Editorial: Honoring Mike Davis

This collection of essays is a tribute to Mike Davis by scholars who are a part of the city, Los Angeles, which featured so prominently in Davis's work. We came together on 2 March 2023, a few months after Mike's passing, in an overflowing room at the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, for a remembrance. The gathering continued late into the evening as scholars of different generations, from distinguished professors to undergraduate students, celebrated all that we have each, and collectively, learned from Mike Davis. Some of us, such as Juan de Lara, were Mike's students. In his essay for this collection, Juan writes of Mike's personal support for him and notes that he has come to see this as “deeply rooted in [Mike's] epistemic commitment to devalued people and overlooked places.” De Lara emphasizes Mike Davis's “interest in nature and political economy” and this is precisely what Susanna Hecht takes up in her essay for this collection. Susanna foregrounds the trail-blazing impact of the global environmental histories through which Mike Davis conceptualized and narrated the social and climate catastrophes of our times. Of Late Victorian Holocausts, Hecht writes, “This book prefigured the rise of global environmental history integrated into world systems and global history as a major intellectual, methodological and very dynamic trajectory in modern historiography, catapulting political ecology into the mainstream of colonial and post-colonial histories.”

The attention to world-historical systems was present in all of Mike Davis's work. And very few scholars have been able to master or replicate his capacity to demonstrate the relationship between such systems and socio-spatial inequality. In our essays in this collection, Michael Storper and I highlight two classic books, City of Quartz and Planet of Slums that make evident Davis's distinctive capacity to situate specific conjunctures of displacement and dispossession in the long arc of racial capitalism. But as Michael notes, what makes Davis's analysis of the neoliberal/carceral turn (in the City of Quartz) especially sharp is the excavation of white power and the spatializations of such power in urban development and governance. In my essay, which pays homage to Davis's two-part essay, “Who Killed LA? A Political Autopsy,” I rely on his theorization of LA's various revivals, rebuildings, and recoveries as “counter-revolutionary” restructuring that operates through liberal violence and its tropes of “community capitalism.” Deshonay Dozier, in the essay for this collection, appropriately terms such political formations as “multicultural democratic fascism.”

But to what end? Not for the sake of the piling up of revered books and essays. As Robin D.G. Kelley notes in his essay for this collection, Davis was fully committed to “a theory and praxis of … revolutionary ethics.” He was, in his own words, “an old school socialist.” Robin emphasizes, as do other authors in this collection, that Davis was no pessimist or defeatist. He saw and found struggle in the many terrains of catastrophe that he analyzed so prophetically. Acutely aware of the social death enacted by past and present conjunctures of racial capitalism, he struggled, as I point out in my essay, with the difficult question of the political agency of surplus populations. An unparalleled scholar of policing and its relationship to land grabs, Davis has made it possible, as Deshonay argues in the essay for this collection, for abolitionist movements to “name names,” to identify those who are propel and control the police state and those who benefit from the circuits of capital accumulation fueled by policing. Dozier's reflections are powerful and poignant, reminding that us Davis was both an old-school socialist and a resolute abolitionist: “I saw my Los Angeles in Mike Davis's excavation of the city … a panoptic excursion of the region's land development … this knowing is grounded in struggle, and grounded in the life and living of Los Angeles, where Davis's work is an imaginative opening towards abolition in the city.”