Mike Davis is an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian who has been a guest on KPFA many times. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. His books include City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, among many others.
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, presents his analysis of the relationship between how Los Angeles is organized geographically to the relation of various racial and ethnic groups. At the center of the city lie banks and financial institutions. In the next ring property values decline dramatically, with working families occupying the third ring. … Continued
Reconceptualizing The Environment : Taking Off The Blinders / Mike Davis| produced by John Martinez. Talk by Mike Davis, urban theorist, social critic, and author of a social history of Los Angeles entitled City of Quartz. He examines the need to reconceptualize knowledge of the physical environment in Southern California. His model is the indigenous … Continued
Mike Davis examines the politics of land development, the abuse of land, and the danger of toxic conditions in East L.A. including the 1989 Southern Pacific freight toxic disaster in the Cajun Pass, and the political coverup — The history of zoning in Los Angeles : 1909, 1930, and the present — The First environmental … Continued
Mike Davis examines the politics of land development, the abuse of land, and the danger of toxic conditions in East L.A. including the 1989 Southern Pacific freight toxic disaster in the Cajun Pass, and the political coverup — The history of zoning in Los Angeles : 1909, 1930, and the present — The First environmental … Continued
Keynote address by Mike Davis on the social, political and economic underpinnings of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Their will be no solution to those fundamental problems if the voices of the communities involved (immigrant and gangs) are ignored. He goes on to point out that the very issues which the Kerner Commission criticized about … Continued
