A tourist,not a god: Mike Davis,radical geographer

Abstract

Mike Davis (1946–2022) was a leftist intellectual and activist, in addition to a prolific author on myriad subjects. His major writings focused on topics that included power relations and inequality in US cities, particularly in Southern California: the history of the car bomb; the ties between climate change, empire, and famine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the explosive growth of shantytowns in the global South; and the political ecology of global pandemics. Trained as a historian, Davis, in many of his works, heavily engaged geographical scholarship, both human and biophysical. While he is perhaps best known for his outsized contributions to urban geography, he also had a major impact on radical geography. Herein, I explore Davis's contributions to three areas of concern to radical geographers: cultural geography, political ecology, and borders and territoriality. In doing so, I focus primarily on four of his books: City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and The Monster Enters. In the end, I consider Davis's ethics and implicit critique of modernity, as well as his geographies of justice and hope.

What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It's what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight. (Mike Davis (Beckett, 2022))

In order to grieve over a cataclysm, we must first personify it. (Mike Davis, The Monster Enters, p. 48)

In July 2022, The Guardian newspaper published a report revealing that at least 200 unhoused people were living outdoors, in the Mojave Desert, on the northern edge of Los Angeles County. They were subsisting just beyond the border of Lancaster, one of two incorporated municipalities of greater LA's Antelope Valley (the other being Palmdale). Many of them had previously lived in Lancaster in tents that they pitched or in trailers that they parked on local streets—that is, until authorities made it impossible to do so, effectively banishing them to the city's desiccated outskirts. As a result, they were now miles from the nearest store and basic services. Between 2015 and the time of the report, the local coroner's office had counted 246 deaths of unhoused people in Lancaster and the surrounding area, including 17 in the desert (Levin, 2022).

The story is illustrative of Bauman's (2013) assertion that the making of “human waste” or redundant lives is an inevitable part of the modern world and the associated quest for economic growth and order. It also demonstrates Mitchell's (2020) contention that homelessness is a manifestation of capitalism and its voracious appetite to commodify space (and thus life itself). It thus speaks to a point once made by Mike Davis—who, on October 25, 2022, passed away from esophageal cancer at the age of 76. In discussing how to fight gentrification-induced displacement in low-income neighborhoods, Davis asserted, “Ultimately, urban reform is impossible unless you control property markets” (Weiss, 2020). But the story reported by The Guardian is not merely another case study of modernity and the production of superfluous populations or of capitalism, dispossession, and the privatization of land—all major concerns of Davis. The specifics matter, not least the geographic setting: metropolitan Los Angeles, and the Antelope Valley in particular.

The Antelope Valley is where Mike Davis begins his most famous work, City of Quartz. He characterizes the area as “both a sanctuary from [the] maelstrom of growth and crisis” that Los Angeles embodies “and one of its fastest growing epicenters” (Davis, 1990: 7). As the passage suggests, the best-selling book about the City of Angels paints a dark picture of the metropolis. When coupled with his follow-up book on Southern California, Ecology of Fear (Davis, 1998), it is hard not to come away with a deep antipathy for many, if not most, things LA and a foreboding feeling about the future of the city and the larger region. This is probably, in large part, what Davis intended. But in opening the book with the story of a socialist community of Llano del Río—founded in 1914, it had 900 residents at its height—a less appreciated side of Mike Davis becomes apparent: a refusal to accept the present as the only possibility and the present as dictating the future; both are indeterminate. Instead, the present, to the extent undesirable, is to be confronted. Like Eduardo Galeano, Mike Davis effectively insisted, “Reality is not destiny, it is a challenge” (Galeano and Goodman, 2000). In this regard, the public intellectual some lazily characterized as a “prophet of doom” was, at least at times, a person of radical hope, ¹ not hope of an empty-Barack-Obama or Pollyanish sort, but one produced through struggle and sustained by way of radical analysis and vision. In other words, despite his often heavily structural analyses, Davis recognized that people have agency—albeit, à la Marx, ² an agency circumscribed by social, spatial, and temporal contexts—and thus varying degrees of responsibility for making and transforming the world. Indeed, his published works often effectively call for collective action. In his book on pandemics, The Monster Enters, for example, Davis (2022: 180), after laying out a truly frightening tale, ends by asking, “Will we wake up in time?” And in his essay, “Who Will Build the Ark?” Davis (2010: 30) exhorts readers to “start thinking like Noah” so that, in a time of intensifying climate breakdown, we can build a new “ark” or world “out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias.”

Not-so-quiet rage drives much of Davis's scholarship. Gross injustice and those who do its bidding bother him. And he is haunted by those victimized by its associated violence of various forms—whether “silent” (Watts, 2013), structural (Fluri, 2022), cultural/symbolic (Nevins, 2005a, 2005b), embodied (Tyner, 2012), or that of everyday life (Scheper-Hughes, 1993). Thus, to make visible what is hidden (at least to many) and in the spirit of historical geographic contingency that animates much of his work, Davis “peoples” the stories that he tells, naming names in the process.

