Watching Los Angeles Burn

Stephen Nardi

Department of English
Princeton University
snardi@princeton.edu

 

Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books – Henry Holt & Company, 1998.

 

Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) has been recognized as a modern classic. Davis’s analysis of the impact of an ideology of urban planning that emphasizes security and surveillance over city and community provides a devastating corrective to the predominantly aesthetic postmodern interpretation of trends in architecture from the 1970s to the present. His description of the use of architecture as defense, and the new interpretations of public space that it makes visible, has had as significant an impact on the way that we view the contemporary city as Jane Jacobs’s 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

 

Unlike Jacobs, however, Davis offers his devotee little in the way of an alternative vision. Jacobs, after all, devotes the bulk of her book to detailing how cities might be better built. Her suggestions are concrete, her precepts easily made practical. Indeed, perhaps the greatest impact of Jacobs’s argument was that doing nothing at all with the urban fabric is better than doing something badly. City of Quartz, on the other hand, expends the majority of its pages building a complex and fascinating case against the very philosophical background of the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area. As a result its thesis has been frequently, and not entirely unfairly, summarized as “Los Angeles–a big mistake.” Davis mitigates this reductivism, however, with a broader argument implicit in the book’s subtitle: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. L.A., it seems, is to be excoriated not merely for its traffic jams and bad taste, but because it represents a foreshadowing of the city toward which we are uncontrollably tumbling. L.A., Davis claims, with all of its ugliness and division, is the city that we Americans now want to build, and certainly deserve.

 

In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Davis returns to Los Angeles’s economic structure with a variation on his previous theme. Fundamentally, the problem of Los Angeles, Davis argues, is that urban development has been allowed to be dictated by real estate interests’ immediate profits, rather than any realistic long-term analysis of the natural environment of Southern California. The result is a city built in such a way as to invite a cycle of disaster and reconstruction–that which Davis calls the “dialectic of ordinary disaster.” By blatantly ignoring the realities of the natural environment (rather un-ironically called “Eden” in a chapter title), Angelenos have built a city that is permanently subject to periodic catastrophes.

 

Instead of describing man’s destruction of the natural environment, however, Davis reverses the typical trajectory of this narrative. According to Ecology of Fear, state and development interests have either ignored or concealed the process by which nature is turning on L.A. itself. A chapter on the hidden plague of tornadoes in L.A., and the careful concealment of the true strength of L.A.’s wind system by L.A. corporate media interests, argues that there is an active conspiracy deeply rooted within the L.A. power structure to conceal the extent of the environment’s hostility to the city. Davis’s extensive research turns up evidence that tornadoes strong enough to have thrown a wrench in the state’s campaign to attract home buyers were systematically downgraded in the press to “strong storms” or “freak occurrences.” Earthquakes, as well, he argues, have been much more powerful and pose a much greater threat to “earthquake proof” buildings than is commonly acknowledged (a point underscored by recent discoveries of ever stronger and ever more threatening faults directly underneath downtown L.A.). In another chapter, Davis describes how development in the mountains displaces mountain lions, who then range into urban areas with predictable spasms of fear among the populace at risk of attack. Development, in other words, challenges nature and then, when it loses, passes the bill over to the city to pay.

 

Returning to the roots of City of Quartz, Davis points out that disaster in L.A. has become not only a routine part of the social fabric, but a key indicator of the distribution of power and privilege. The structure of L.A.’s economy, he argues, was more clearly laid open in the 1994 Northridge earthquake than the interiors of the devastated buildings. The basic point here is obvious; the highways that allow rich people to avoid poor black neighborhoods are rebuilt first, and the neighborhoods themselves, once bypassed, are allowed to languish. But Davis’s point is more interesting than simply an anatomy of inequality. At the heart of his case is the notion that the Los Angeles power structure adopts the inevitable cycle of disaster in order to perpetuate itself. In the chapter “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” he argues that preserving ritzy Malibu (built on a mountainside prone to wild-fires), for example, drains attention and resources from the inner city where fires could actually be prevented.

 

Likewise, those killer earthquakes on the horizon are being prepared for not through tougher building codes and careful limitations on building in the most vulnerable areas, but through the creation of a political and financial structure that will keep developers solvent despite the most extreme destructive impact, at a cost, of course, to the public. President Clinton’s quick reaction to the Northridge quake, for example, allowed tracts of luxury houses to be rebuilt at tremendous cost despite the foolish placement of these neighborhoods in the first place. Million-dollar housing developments, built in neighborhoods certain to endure tremendous damage in the near future, are guaranteed by the Federal Government under the notion of saving home owners from random acts of nature. The fact that these acts of nature are fully predictable goes pointedly unnoticed.

