City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Homegrown Revolution”

Although Homeowners’ Associations have been overlooked by historians and sociologists, Davis considers them the “‘trade unions’ of an important section of the middle class” (160) who have used them to slow down urban growth that threatens to disrupt the nature of their communities. Historically, these white-dominated associations have used their power to exclude Blacks and Asians from wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods; until a 1948 Supreme Court Law forbade such interference, white homeowners could easily rally together to control the ethnic makeup of their neighborhoods.

Even after the 1948 law, realtors and developers were able to collaborate in favor of suburban racial segregation. As late as the 1970s, middle-class families wanted to “reestablish the suburban Eden of the early 1950s, with low taxes and ‘neighborhood’ (read: white) schools” (185). This was achieved by the “separate incorporation” of suburban communities, such as Lakewood, just north of Long Beach, where its founders “hired consultants to explore options for incorporation without the traditional cost of creating city government out of the whole cloth” (165). They were thus able to avoid consolidating with the metropolis, as such suburban communities were able to “reclaim control over zoning and land use without the burden of public expenditures proportionate to those of older cities” (166). Thus incorporated, suburban dwellers were able to keep poor people out by restricting the building of multifamily homes and raising the threshold value of new homes.

Despite “the widespread demand for decentralization of land-use decision making to the neighborhood level” in Los Angeles’ middle-class neighborhoods, high-rises continued to soar in them throughout the 1970s and 1980s, owing to the influence of millionaires and Japanese banks (188).

The coup de grace for the slow-growth campaigners came in May 1987 when the breakdown of the Hyperion Activated Sludge Plant, which had been put in place to deal with Los Angeles’ sewage, broke down and emitted waste into Santa Monica bay. Here, at last, “the penny began to drop in City Hall that the growth wars between homeowners and developers were actually being fought within the limits of a collapsing infrastructure” (198). Davis considers that this sewer ordinance was crucial in forcing the authorities to begin thinking about the quotidian functioning of Los Angeles, as well as its financial development. Davis concludes that the debate between homeowners who prefer slow growth and developers who favor economic expansion focused on the interests of privileged elites and thus overlooked what became the “great non-issue” of the 1980s, which was “the appalling destruction and misery in Los Angeles’s inner city areas” (212).

Chapter 4 Summary: “Fortress L.A.”

Davis argues that the tensions between Los Angeles’ affluent wealthy and its dispossessed poor “have been institutionalized into the very structure of urban space,” as the wealthy, both at home and in their places of work, sequester themselves in armed fortresses, while the poor are restricted in their violent, often heavily policed zones (224).

Indeed, town planners’ “destruction of accessible public space,” a process that accompanies the deregulation of the economy, whereby pedestrianized areas have been turned into traffic zones, means that rich and poor, black and white, make minimal contact with one another (226). Whereas old photographs of Downtown Los Angles show “mixed crowds of Anglo, Black and Latino pedestrians of different ages and classes,” the “contemporary Downtown ‘renaissance’ is designed to make such heterogeneity virtually impossible” (231). Most cruelly of all, “ingenious design deterrents,” such as uncomfortable benches at bus stations, overhead sprinkler systems that drench unsuspecting rough sleepers, and a lack of public toilets are all put in place to “contain” the homeless in Skid Row, rather than having them spread all over the city and depreciate property values (233).

Davis judges that Frank Gehry, Los Angeles’ prizewinning architect, is complicit in formalizing the divide between rich and poor. He claims that Gehry’s fortress-like work panders to the paranoia that elites have about feeling unsafe in public space. Meanwhile, architectural design has also been used to entrench the poor firmly in their sphere. Developer Alexander Haagen placed high security measures in inner-city malls so that shoppers are effectively entering a “panopticon observatory”; social housing projects have been similarly fortified with fencing, obligatory identity cards, and curfews (243).

Los Angeles’ wealthy, who reside in areas like Beverly Hills and San Marino, discourage outsiders from entering their area by restricting parking to residents and closing parks on weekends to discourage members from adjacent communities. Meanwhile, enclosed or gated communities prevail, as the demand for armed security personnel engaged in residential protection has increased dramatically since the 1980s.

The city’s police department, the LAPD, has historically utilized “technologized surveillance and response” to supplant the “traditional patrolman’s intimate ‘folk’ knowledge of specific communities,” implementing the radio patrol car in the 1920s and the helicopter surveillance of the city after the Watts riots of 1965 (251). During the 1990s, there were even ideas to use space satellites to facilitate policing. Given that surveillance is only set to expand, Davis worries that “Los Angeles, in its usual prefigurative mode, offers an especially disquieting catalogue of the emergent liaisons between architecture and the American police state” (228).

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

“Containment,” an American foreign policy that sought to keep Communism from spreading beyond the zones where it had already taken hold, also defines Los Angeles elites’ attitudes to keeping the poor in their restricted zones (232). However, in seeking to keep their zones free from nonwhites, homeless people, and other “undesirables” who they see as trespassers, Los Angeles’ elites have also made an art out of containing themselves (257). Prize-winning architect, Frank Gehry, who has made a reputation for solving “the problem of how to insert high property values and sumptuary spaces into decaying neighborhoods,” is a champion of the “fortified exterior” that separates the building’s inhabitants from the outside world (238).

Davis shows how Los Angeles’ wealthy have been pursuing Gehry’s design mentality both by turning their homes into heavily guarded fortresses, and on a larger scale, in the incorporation of the elite parts of town where they live. Measures, such as gated communities and parking restrictions for those who do not live in wealthy areas, mean that Los Angeles’ wealthy can go about their lives oblivious of the poor in neighboring communities. Meanwhile, the poor and homeless are ghettoized in their own failing, underfunded neighborhoods, where their plight remains unseen by wealthier Angelinos, except for the LAPD, who keeps their residential and recreation areas under increasing surveillance. The city thus becomes a series of prisons; as the wealthy are locked up and protected in their castles of delusion, the poor have no means of escaping the eyes that are continually anticipating their mischief. This system creates division and lack of empathy amongst different social groups.

While the situation of a surveillance city may seem highly controlled, even the relatively wealthy, who increasingly isolate themselves from the metropolis, feel the threat of market-driven millionaires and foreign investors who threaten to throw up polluting infrastructure in their backyard. However, Davis paints the economic “‘growth’ versus ‘neighborhood quality’” dichotomy as “false opposites,” given that both serve the interests of wealthy people and ignore the absent element of the poor’s restriction into the worst-funded parts of the city (212). This fear of heterogeneity has resulted in the loss of “accessible public space,” as “vital pedestrian streets” have been transformed into “traffic sewers,” and the term “street person” for homeless person is itself symptomatic of the demotion of public spaces (226). As security paranoia increases in the United States, and other cities look set to adopt the Los Angeles model, the growing wealth and empathy gap between rich and poor only looks set to continue. A loss of vitality and spontaneity accompanies this loss, as Davis shows how sterile and soulless Los Angeles, a place driven by market forces and surveillance, has become.