Trained as a historian, Mike Davis was a geographer at heart—one in part of an “old school” variety in that he seemed to be almost equally fascinated by and conversant in human and biophysical phenomena. His attention to landscape and place and their specificities as well as to spatial unevenness, his ability to put ecological processes in dialogue with social transformation, and the multiple spatial scales which he interrogates and across which his writings unfold manifest a geographer's sensitivities.

In what follows, I explore Mike Davis's contributions to three areas of interest to radical geographers—cultural geography, political ecology, and borders and territoriality—while, in the process, gesturing toward his enormous impact on urban studies (Walker and Lilley, 2022). In conclusion, I briefly consider Davis's ethics and implicit critique of modernity as well as his geographies of hope. Given the depth and breadth of Davis's work—he wrote on everything from the history of the car bomb (Davis, 2017) to the explosive growth of shantytowns in the global South (Davis, 2006), and on cities ranging from Dubai (Davis and Monk, 2007) to Las Vegas (Rothman and Davis, 2002)—I do not attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, I limit myself primarily to four books that had the biggest impact on my own thinking: City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear: Late Victorian Holocausts, and The Monster Enters. But before doing so, I “locate” Mike Davis.

A Southern Californian

[T]he past is not completely erasable, even in Southern California. (Mike Davis, City of Quartz, p. 376)

In Southern California we bury our dead, then forget. (Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, p. 47)

Michael (“Mike”) Ryan Davis was born on 10 March 1946, in Fontana, California, at the time a small city dominated by the steel industry. (Fontana's rise and transformation from a rural, agricultural town to a post-industrial city are the focus of the last chapter of the City of Quartz; titled “Junkyard of Dreams,” that chapter alone makes the book worth reading.) Soon, his working-class family moved to nearby San Diego County. His father worked in the meat industry and was a member of the meatcutters union; he died when Davis was only 16, which led him to drop out of school to work as a truck driver to support his family.

It was during his late teenage years that the leftist politics Mike Davis came to embody began to take shape. Until that point, he was, in his own words, “right-wing, ultra-patriotic” (Miranda, 2022). Various experiences helped to radicalize the teenager. Key among them was reading a biography of famed socialist Eugene Debs (Ginger, 2007) and John Hersey's (1983) Hiroshima, a gripping account of the horrific impacts on Japan from the US atomic bomb; going to a demonstration in San Diego with a cousin married to a Black civil rights worker that US sailors attacked; and gaining exposure to labor politics and through his truck-driving stint (Miranda, 2022; Palmer, 2023; Weiss, 2020).

Davis eventually returned to high school and graduated as one of his class's valedictorians. He then worked at the San Diego office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) before heading off to Reed College, where he had won a full scholarship. Davis did not last long at the Portland, Oregon, liberal arts college. Before the end of his first semester, he was on a bus to New York City where he took a job with Students for a Democratic Society. By the end of the 1960s, Mike was back in Southern California; a member of the Communist Party, he worked with Party stalwart Dorothy Healey and ran its bookstore in Los Angeles. During those years, he also worked as a truck driver delivering Barbie dolls and as a tour bus driver for visitors to Los Angeles (Miranda, 2022; Palmer, 2023; Weiss, 2020).

In the mid-1970s, at the age of 28, Mike Davis enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to resume his undergraduate studies. Focusing his coursework on economics and history, he received his bachelor's degree and then entered UCLA's PhD program in history. He dropped out after the department rejected his dissertation, some of the research for which would later become part of City of Quartz.

But before diving into what would become his most well-known publication, Davis moved to London, where he worked with New Left Review (At UCLA, Mike had developed a close relationship with history professor and NLR editor Perry Anderson). It was in Britain where he penned his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (Palmer, 2023; Shatz, 1997). Published in 1986, the book explores the failure of organized labor in the United States to build a socialist or labor party while offering a critical analysis of the right-wing politics associated with US President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s (see Denvir, 2022).

In 1987, Davis returned to California, the very state from which former actor and Golden State governor Ronald Reagan had emerged. It was a good time to scrutinize California—especially its southern portion, a key incubator of modern conservatism in the United States (see McGirr, 2001; Walker, 1995). This was especially true of metropolitan Los Angeles. At the time, Davis (1990: 6) reports, it had “a built-up surface area nearly the size of Ireland and a GNP bigger than India's” and was “the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world.”

Davis began thinking about what would turn into City of Quartz while living in London. As he explained to an interviewer (Beckett, 2022), “I had a really hard time in London, and in my homesickness, I started thinking: how would I explain southern California in radical terms?”

