About Mike Davis

author

"Unlike most writers on Southern California, Mike Davis is a native son. He was born in Fontana in 1946 and grew up in Bostonia, a now 'lost' hamlet east of San Diego. A former meatcutter and long distance truckdriver, he now teaches Urban Theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

He is a co-editor of The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook and author of Prisoners of the American Dream (Verso 1986) and the brilliant City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso 1990), in which he recounts the story of Los Angeles with passion, wit and an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust and the dangerous. Davis' City of Quartz points to a future in which the sublime and the dreadfull are inextricable; a future which does not belong to Southern California alone, but terrifyingly seems to belong to all of us." (Reproduced from Mediamatic)

Mike Davis articles

• House of Cards ~ Las Vegas: Too many people in the wrong place, celebrating waste as a way of life.
• When The Rivers Ran Dry — We may be the most reckless and suicidal overconsumers of water in world history.
• Firebugs — Build it in Southern California's foothills, and it will burn.
• Let Malibu Burn —  A political history of the Fire Coast.
• The Incendiary Other —  The 1993 Malibu firestorms opened a Pandora's box of fear.
• World Fire, vol. 4, Cycle of Fire — Anthropogenic fire is more than a tool, it is a conscious geological power.
• Dark Raptures — A consumer's guide to the destruction of Los Angeles.
• Monsters and Messiahs —  Too often we equate wildness with urban disorder.
• Learning From Tijuana — The art of ADOBE L.A.
• Hell factories in the field —  A prison-industrial complex.
• LA Weekly Interview with Mike Davis, 1998

Contact Mike Davis at U.C. Irvine Department of History | Wikipedia — Mike Davis