Dead Cities by Mike Davis, New Press, $26.95, ISBN 1565847652
The title of Mike Davis鈥檚 Dead Cities recalls the early Martin Amis novel Dead Babies. It鈥檚 a similarly shocking attention-grabber, and a similarly sly, oblique allusion to the true topic. This isn鈥檛 a book about the dusty remains of once-great centres of urban life 鈥� Babylon, Troy, Pergamon, Tikal and the like 鈥� but an angry trawl through the ills and traumas that threaten to kill our cities.
It is, unmistakably, a view from Los Angeles 鈥� city of angels, bumper to -bumper on the freeway, flames in the eucalyptus-scented night, earthquakes, sugar-brown inversion layers, drive-by shootings, 鈥淗ave a Nice Day鈥� and 鈥淗ey, missing you already鈥�. Davis has long been one of the shrewdest, most trenchant observers of that sprawling, palm-fringed paradox by the Pacific, and his bleak riffs on LA life are the best parts of this book. He understands man-made Southern California as a fragile, contingent construction 鈥� a hubristic affront to forces that might, at any moment, shake it, bake it, dehydrate it or otherwise ground-zero it.
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For Davis, the urban condition is a tenuous one, and he wants to explode our puny illusions of civic stability and long-term survival. Dead Cities reminds me of a sign that used to be on a UCLA fallout shelter advising that, in the event of a nuclear attack, you should lie on the ground and place your head between your legs; a graffiti artist had added 鈥渁nd kiss your ass goodbye鈥�.
Like Raymond Chandler before him, Davis has an eye for LA noir as well as the blue skies and tinsel, the miseries of the Temple-Beaudry neighbourhood on one side of the Harbor Freeway in contrast to the glitzy redevelopment of Bunker Hill on the other, Compton as the depressed inland counterpoint to the yuppie West Side. If the forces of nature don鈥檛 get you, Davis suggests, those of vulgar economic determinism will.
And nowhere are those forces more effectively arrayed than in the energy sector, whose ruthless quest for profits is uniting the dark side of capitalism with the even darker side of global climate systems. Davis has no patience with academic social theorists who, seduced by fancy French philosophy, fail to grasp this down-to-earth point: 鈥淲e don鈥檛 need [Jacques] Derrida to know which way the wind blows or why the pack ice is disappearing.鈥�
Davis is very good on dead spots in the landscape that, like lesions providing the first indications of a deadly disease, should suggest immediate attention to the underlying pathology. He takes us on vivid tours through the radioactive and chemically poisoned test sites of the American West, bomb-flattened former residential areas, and economically hollowed-out urban cores. And he is terrific on the view from the street in these places, which he describes with energy, insight and compassion.
But Davis鈥檚 gifts as an observer of the underside and advocate for the underdog do not seem to be matched by a capacity for cogent theorising. Dead Cities rambles (often, it must be said, entertainingly) through far too much territory. It mixes first-hand reportage with extended analyses of literary precedents, summaries of textbook science, reflections on terrorism and hardball political polemic. There are too many jump-cuts, and too little attention to continuity. Inside a fat trade book, there is a slim jeremiad trying to get out.
Still, Dead Cities does deserve attention. Chillingly, it succeeds in inverting William Blake鈥檚 beautiful, hopeful metaphor of a bright new city built among dark, satanic mills. Dead and dying urban areas, it insists, should remind us of the fragility of our Jerusalems. Those mills might have the last laugh after all.