Explaining Southern California in radical terms is exactly what he does. In City of Quartz—a book, asserts William Deverall in referring to its huge impact on academic analyses of cities, that “launched so many ships” (quoted in Miranda, 2022)—Davis explores the political economy of Los Angeles over time and space, the metropolis's relations of and struggle over power, and various forms of violence that the city embodies. Its title, he once explained, refers to “something that looks like diamond but is really cheap, translucent but nothing can be seen in it” (quoted in Shatz, 1997). In Ecology of Fear, he focuses on Los Angeles's unparalleled combination of risk of “natural” disaster and its “heavy burdens of mass poverty and racial violence” (Davis, 1998: 54). In both books, Davis uses Southern California and Los Angeles interchangeably. A subsequent, co-authored book on San Diego—“an alternative, people's history” of what the authors characterized at the time as “generally…the most corrupt city on the West Coast” (Davis et al., 2005: 3–4)—Davis makes clear that he appreciates that Southern California is bigger than Los Angeles. Still, in terms of Southern California's history and geography, LA receives the lion's share of his attention, with culture a key lens through which he explores the city.

Cultural geography

I am interested…not so much in the history of culture produced in Los Angeles, as the history of culture produced about Los Angeles, especially where that has become a material in the city's actual evolution. (Mike Davis, City of Quartz, p. 20)

The making of Los Angeles as a place is the common focus of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear. Not surprisingly given Davis's Marxist lens, political–economic power looms large in the two works. But, as with his landscape analyses, Davis does not reduce place-making to the forces and agents of capital. Central to his analysis are imagined or imaginative geographies (see Houston, 2019; Said, 1994) and the interests, relationships, and work they reflect and help advance.

Of course, members of the capitalist class are central players in the imagineering process. As Davis (1990: 102) writes, “Political power in Southern California remains organized by great constellations of private capital, which, as elsewhere, act as the permanent government in local affairs.” While one could say that about almost any urban area—particularly in the United States—what makes LA stand out “is the extreme development of what remains merely tendential in the evolution of other American cities.” Thus, “[e]ven though Los Angeles's emergence from the desert has been an artifact of giant public works,” it has been “the anarchy of market forces” that have dominated the building of the city “with only rare interventions by the state, social movements or public leaders” (Davis, 1990: 23). Take public housing, for example. The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3,822,238 people, has 6300 units of public housing; compare that to Boston: with a population of 650,706, 17% of that of Los Angeles, that city has 12,600 units, twice that of LA. ³ The extreme level of private control over Los Angeles's housing market that such a disparity reflects is illustrative of how the city has become, according to Davis (1990: 18), “a stand-in” for advanced capitalism. Ideologically, it relies on the region's endless embrace of “rapid economic growth,” what he refers to as metropolitan LA's “one sustaining ideal and common goal” since its establishment (Davis, 1998: 53).

Associating Los Angeles with the Mediterranean has been key to its “selling” ever since the late 1800s. Along with the chamber of commerce, publicists for the railroads—which, as the region's largest landowners, Davis sees as playing a huge role in Southern California's transformation in its early decades—packaged Los Angeles in this fashion. “For more than a century,” he writes, “this Mediterranean metaphor has been sprinkled like a cheap perfume over hundreds of instant subdivisions.” This has created a “faux landscape celebrating a fictional history,” one from which “original Indian and Mexican ancestors have been expunged” (Davis, 1998: 12).

Davis's assertion manifests the importance he places on storytelling as a means of place-making (see Curry, 1996); Davis not only tells lots of stories but also interrogates many. This is true in terms of the critical eye he applies to dominant forms of representation of spaces associated with Los Angeles advanced by members of the area's ruling class and by myriad other agents of the metropolis's geography. It also applies to his exhaustive analyses of literature and film.

In the City of Quartz, for example, Davis dedicates the first chapter to an exploration of what he calls “the complex corpus of what we call noir (literary and cinematic).” Under this broad umbrella, he includes Cary McWilliams, someone he celebrates—particularly the writer's Southern California Country: Island on the Land and the effort to integrate “historical narrative with economic and cultural analysis” [1990: 35]—and in whose footsteps, Davis implies, he follows. He also includes everyone from those involved with the region's Black Arts Movement to “the neo-Marxist academics of the ‘Los Angeles School’” (1990: 24), with which Davis is often associated, his criticisms of elements of the “school” of urban theory notwithstanding.

In Ecology of Fear, Davis has an entire chapter on novels and movies about Los Angeles in which the theme of disaster features. As part of his effort to examine LA's complicated relationship to narratives of environmental or social collapse—and how it reflects and contributes to fear—Davis analyzes, he modestly reports, “only a hundred or so novels and a few dozen films” (Davis, 1998: 279). In doing so, he reveals not only his prodigious research but also how race, class, and other premature-death-inducing forms of inequality (Gilmore, 2002) have long dovetailed with concerns about catastrophe. They range from fears of a Japanese invasion in the early 20th century to dystopian visions of ecological collapse coupled with Malthusian worries of too many poor people of color.

