excavating the future

One of the books that triggered my intense interest in urban culture and politics (and that seemed to communicate to quite a broad base of academic and non-academic readers at the time and afterwards) was Mike Davis' City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990). We used to have two copies in our household but the excellence of this 'contemporary history' of Los Angeles can partly marked by the fact that both of these seemed to have ben 'permanently borowed' by an academic friend and, perhaps?, a former student.

A postgraduate student of mine was kind enough recently to pass on a copy of the additional preface (written in April 2006) to the latest edition of the book.  It is an interesting, quick read. The delightful Chandler-esque flavour of Davis' academic-activist approach is still there: 'City of Quartz, to use one of those Parisian terms that I usually try to run over with my pick-up truck, is the biography of a conjoncture: one of those moments, ripe withparadox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history suddenly converge with profoundly unpredictable results.'

It is an interesting move - recognising in retrospect that what he was writing about and trying to describe at the time was a located form of globalisation in  process. I think it is a reasonable claim.

One particularly interesting section of the preface (for me) notes the transience of the city's centrality as an economic command-and-control centre for networked Californian and Asia-Pacific rim economies. Boosters in the 1980s played up this vision of the city's future but, as he notes, a combination of susbsequent factors (ranging from the withdrawal of Japanese capital in the 90s recession to the local social unrest/uprisings stemming largely from ongoing economic processes such as re/de-industrialisation) means that contemporary Los Angeles  'has entered the twenty-first century, as it did the twentieth, largely as an economic colony of corporations and investors headquartered elsewhere: San Francisco, Charlotte, New York, Chicago and Tokyo.'

Davis ends on a 'cautious note of optimism' that has some interesting Australian resonances.Kevin Rudd and friends might benefit from this advice (in terms of a necessary shift from a popularity based on anti-Howardism (or simply being 'over' Johnny and his crew) to something more sustainable.

Labor's forward march in Los Angeles ... depends in my opinion, upon further consolidation of a programmatic vision, built around a human needs agenda, that is not hostage to any individual campaign or political personality. Los Angeles needs, in short, a more, not less, ideological politics. I find nothing praiseworthy in current calls for more "centrism" or "pragmatism": euphemisms fo the continual process of incremental adjustment to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party. In contrast, conservative Christian groups have built impressive political bases in local suburban politics largely through unyeilding, programmatic tenacity. Odd to say, but many conservatives seem to have a better grasp of Gramsci than many on the Left. Above all, they understand the principle that a hegemonic politics must represent a consistent continuum of values: it must embody a morally coherent way of life.