Dead Cities: And Other Tales [Paperback]

Mike Davis gives voice to just what the hell we've done to our environment, what's transpiring in the gaps in our relationships with each other, and what goes on underneath the deep and wide footprint of our rampant urban development. Dead Cities is a postmortem excavation of our postmodern urbanscape, a conjugation of all the verbs at work in the human condition.

From the chaos of the "Miamization" of Southern California ghettos and the sprawling ennui of suburbia, to the unfathomable waste of natural resources in Las Angeles and Las Vegas and the groaning discontent of the earth itself, Mike Davis follows every vector that juts out of Main Street, USA. And there's bad news around every corner - especially for the next generation of leaders, planners, and plain old citizens. As he told Mark Dery in an interview for 21C magazine, "Increasingly, the only legal youthful activities involve consumption, which just forces whole areas of normal teenage behavior off into the margins... Irvine, which is the last generation's absolute model utopia of a master-planned community, is producing youth pathologies equivalent to those in the ghettos simply because in the planning of Irvine there was no allotted space for the social relationships of teenagers, nowhere for them lawfully to be - the parks are closed at night, they're not allowed to cruise, and so on. So you get these seemingly random acts of violence." The geography of nowhere is cultivating its very own nihilistic culture -- even in the "perfectly planned" gated communities.

The most commendable thing about Mike Davis and his exhaustively researched books is their propensity toward the margins. Not that he meanders around the subjects about which he writes, rather Davis always includes that extra story that makes the core concepts resonate that much stronger. Whether it's the seven deadly sins of Los Angeles, the dynamical behavior of earth as a closed system, or the plight of the immigrant computer-smashers who moved here "to work in your hi-tech economy," Davis always gets to the core of the issues at hand with his feet firmly on the ground -- and Dead Cities is his most all-encompassing work yet. As he writes at the end of the book, "We don't need Derrida to know which way the wind blows or why the pack ice is disappearing."

Notwithstanding that, there is much that the reader will find informative and valuable. Carrying on from his chapter in The Ecology of Fear about Los Angeles' dystopias, the book starts with a chapter on the imagined literary destruction of New York. Davis quotes H.G. Wells' almost forgotten classic The War in the Air about the first aerial destruction of NYC: "They [New Yorkers] saw war as they saw history, through an irridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away." While this is not entirely fair about New York, it is all too true of the Republican Party. Davis goes on to discuss the poisoning of much of Nevada and Utah by the military, as well as making model cities to practice bombing Axis civilians in world war two. (Davis reminds us that a third of the 600,000 civilians killed this way in Germany were prisoners of war and slave labor). There are essays on Los Angeles' Pentecostals, as well as how one Hawaian island remembers several devastating tsunamis. There is also an essay which discusses several fictional attempts to describe what would happen if most humans became extinct. The longest chapter is an article where Davis summarizes the revolution in earth sciences as geology and evolutionary theory has to come to terms with the prospect of asteroids hitting the earth on a devastating, if irregular basis.

But the book is most impressive in discussing the greed, selfishness and waste of the "conservatives" who have done so much to make the American west what it is today. A chapter on Las Vegas discusses how the city has no responsible water ethic, cuts down public space to the lowest in the country, disperses land over an enormous and wasterful area, while public transit is dictated by the car. 60% of water use goes to irrigate lawns and golf courses, while water use is double or triple that of other Western cities. But being in the middle of a desert Las Vegas' water requirements cannot be sustained by local sources so it greedily seeks water elsewhere. Meanwhile local government is deliberately fragmented and gerrymandered so that the most valuable areas are separated from the electorate that needs public services.

Los Angeles, as Davis shows, shares many of the same vices. It has only a third of NYC's public park area per capita. It has the same distorted local government. The worst incorporated city must be Vernon, which has 48,000 workers, mostly Latinos in sweatshops, and an actual resident electorate of 90 people, who do not use their tax revenues to help their workers but the property developers who run the city almost as a private fief. Other areas show white electorates ignoring hispanic minorites. Meanwhile Davis discusses Los Angeles' would-be subway system, where the relatively affluent 6% of the ridership who use the proposed subway get 70% of public transit funds, while the poorer, darker majority who use the bus face fare increases and reduced service. Davis also goes to the "city" of Compton, where before it achieved a black majority the white city council spitefully ran it down and sowed the streets with salt. Compton's attempt to get a tax base by annexing industrial areas was thwarted and attempts to attract investment with tax breaks only attracted those who took the money and run. Now the black council selfishly protects its own privileges over those of the increasing Hispanic population. Best of all is the chapter "Who Killed L.A." which discusses the systematic redistribution of income from the poorest inner cities to the wealthy suburbs. (The federal contribution to Los Angeles' budget fell from 18% to 2% from 1977 to 1985, while George Bush stuffed the 1992 riots aid package with a cut on luxury taxes on yachts, but vetoed it when it tried to remove the tax deduction on club dues.)

The final chapter discusses ecological crisis as global warning leads to increasingly erratic weather, while the spread of the market and corporate pressures leads to deforestation in Vietnam, ecological degradation in China and the extinction of the Grand Bank fisheries. The book could use more updates, and there are a number of annoying printing errors and misprints (most obvious, Alexandra Richie's name is mispelled as Alexander). But Dead Cities is a valuable work that produces an acerbic outlook in an intellectual world that is complacent beyond belief.