Davis heavily emphasizes policing in both LA-focused works as one among myriad ways these imagined geographies are manifest on Southern California's landscape. More broadly, he explores the production of militarized and forcefully segregated landscapes and their relationship to “security.” Security, Davis (1990: 224) declares, “has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption, and travel environments, from ‘unsavory’ groups and individuals, even crowds in general.” In highlighting how “the market provision of ‘security’ generates its own paranoid demand” and how security serves as a “prestige symbol,” Davis brilliantly combines matters of power and difference with what are now referred to as emotional geographies, thus showing the value of many concerns of traditional cultural geography while enriching them by employing a political–economic lens. Davis thus shows how landscape (like culture more broadly (see Mitchell, 2000)) is both social product and producer, and as such—not least because it is a “way of seeing”—it is both ideological and, consistent with Marxist methodology, inherently dialectical (see Mitchell, 2002). He also illustrates the great value of probing the social forces underlying landscape changes, how those changes flow from and help (re)produce various forms of “difference,” and for whom and why they are (in)visible (see Villanueva et al., 2016). Finally, à la Massey (1993), just as landscape is not local (Mitchell, 2002), Davis illustrates how place is a bundle of relations that are not limited to a delimited space. Relatedly, place, in addition to being unbounded in that it reflects and gives rise to relations that transcend its spatial definition, is dynamic or processual—always in motion—and has multiple identities. In such ways and more, Mike Davis made significant contributions to radical currents within cultural geography.

Political ecology

If, as Ramond Williams once observed, “Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history,” we are now learning that the inverse is equally true: there is an extraordinary amount of hitherto unnoticed environmental instability in modern history. (Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 279)

If culture is not an unchanging “thing” with essential properties, but instead something “socially produced through myriad struggles over and in spaces, scales, and landscapes” (Mitchell, 2000: xvi), this has implications for understanding human–environment relations. Via cultural ecology, in the mid-20th century, “culture” provided the dominant lens within academic geography for interrogating human-induced environmental change. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, as political–economic concerns and approaches increasingly influenced the discipline, geographers progressively moved away from cultural ecology and its tendency to see “culture” as a self-evident, spatially bounded phenomenon devoid of power relations to political ecology.

It is an ecology with a broad notion of the environment, in terms of the production of nature (Smith, 2010), environmental knowledge and representation (Watts, 2008), and the various ways in which nature and power-infused “difference” are co-productive (Mollett, 2011; Pulido, 2000). What is striking about much of Mike Davis's work is the extent to which it reflects this more expansive conceptualization of the environment, while also deeply engaging biophysical processes and phenomena.

That Davis considers matters of political ecology in his two LA-focused books may seem counterintuitive given that, for many, the sprawling metropolis is the ultimate antithesis of nature. To give one example that Davis (1998: 80) highlights, by 1970, “more than one-third of the surface area of the…region was dedicated to the car: freeways, streets, parking lots, and driveways.” However, this does not mean that “nature” is any less present in Los Angeles than elsewhere, but simply that it takes on different forms. This is true of cities in general—thus Harvey's (1993: 28) much-quoted observation that “there is in the final analysis nothing unnatural about New York.” Such thinking has animated the emergence of a specifically urban political ecology, one that Mike Davis deserves credit for playing a large role in bringing to life.

In City of Quartz, matters of the environment are present largely through Davis's emphasis on the centrality of control over and development of land. “As a general rule,” he writes, “changing modes of land speculation have tended to determine the nature of Los Angeles's power structure” (Davis, 1990: 105).

As one might expect given its title, environmental matters loom even larger in Ecology of Fear. One way they emerge is through Davis's exploration of what he characterizes as a paranoia that Angelenos have about their environment. This fear, he says, “distracts attention from the obvious fact that Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm's way. For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense” (Davis, 1998: 9). One example of such transgression is the contemporary “hydraulic civilization” of Los Angeles—and of the US Southwest more broadly (see deBuys, 2013)—and its massive consumption of water. It manifests how the area's modern development has been predicated on unrealistic notions of what constitutes normal. As Davis (1998: 35) declares, such notions flow from myopic thinking: “If there has been a single fatal flaw in the design of Southern California as a civilization, it has been the decision to base the safety of present and future generations almost entirely upon shortsighted extrapolations from the disaster record of the past half century.”

The chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”—an earlier version of which was published in Environmental History Review (Davis, 1995)—is where Davis lays out most memorably what “environmental common sense” might look like. Examining large fires over several decades in two areas of Los Angeles, Davis illuminates what he repeatedly refers to as the region's spatial apartheid (see also Hamilton, 1987). One area is tony Malibu, “the gilded coast” and “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world” (Davis, 1998: 96–97). The other is the working class, heavily immigrant Westlake and adjacent areas of Downtown LA, which at the time of the book's writing had “the highest urban fire incidence in the nation” (Davis, 1998: 96). The former, a small city on the edge of a chaparral and woodlands area of the Santa Monica Mountains, Davis makes clear, defies logic given its propensity to burn; indeed, as Davis lucidly explains, the dominant vegetation of the area depends on fire for reasons of nutrient recycling and seed germination. As such, its very existence as a residential playground for the well-heeled speaks not only to recklessness (especially as the related science has become increasingly clear) but also to the longstanding shortsightedness of LA's powerbrokers who have allowed privatization and despoilation of the ecologically fragile area to unfold. And as the greater Malibu area's built environment and the value of its real estate have grown, so, too, has state investment in protecting the interests of the wealthy via a policy of “total fire suppression”—which makes the area even more fire-prone as it allows for the buildup of stockpiles of fuel. Meanwhile, tenement fires in Westlake resulted in 119 fire-related deaths between 1947 and 1993 as the state failed to hold slumlords “to even minimal standards of building safety.” As Davis (1998: 99) writes, “If enormous resources have been allocated, quixotically, to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-made and remediable fire crisis of the inner city.” This has resulted in “two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal” (Davis, 1998: 147) and their life and death implications.

The production of such differential levels of vulnerability is a longstanding concern within political ecology (see, for example, Blaikie et al., 1994; Muldavin, 1997). It is a matter at the center of Late Victorian Holocausts. Focusing on three “global subsistence crises” between 1876 and 1902 that involved the deaths of tens of millions of people across the world, Davis seeks to correct the erasure of the fatalities from mainstream historiography. “Almost without exception,” Davis (2001a: 8) asserts, “modern historians writing about nineteenth-century world history from a metropolitan vantage point have ignored the late Victorian mega-droughts and famines that engulfed what we now call the ‘third world.’” He also seeks to challenge “much of the conventional understanding of the economic history of the nineteenth century” which suggests that the famines were a result of economic backwardness. What he shows instead, via a narrative of devastating detail, is that what transpired in Brazil, China, and India (his three major case studies) was a result of economic modernization, specifically the integration of pre-capitalist societies into an emerging world economy centered on European imperial powers. Thus, Davis (2001a: 9) writes, “Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system,’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.” The coercive imperial polices underlying this incorporation, he contends, “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet” (Davis, 2001a: 22).

In the case of the Indian subcontinent, for example, British rule led to economic stagnation on a general level—“there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947,” Davis (2001a: 311) reports—and declining living standards and impoverishment for many. Various phenomena conspired to wreak havoc on the livelihoods of countless people. Factors included enclosure and the destruction of rural commons and, as a result, ecological degradation, as well as heavy taxation, much of which went to finance the construction of the export-carrying railroad network and the imperial military. The undermining of India's indigenous textile industry in the name of facilitating the interests of England's industrialists and the promotion of monocultures in various regions also contributed. Such “modernization” and associated processes of primitive accumulation (see Glassman, 2006) greatly enhanced the vulnerability of large swaths of the population when drought emerged.

Davis, in employing what he explicitly labels a political ecology approach, takes intellectual inspiration from Michael Watts (2013) and his classic study of famine in Nigeria as well as from Karl Polanyi's (1944) influential work on modern capitalism's history. In terms of the latter, Davis draws on and builds upon Polanyi's insights regarding the destruction of community institutions via the spread of capitalism. In China. for instance, during the high Qing period (1683–1799), the state had a system of grain price stabilization, a country-wide system of granaries and “incomparable hydraulic infrastructures” (Davis, 2001a: 282). These “technologies of security” (Wright, 2005) allowed the Qing to maintain 2 million peasants for 8 months during a drought in 1743–44, a time when “contemporary Europeans were dying in the millions from famine and hunger-related diseases following artic winters and summer droughts in 1740–43” (Davis, 2001a: 281). That such mechanisms broke down, whether in China or India or elsewhere within Europe's empires—and here's where Davis, in emphasizing brute force, differs from Polanyi—was a result in no small part of imperial violence, both direct and structural. (Just how effective such mechanisms would have been in the face of the droughts that followed is far from certain—see Watts, 2001.) “[I]t is indisputable,” Davis (2001a: 295) insists, “that from about 1780 or 1800 onward, every serious attempt by a non-Western society to move over into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from London or a competing imperial capital.” He thus declares, “The use of force to configure a ‘liberal’ world economy…is what Pax Brittanica was really about.” (This is an observation one can also make about the “Pax Americana” and the making of 20th century liberalism; see Bevins, 2020.) So much for the peaceful development of global capitalism.

