In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and "urban pioneers" alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates' overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.
This paper revisits Mike Davis’ seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles twenty years after it was originally published. It argues that the book continues to provide an indispensable model for left, politically engaged forms of urban research. 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. 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. At the same time, the paper addresses inadequacies of what has been called the “L.A. School” and its singularly postmodern approach to urban questions that fail to provide coherent understanding of the material realities of modern American cities. It argues that something like an L.A. 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. 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.
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