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Dead Cities: A Natural History
 
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Dead Cities: A Natural History (Hardcover)

by Mike Davis (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: The New Press (14 Nov 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1565847652
  • ISBN-13: 978-1565847651
  • Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 16.2 x 3.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 311,585 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Synopsis
In his most provocative writing yet, the radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, the site of a perpetual battle waged within cities and against nature. Davis examines themes of urban life today - white flight, housing and job segregation and discrimination - and looks at areas he calls "national sacrifice zones", military landscapes that simulated warfare and arms production have rendered uninhabitable. Davis begins his apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York's Ground Zero and to the diabolic miracle of Las Vegas.

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Dead and the Dying, 10 April 2003
By Elizabeth Nolan (London, UK) - See all my reviews
'Dead Cities' is the third instalment in Mike Davis’ exploration of the nature of the modern and postmodern American city, following 'Ecology of Fear' and the superb 'City of Quartz'. Once again, it is his vacillating love/hate relationship with the deserts and metropolises of California in particular, which forms the centre of his work.

Despite the fact that it’s Preface would have you believe 'Dead Cities' is a meditation upon post-September 11th urban America; it is rather a collection of essays and articles written during the last decade which each provide a broadly different ‘take’ upon the notion of the dead or dying city. 'Dead Cities' examines the fragility of our urban infrastructures, threatened by man-made or natural factors; providing us with a fractured journey through parts of America in which the apocalypse has already taken place and where the destruction of the twin towers seems an almost inevitable climax.

The scope is vast, ranging from what some may find to be the rather dry economic and statistical data about corrupt town planning in LA; to fascinating and disturbing chapters on the expansion of suburban Las Vegas, and America’s secret nuclear weapons testing. Davis also takes in the Compton race riots, extremes of weather in Canada, and there’s even a chapter on the bombing of Berlin in WW2. What the spectre of 9/11 adds to this collective is a retrospectively portentous significance; the sense of an interminable social trajectory.

The one drawback of 'Dead Cities' is that it is easy to lose sight of it’s central argument. It is not, like Davis’ previous works, a narrative which steadily gains momentum, but rather ponderings around a central subject. Whilst this means the strength of a core argument is at times obscured, is also serves as the text’s strength, making it easy to dip in and out of. The subject matter in itself almost seems more suited to this layered approach, drawing together a montage of images and ideas, all held in place by Davis’s remarkably acute eye for human pathos and contemporary social mores.

It’s difficult to define exactly where Mike Davis’ work should sit in terms of literary genre, for he is at once a geographer, an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist, a journalist and an architectural critic. Where you will find him is under the rather vacuous heading of ‘urban theorist’ which in truth combines all of the above and more. It is however, this diversity which gives his writing its appeal, and it is admirably represented here.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the best Mike Davis essay collection, 11 May 2009
By M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
"Dead Cities" is a collection of Mike Davis essays, most of them by now belonging to the older range of his work (many are from the early 1990s), but this is nonetheless perhaps the best of the essay collections by Davis in print.

As is usual with Davis, the tone is apocalyptic and yet subtle and well-considered throughout, in that combination of piercing rhetoric and grand imaginings that makes his work so readable and compelling. Also usual is the way in which about the first half or so of the collection consists of considerations, commentaries and concerns regarding Los Angeles and its complicated urban structures, both physical and social. Not all of this is equally interesting to non-Angelenos, and sometimes Davis does go on for too long in too much detail about this or that development project on such-and-so street, but on the other hand it allows Davis an opportunity to show his remarkable grasp of the subtle intricacies of race and class in the United States and their intermixture. Here Davis shows the way in which Marxism-based analysis remains the best tool for understanding specific social formations, whether small-scale or large, without it even being necessary to actually name Marx anywhere. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that is what Davis does.

What is remarkable about this particular book is the last part of it, which contains a few lengthy articles by Mike Davis on natural sciences and ecology. The title of the book, Dead Cities, is derived from an extremely intriguing article he wrote on various fin-de-siècle authors' imaginings of great cities, from London to San Francisco, and the way in which they would decay and be reconquered by nature if the humans in them were suddenly to disappear. To this is added an analysis done by modern scientists describing how they would imagine the process of natural reclaiming would proceed, as well as a comparison with the bombed rubble of London and Berlin during WWII, when there were parts of these cities that truly were as if humankind had abandoned it (directly after WWII, predators like wolves formed a serious threat to humans on the road, and famished Berliners grubbed for edible plants). Also of interest is an essay by Davis on the interaction between asteroid impacts and the development of human life on earth, and whether and to what degree our solar system and its bodies form one holistic system with earth.

Although some insipid commentators like Fred Siegel have attempted to portray Davis' musings in this book as being anti-urban or actually wishing for 'Dead Cities', this is manifestly not the case. Davis on the contrary, as is his wont, describes how capitalism unleashed ruins the physical and social life of urban areas, and he has a particular eye for the historical background and sweep of events as they touch the lives of humans, who are now more than ever an urban species. Indeed the apocalyptic in Davis' books sometimes has a rather inexorable character, and this can make him seem a bit too eager to cry doom and gloom, but sometimes when a boy cries wolf the wolf is actually there.
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