One of the most impressive, if not awe-inspiring things (and humbling, at least to this reader) about Mike Davis is his ability, in works such as Late Victorian Holocausts, to make sense of a diverse body of dense scientific literature and translate it, with varying levels of success, to a lay audience. ⁴

One sees this in Ecology of Fear, for example, where he engages seismological writings on California and, on that basis, contends that, relative to the previous two millennia, Los Angeles has seen few earthquakes over the last two centuries. What he calls a “long seismic siesta” has contributed to increasing stress along the region's tectonic plates. On that basis, Davis suggests, Southern California is likely to experience a greater number of earthquakes and of greater intensity in the foreseeable future—a prediction made more ominous by the size of the region's population and the footprint of its associated infrastructure.

In The Monster Enters, Mike Davis displays a command over the literature on virology. And in Late Victorian Holocausts, in addition to providing a fascinating overview of meteorological debates during the 19th century in the effort to explicate drought conditions in India, he engages the latest science on climatology in relation to ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation)—giant swings in ocean temperature and air pressure in the equatorial Pacific. These oscillations bring about phases of warming and cooling that, in interacting with other climatological processes in highly complex ways that Davis explores, lead to dramatic changes in rainfall and wind across the tropics—today, every 2–7 years or so.

Such processes have led many to conclude that the drought-related famines the unfolded in the late 19th century were “natural.” In this sense, Late Victorian Holocausts’ is a much-needed corrective. However, as Watts (2001) suggests, the broad-sweeping nature of the story Davis tells—he applies his ENSO lens to places ranging from Australia and Chihuahua, Mexico, to the Maghreb and Southern Africa, in addition to his three main case studies—and the overly structural nature of the book's analytical frame misses important nuances and erases significant differences across global space. Still, the work serves as an invaluable resource for political ecologists, among others, concerned with famine to engage and build upon.

Borders and territoriality

Mental geographies betray class prejudice. (Mike Davis, City of Quartz, p. 375)

As demonstrated by Britain's enclosures in India, prejudices of class—among other forms of difference—and associated mental geographies were fundamental to the rise of capitalism and the European imperial project. Whether in the form of “terra nullius” (Lindqvist, 2007) or enclosure of the commons as part of the colonial or nation-state-building process (Fields, 2017; Nevins, 2021), particular ways of seeing the classed, imperialized, or racialized “others” were (and remain) inextricably tied to geographic imaginaries and associated processes of possession and dispossession. Inherent in such geographies are territorial borders, the production and maintenance of which in a context of inequality is a necessarily violent endeavor. It is thus hardly a coincidence that the period that Davis focuses on in Late Victorian Holocausts was when most of what became national boundaries were drawn—particularly in the world's colonized parts.

While in some writings (e.g. Chacón and Davis, 2006), Mike Davis does concentrate his attention on the US–Mexico border—what he refers to elsewhere as “a state-sanctioned system of violence: physical, environmental, economic, and cultural” (Davis, 2002: x)—national boundaries are not a primary focus of his work. Socio-territorial divides in a broad sense, however, permeate much of it. Davis also considers borders and territory in a more fluid fashion, particularly in terms of those between human beings and non-human forms of life.

Territories and borders of violence—as suggested by the metaphor of spatial apartheid employed in Ecology of Fear—feature prominently in Davis's writings on Los Angeles. It is, he suggests, a city of walls: “Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles” (Davis, 1990: 228). The barriers take different forms over time and space depending on who is producing them and to what ends. As David Delaney (2005) has pointed out, territory both expresses and produces social orders and does so at multiple geographical scales, including that of the body (Delaney, 2005). And given that social orders are dynamic, so, too, are territories and borders. In other words, territory (like borders) is not a timeless (nor space-less) universal; it is always contextual (Elden, 2013).

In City of Quartz, borders are most present in the chapter on homeowner associations (HAs), which, Davis (1990: 160) contends, have had an “enormous” impact on the city's socio-spatial structure. HAs first emerged in the early 1900s with the goal of maintaining social and racial homogeneity (i.e. white, Christian neighborhoods). As a result of such efforts and restrictions tied to both property deeds and neighborhood blocks, an amazing “95 percent of the city's housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians” (Davis, 1990: 161). In more recent times, HAs have promoted “slow growth” and conservation in an explicit effort to prevent the urbanization (in its diverse meanings) of the suburbs. Such advocacy, Davis (1990: 213) asserts, is “in the long tradition of Los Angeles homeowner politics—a reassertion of social privilege.”

If homeowner-led movements are a “soft” tool of socio-spatial control, the securitization of space (the focus of the chapter that follows) is an equally odious side that Davis highlights and contests. (He takes urban theorists to task for being “strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level” (Davis, 1990: 223)). Recalling a past of public spaces that allowed for heterogeneity, Davis decries what he characterizes as the almost total eradication of what was “once-upon-a-time a demi-paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and ‘cruising strips.’” Relatedly, he condemns the rise of privatized “pleasure domes” for the relatively affluent, a class dependent upon “the third-world service proletariat who live in increasingly repressive ghettoes and barrios” (Davis, 1990: 227).

