ABSTRACT
The dialectics of dystopia: City of Quartz and the death of public space The point of departure for Mike Davis’s grand tour of Los Angeles is the crumbling ruins of what he sees as the city’s quixotic ‘alternative future’ at Llano del Rio – a failed ‘ragtime’ socialist co-operative movement deep in the Mojave Desert. As a communal utopia, Llano del Rio was a short-lived project. Assailed from the outset by a right-wing media, wrangles over water rights and xenophobic neighbours, it withered and died in the searing Mojave heat. However, for Davis, the story of the demise of the ‘Socialist City’ in the desert is a powerful metaphor for what he believes transpired in Los Angeles more generally in the latter part of the 20th century: the surrender of social ideals, public space and liberal values to the powerful combination of the demands of corporate capitalism, real-estate developers and middle class self-interest. Davis holds up Los Angeles as the archetypal post-industrial capitalist city – a place characterised by social polarisation, out of control ‘no go’ inner-city enclaves, oppressive policing and bourgeois paranoia. Portrayed by Davis, Los Angeles is a city lost to unmediated capitalism, a place where civic concerns and public-spiritedness come a poor second to the interests of profit and consumption, and where movement-restricting architectural developments and the demise of public space can be seen as the latest reflection of a rampant capitalist political economy.2
