling of the United States in the age of Reagan and Bush. […] Like Downtown, Hollywood is becoming a colony of the world economy.” 

Japanese business’ acquisition of Hollywood symbolizes how everything stands to be sold to the highest bidder in Los Angeles. The fact that Hollywood, a leading cultural producer, has been reduced to the status of a colony indicates how nothing is sacred in a city governed by advanced capitalism. 

“‘Community’ in Los Angeles means homogeneity of race, class and, especially, home values. Community designations […] have no legal status. […] They are merely favors granted by city council members to well-organized neighborhoods or businessmen’s groups seeking to have their areas identified.” 

Communities in Los Angeles are separated by race and class, a phenomenon that the naming of separate areas, and their incorporation, contributes to. The naming and incorporation of a neighborhood makes it exclusive to its residents and contributes to societal division. 

“The emergence of Southern California as a ‘metrosea’ of fragmented and insular local sovereignties—often depicted in urbanist literature as ‘an accident’ of unprecedented growth—was in fact the result of deliberate shaping.” 

Davis seeks to draw attention to the power of the middle classes in securing the local neighborhood sovereignties that distinguish them from the metropolis. These bourgeois residents’ desires to be apart from the metropolis, and their organized activity to that end, caused the city to be thus structured. 

“As shit was followed by floodwater, drought, toxics, seismic safety, smog and solid waste, the horrible penny began to drop in City Hall that the growth wars between homeowners and developers were actually being fought within the limits of a collapsing infrastructure.” 

The breakdown of Hyperion Sludge Plant, which was brought in to deal with Los Angeles’ waste, was a warning of how untenable the situation of each incorporation looking out for its own interests was, as the population and its waste grew exponentially. The explosion of sewage further highlights the dystopian, shadow side of Los Angeles. 

“Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous ‘armed response.’” 

The threatening warning signs of armed response and the fortresses of luxury that imprison the rich have a distinctly dystopian feel. The primary American virtue of freedom is compromised in this situation.

“To reduce contact with untouchables, urban redevelopment has converted once vital pedestrian streets into traffic sewers and transformed public parks into temporary receptacles for the homeless and wretched.” 

Davis borrows the phrase “untouchables,” which stems from the lowest, almost abject strata in Indian society, to show how squeamish affluent people are about making contact with the poor. Meanwhile, the replacement of humane “pedestrian streets” with alien “traffic sewers” shows that this apparent clean-up has dystopian overtones. 

“With sometimes chilling luminosity, his work clarifies the underlying relations of repression, surveillance and exclusion that characterize the fragmented, paranoid spatiality towards which Los Angeles seems to aspire.” 

Gehry’s buildings make Los Angeles’ urban plan of separating different strata of society into high art. The phrase “chilling luminosity” aptly describes Gehry’s evocation of the Californian characteristic of light, while simultaneously showing his sinister pandering to the aesthetics of surveillance and exclusion. 

“To facilitate ground-air synchronization, thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” 

The level of surveillance in Los Angeles is so extensive that the city has been shaped and even disfigured in order to facilitate it. The residencies with numbers on their rooftops are therefore less private habitats than targets for identification. 

“The ‘terrorism’ metaphor has metastasized as Hahn and Reiner have criminalized successive strata of the community: ‘gang members,’ then ‘gang parents,’ followed by whole ‘gang families,’ ‘gang neighborhoods,’ and perhaps even a ‘gang generation.’” 

This passage shows how whole underprivileged communities become vilified in their suspected association with gangs. In keeping with the terrorism metaphor, the authorities have recognized that it takes a whole network of people to support a gang. The authorities have expanded culpability beyond gang members themselves to increase paranoia and unease amongst other members of the community. 

“It seems probable that the first generation of Black street gangs emerged as a defensive response to white violence in the schools and streets during the 1940s.” 

This passage illustrates how black street gangs were originally formed for defensive rather than offensive purposes. It thus positions racism against blacks as the reason for street conflict. 

“Although terrorism is always portrayed precisely as inarticulable malevolence, authorities expend enormous energy to protect us from its ‘ravings’, even at the cost of censorship and restriction of free speech.” 

Davis points out the double-bind cast by the authorities, who portray delinquents as both inarticulate rebels without a cause and prohibit them from telling their side of the story. Davis regards this as a form of censorship that is incompatible with American ideals of free speech and constitutional rights. 

“The genius of the Crips has been their ability to insert themselves into a leading circuit of international trade. Through ‘crack’ they have discovered a vocation for the ghetto in L.A.’s new ‘world city’ economy.” 

Although the media portrays drug-dealing gang members like the Crips as outcasts, they are alert to the changes in the local economy. As their city’s economy becomes more international, so does their trade. 

“The pueblo of the Queen of Angels is becoming a Catholic town again.” 

The mixture of Spanish and English in this sentence conveys Davis’ meaning that Los Angles is returning to both its Catholic and Spanish roots. The “pueblo of the Queen of Angels” stands to be the Spanglish Los Angeles of the future. 

“Unless ways are found to attract more Latinos into seminaries, a strange new ethnic mismatch may result as refugee Vietnamese or Chinese clergy replace retiring Irish priests in predominantly Latino parishes.” 

Davis here draws attention to the problem of the Latino majority in Catholic congregations who nevertheless feel excluded from leading positions in the church. Whereas Angelino priests have historically been Irish, new recruits may have to be imported from where the Catholic Church is young, such as in Vietnam or China. The Church in Los Angeles thus stands to have an increasingly hybrid future. 

“But Fontana is more than merely the ‘roughest town in the county.’ Its indissoluble toughness of character is the product of an extraordinary, deeply emblematic local history.” 

Whereas Angelinos may be tempted to dismiss Fontana as a dump, Davis encourages them to consider it a product of its unusual history of capitalist conquistadores.