The bordering tools employed to (re)produce the spatial divisions between the proletariat and those who they serve are multiple. They range from gated communities in suburban LA and private security firms that patrol the city's affluent neighborhoods under contract to a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), one racked by scandal and countless cases of gross brutality, which heavily relies on technology (e.g. helicopters) to compensate for its relative lack of patrol power. And for the tens of thousands of unhoused people in Los Angeles, the city has been a pioneer in repressive policing and technologies aimed at containing the homeless—from “bum-proof” benches at bus stops to sprinkler systems that turn on at unpredictable times in public parks and near businesses.

Among what makes Los Angeles unique among the largest US cities is the absolute and relative size of its Mexico-descended population. The general absence of the Latina/o population (as well as that of Asian descent) in the City of Quartz's pages—apart from Chapter 6, which focuses on the Catholic Church—is thus quite striking. As Wendy Cheng (2012: 90) writes in a 20th anniversary retrospective on the book, “Latinas/os and Asians are barely present at the edges of the central narrative.” Still, at key points, Davis shows awareness of the Mexican and Chicana/o population's centrality, not least in relation to borders. For instance, he displays an appreciation for how efforts to segregate that population have long been tied to the policing of the US–Mexico boundary and the construction and containment of “threats.” Chief William Parker, a notoriously racist head of the LAPD, for example, while testifying to the US Commission on Civil Rights in January 1960, had this to say about Mexicans and their alleged propensity for criminal behavior: “some of those people [are] not too far removed from the wild tribes of the district of the inner mountains of Mexico. I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss behavior patterns of people” (quoted in Davis and Weiner, 2020a). One of Parker's concerns during his long tenure as chief (1950–1966) was illicit narcotics, particularly heroin and marijuana, the importation of which he blamed on Communists. On this basis, he demanded the closing of the US–Mexico border (Davis, 1990: 294).

Recall Davis's statement that the US–Mexico border is state-sanctioned violence of an environmental sort (see Peluso and Watts, 2001). In this regard, one of the more provocative lines of analysis in Ecology of Fear is Davis's suggestion that the LA ruling class's hyper-exploitation of “nature” is tied to the mistreatment of the city's non-white (particularly Black and Latina/o) and working-class populations. Indeed, he ends the book in 1992, with the fires of the LA riots or uprising. Referring to the savage beating of a Black man by four LAPD officers, Davis calls it the Rodney King riot. It was the subsequent acquittal of all four officers of assault and of three of the four of the use of excessive force—that was the spark that produced the riot and the fires. The fires, Davis (1998: 422) says, were visible from outer space “as a unitary geophysical phenomenon, comparable to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.” From space, he writes in the book's final sentence, “the city that once hallucinated itself as an endless future without natural limits or social constraints now dazzles observers with the eerie beauty of an erupting volcano.”

Here, and in many places in Ecology of Fear, we see the invocation of two broad types of borders. One concerns social transgression related to violations of human dignity; the other involves ecological limits. The latter translates into spatial limits for Davis, at least in an implicit manner. Whether it is in discussing fires in the Malibu environs or fears of wildlife attacks in LA's “wild-urban ecotone,” Davis repeatedly communicates a sense of unwelcome and ill-advised human encroachment (in the form of “development”) into the spaces of the other-than-human.

Such ecological transgression is most apparent in The Monster Enters. First published as The Monster at Our Door in 2005, the original edition of the prophetic book—Davis proved to be prescient on many fronts—was a response of sorts to the outbreak of avian flu, mainly in China, the Netherlands, and Southeast Asia in the early 2000s. The pandemic led to the slaughter of tens of millions of chickens and ducks in the effort to contain its spread and to the deaths of a small number of human beings.

The avian flu, as we have come to know, was a harbinger of worse things to come—and perhaps things yet-to-come (see Tufecki, 2023). In the introduction to the revised edition, which he wrote in April 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Davis (2020: 16–17) asserts, “This new age of plagues, like previous pandemic epochs, is directly the result of economic globalization.” More specifically, he names multinational capital “as the driver of disease evolution.” It has taken on this status “through the burning or logging out of tropical forests, the proliferation of factory farming, the explosive growth of slums and concomitantly of ‘informal employment,’ and the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to find profit in mass producing lifeline antivirals, new-generation antibiotics, and universal vaccines” (Davis, 2020: 17). While one might wonder about the roles of non-multinational capital and the state (among other actors) in fueling such phenomena, that multinational capital has played an outsized role in producing “structures of disease emergence” (Davis, 2020: 18) is beyond question.

Cutting down forests and destroying wildlife habitats more broadly and expanding towns, cities, and industrial activities create pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body. As non-human animal species are effectively forced into smaller spaces of habitat, the likelihood increases that they will come into regular contact with human settlements. Such contact allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into ours (or vice-versa)—a process referred to as zoonotic transmission—changing what had been benign animal microbes into pathogens potentially fatal to humans (Shah, 2020). In the face of such dangerous transformations, Davis (2020: 18) calls for “revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living.”

