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.