 

Most striking of all, and the point where Davis’s argument about “Excavating the Future” returns some satisfactory dividends, is the underlying notion that disaster, in becoming part of the social ecology of Los Angeles, is being programmed into the creation of the nightmare future. Frequent, devastatingly expensive disruptions, Davis notes, will not wipe L.A. off the map. Instead, they will contribute to the increasing divide between rich and poor, the have and have-nots. This in turn, he argues, will drive the city further into the model of containment envisioned in City of Quartz. Inner cities, repeatedly devastated and vulnerable to natural disaster, will be deprived of the funds for social programs by the need to keep subsidizing the defense (against both nature and the masses) of expensive housing developments on the periphery.

 

The result of this process is a future for L.A. that will resemble Blade Runner much more closely than Endless Summer. “Megacities like Los Angeles,” Davis writes, “will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts” (54-55). The “dialectic of ordinary disaster” and the public will that makes it possible result in a city increasingly divided between the protected few whose publicly subsidized escape is won at the cost of the enforced isolation of the worst affected areas.

 

Here Davis’s argument comes into its own with its most powerful example: the Los Angeles riots of 1992. In discussing the riots, the Ecology of Fear becomes most visible and most effective. The riots, in Davis’s vision, are a natural and inevitable outcome of the structure of the social system that increasingly applies pressure to poor neighborhoods. Their destructive results, however, become a justification for more of the same pressure. The militarization of poor neighborhoods produces riots, which then justify increased militarization. This is the Ecology of Fear in a nutshell.

 

In the last chapters of the book, Davis describes the legislative maneuvers to contain and control the expanding net of social chaos that is the long-term legacy of the ecology of fear. In Davis’s descriptions of the homeless “containment” zones, the gated communities, the rapidly expanding legal apparatus of exclusion and control developing in Los Angeles’s governmental structure, he presents his most convincing evidence that the culture of crisis and containment he sees looming in the future has already begun to arrive.

 

Davis’s argument is convincing, frightening, and provoking in the best sense of the word. In addition, his evidence is well marshaled and thoughtfully presented. Yet this movement away from the “Excavating the Future” model of L.A. to the specificity of L.A. as a unique case among cities weakens the interest of the book considerably. In building a case that so specifically indicts Los Angeles for its response to its particular environment (both natural and sociological), Davis sacrifices some of the wider vision that rescued City of Quartz from becoming an anti-L.A. diatribe. Simply put, a New Yorker will not recognize his city in the picture Davis paints.

 

This becomes clearest in the chapter on the various literary depictions of Los Angeles. Going back to the turn of the century, Davis exhaustively traces the development of disaster narratives about the city. At times this is entertaining stuff, as is the chart in which Davis lists the variety of ways in which L.A. has been leveled. Likewise, at times his analysis rings painfully true. He notes, for instance, the ease with which Bob Dole can proclaim Independence Day (which features the fiery destruction of L.A.) a great patriotic movie. It is now an act of great service to the country to flatten Los Angeles. But this argument also emphasizes the degree to which L.A. is an exception, rather than the rule. In the same way that New York City, in its particular emphasis on the walkable street and mass transit, is an exception to the rule, it may well be that L.A. is also unique in its nexus of problems and futures.

 

It may be true that our culture is leaning more and more toward finding pleasure in watching the urban core burn. An uncomfortable number of movies last summer, after all, involved major metropolitan areas being pulverized (by asteroids, by nuclear monsters, etc.). Clearly the classic Jane Jacobs’s street is under siege by those who prefer the privatized sanctity of the mall. But urban centers may no longer be so clearly losing this battle. The resurgence of interest in city living shown in everything from the number of new sitcoms set in New York to the sudden emergence of urban sprawl as a campaign issue (a far cry from the cliché of the suburban paradise).

 

Other recent books on the city have made the case that the social orders arising out of the postmodern landscape, as much as they involve policing and surveillance, also offer the possibilities of a new mixing of urban pleasure. Davis fixes on a vision of the city which is undoubtedly important, and probably accurate. But the singleness of that vision, so refreshing in its originality in City of Quartz, is a bit more suspicious now. As Davis retreats from a grand vision of new urban realities, he loses some of the visionary force that made his arguments so compelling in the first place.