Underlying this call and the related analysis is a championing of borders. The borders are territorial and ecological in that they aim to spatially contain human activity and rein in human consumption—particularly, as suggested by the term “plague of capitalism” (from the revised edition's subtitle), that associated with capital accumulation. These borders cannot be fixed; they are unavoidably flexible in that the “challenge of space” (Massey, 2005) necessitates negotiation with all those who reside within and those who seek to enter or leave—including with other-than-human forms of life (see Provenzano and Nevins, 2019). And, by extension, confronting the challenge of space that implicitly informs much of Davis’ s work also requires territorial forms that are radically democratic. In other words, Davis pushes us to conceive of borders that are fundamentally different from the inherently violent ones associated with nation–states and private property (see Blomley, 2003; Bryan, 2012; Wolkin and Nevins, 2018) so as to allow all forms of life to flourish.

Conclusion

[W]e think ourselves gods upon the land but are still really just tourists. (Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, p. 36)

In a Los Angeles Times column, at a time when wildfires were raging across California, Gustavo Arrellano (2018) looked back at “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” and concluded, “we now live in Mike Davis’s world.” It is an observation that applies far beyond wildfires.

At the same time, the world—particularly that associated with Los Angeles (see Cheng, 2012; Pulido et al., 2012)—is more complicated and multifaceted than Davis's often-dire, indeed, sometimes apocalyptic (see Katz, 1993), accounts admit. In this regard, we can and should always improve upon our representations of reality, even if they can never fully capture the world's richness.

Doing so is not simply a question of “getting the story straight”; it is a profoundly political matter. In the case of Southern California, for example, Davis's sometimes excessively dark and hyperbolic representations and the paucity of attention he often affords to the region's histories of political struggle do a disservice to the political projects he champions. As Wendy Cheng (2012: 92) writes, while invoking City of Quartz's final chapter, “these heterogeneous histories ⁵ are there to be excavated, and may renew the weary soil of Davis's junkyard of dreams toward the imagination of more hopeful futures.”

That said, Mike Davis does provide myriad tools—empirical, methodological, and theoretical—to help us envision and build better futures; these tools are particularly valuable to geographers concerned with achieving emancipatory alternatives to an age of extreme violence (see Mitchell, 2004). Another is that of hope. As Davis once said, “If, like me, you lived through the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle” (quoted in Goodyear, 2020). And yet another is by way of the ethical stances Davis takes. They are manifest in his refusal to see anyone as disposable, as reducible to their worst moments. Take, for example, his effort in City of Quartz to historicize gang violence in Los Angeles, his repudiation of those who simply pathologize gang members and the seriousness with which he engages with them and their concerns and desires (see Palmer, 2023, Weiss, 2020). Also consider his criticisms of endless economic growth, a central tenet of the modernist paradigm—particular in Ecology of Fear—and his embrace of living within ecological limits. Here, one hears echoes of Carl Sauer's (1956) call—albeit with a heavy dose of political economy and socio-ecological justice thrown into the mix—to live in moderation.

These stances are a manifestation of Davis's radically democratic politics. While recognizing, for example, China's success in stymieing the spread of the coronavirus, Davis (2020: 48) warns against “learning the wrong lesson: state capacity for decisive action in an emergency does not necessitate the suppression of democracy.” Similarly, he refers to pandemics as “a fundamental test of human solidarity” (Davis, 2020: 179).

Note here the use of the term “human solidarity.” In the “Prologue” to City of Quartz, Davis recounts a visit to Llano del Rio on May Day, 1990. There among the ruins, he comes across two laborers from El Salvador and talks with them about what they think about Los Angeles, what Davis (1990:12) characterizes as “a city without boundaries.” In doing so, he refers to his two interlocutors as his “new Llano compañeros” (comrades). Their national citizenship, whatever it might be, is of incidental interest to Davis. They have “a right to the city” (see, e.g. Attoh, 2019) and to the world and its bounty more broadly (Nevins, 2017), just as much as anyone else does.

In the end, Mike Davis is a champion of the everyperson, the commons and the commoners, big-tent socialism (see Palmer, 2023), and public space along with its “democratic intoxications, risks and unscented odors” (Davis, 1990: 268). Hence, we are to embrace and engage the public in all its messiness as well as the world as the home of that public. ⁶ This is a project that requires, among other things, that we exhibit love for one another and life more broadly, and a willingness to fight to defend all within that realm. Moreover, it demands that we imagine spaces of hope (Harvey, 2000) and struggle to bring about a world of justice in which all life can thrive. And it necessitates that we see ourselves, as Mike Davis did, with humility, as tourists or visitors, not gods, and live accordingly.