Mike Davis (scholar)

Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.

Life

Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the Ph.D. program in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998, and has been a fellow at the Getty Institute. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.

He is now a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of the New Left Review. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain. As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written frequently for, among others, The Nation and the UK's New Statesman. He is a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist". He writes in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cites in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of Revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like other Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Daniel Guerin, Richard S. Fraser, and James Robertson, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U.S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U.S.

Reviewers have praised his prose style and his exposés of alleged economic, social, environmental and political injustice. His book Planet of Slums inspired a special issue of Mute Magazine on global slums. City of Quartz is notable for predicting some of the tensions that would lead into the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Davis is not without detractors, however. Veronique de Turenine, in a Salon article entitled "Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles All in His Head?" (December 7, 1998), cites an allegation that Davis distorts or makes up facts to overdramatize his case against the contemporary capitalist city. The claim was made by Malibu Realtor Brady Westwater, and subsequently repeated by commentator Jill Stewart, who in addition called Davis a "city-hating socialist" in the New Times Los Angeles. According to one critic, Davis "has acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local environmentalist, Lewis McAdams, for a cover story he wrote for L.A. Weekly a decade ago; he defends it as an early attempt at journalistic scene-setting." Jon Wiener, however, in the Nation has defended Davis from the charges of poor scholarship, arguing that these charges are made by big city "boosters." Kevin Stannard, in his October 2004 Geography article "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City," has argued for the defense that "much of the controversy is explained by Davis’s ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage, which can act as a prism through which to evaluate interpretations of the postmodern city."

On a more substantive, explicitly political note, from the Right, self-described "urban policy expert" Reason Foundation Research fellow Joel Kotkin has charged in American Enterprise that Davis leads up a politics of "totalitarian" "class war" on LA.

From the liberal-Left, following Jane Jacobs's attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) has attacked him as "harsh," (p. 170) and his work, particularly Planet of Slums, has been criticized by urban studies professor Tom Angotti, and Merrifield as "anti-urban," overly "apocalyptic." Such critics also charge that Davis ignores what they see as the potential of activist groups among the poor and working class to address the problems he raises with the contemporary metropolis on a local or citywide basis, as advocated by Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman. Davis, however, is less interested in such local reforms of the existing city as an end in themselves, than he is moving toward a fundamental, revolutionary transformation of the city, along with capitalism itself, by the global working class to become ecologically sustainable, and much of its population decentralized through a socialist regionalism, as Mumford and Eckbo advocated in the past.

Books

• Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, ed. with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)
• In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007)
• Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007)
• No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2006)
• Planet of Slums (2006)
• The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
• Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (2003)
• Dead Cities, And Other Tales (2003)
• The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas (2002)
• Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
• Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (2000)
• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (2000)
• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 2006)
• Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986, 1999)
• Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear (1992)

Published articles and essays

• The Democrats After November, New Left Review, 43, January-February 2007
• Vigilante Man
• A Paradise Built on Oil
• Has Time Run Out? - The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic
• The Mysteries of New Orleans - Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
• Poor, Black, and Left Behind
• Remembering Bill and Ivan
• The Perfect Fire
• "The Flames of New York", New Left Review, 12, November-December 2001
• "Planet of Slums", New Left Review, 26, March-April 2004
• "House of Cards — Las Vegas: Too many people in the wrong place, celebrating waste as a way of life"
• "Cry California"
• "The Winged Killer Flies In", Red Pepper, December 2005
• "Believer Interview", The Believer (magazine), February 2004
• "Firebugs: Build it in California's foothills, and it will burn.", Sierra, 1994
• "Let Malibu Burn.", L.A. Weekly, 1996
• "The Incendiary Other"
• "Dark Raptures: A Consumer's Guide to the Destruction of Los Angeles"
• "Monsters and Messiahs"
• "Hell factories in the field: a prison-industrial complex"
• "When the rivers ran dry… The drought next time"
• "Runaway Train Crushes Buses"
• "Learning From Tijuana"
• "Who Is Killing New Orleans?", in The Nation, April 10, 2006

References

• Review of "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World"

External links

• UC-Irvine Faculty Page
• "The American Earthquake - Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster By Adam Shatz, in Lingua Franca, (September 1997).
• LA Weekly profile, 1999
• Salon.com profile, 1999
• "L.A. Story: Backlash of the Boosters" by Jon Wiener Nation (4 February 1999).
• "Best-Selling Author's Gloomy Future for Los Angeles Meets Resistance" Todd S. Purdum, New York Times
• A Collection of reviews of 'Planet of Slums'

Reviews

• A collection of reviews of Planet of Slums
• "Seven Oaks" Planet of Slums review, by Derrick O'Keefe
• Planet of Slums reviews in Mute Magazine
• Planet of Slums Review from (Johannesburg) Sunday Independent
• "Slums, resistance and the African working class" A friendly critique of Planet of Slums by Leo Zeilig and Claire Ceruti in International Socialism journal

Interviews

• Interview with Juris Jurjevics of San Diego Reader, 6 April 2006.
• Interview with the editors of Voices of Resistance from Occupied London, an anarchist journal from the United Kingdom, 23 February 2007.
• Interview with IRIN News, the news service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, September 2007.