Their goal is not only to produce safety and cleanliness in the urban environment but to influence the symbolic dimension of what the city is and for whom it is made. Our thesis is that, in the context of recent urban renaissance initiatives, BIDs are expanding their ‘clean and safe’ profile to be a much more comprehensive programme. Our paper addresses the complex role of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in current processes of inner-city restructuring and the function of BIDs in the implementation of new forms of social control in downtown areas. Ultimately the paper is a call for scholarship on Los Angeles to be deeply engaged with both the concrete and abstract dimensions of a place, not for the sake of theory alone, but to further radical praxis in Los Angeles and all American cities. School can be more properly grounded in the historical-materialist, even socialist, forms of writing and thinking developed in works like City of Quartz and much of the critical urban geography that came in its footsteps. School” and its singularly postmodern approach to urban questions that fail to provide coherent understanding of the material realities of modern American cities. At the same time, the paper addresses inadequacies of what has been called the “L.A.

To this end, the paper looks to the city’s more recent history, especially current battles being fought over the future of downtown L.A., to illustrate how we might continue to use Davis’ framework for critical analyses of urban power. The paper criticizes the apocalyptic readings of City of Quartz that have multiplied over time and instead suggests that Davis be read for his emphasis on an urban dialectic-the constant and ongoing struggles over urban form, politics and culture that shape the geographies of Los Angeles to this day. It argues that the book continues to provide an indispensable model for left, politically engaged forms of urban research. This paper revisits Mike Davis’ seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles twenty years after it was originally published.

City of Quartz by Mike Davis