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Mike Davis
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Mike Davis

1946–2022

American historian who wrote about Los Angeles and about informal settlements with the same eye: who is left off the plan.

City of Quartz dissected Los Angeles as a city organised around fear: gated developments, private security, benches you cannot sleep on and public space designed to expel. Davis called it the militarisation of the landscape, and he wrote it a decade before it became obvious.

In Planet of Slums he took the same attention to a global scale. His uncomfortable argument is that the accelerated urbanisation of the global South does not mainly produce an urban middle class, but peripheries without services where a growing share of humanity lives.

Born in 1946 in California into a working-class family, Davis was a meat cutter and a truck driver before studying history and becoming the most widely read chronicler of Los Angeles. City of Quartz (1990) told the city as a product of speculation, police and fear, and anticipated the 1992 riots; Ecology of Fear (1998) showed how Los Angeles builds in fire and flood zones and then calls the result a natural disaster. He was a professor at the University of California, Riverside, and received a MacArthur fellowship in 1998.

Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) explained the famines of the nineteenth century as products of empire and market, and Planet of Slums (2006) carried that view to the urbanisation of the Global South: a billion people in informal settlements, the product of structural adjustment and urbanisation without industry. Critics reproached him for catastrophism and disputed figures; his legacy, until his death in 2022, is to have joined history, geography and denunciation in a prose that made people read about cities who never would have.

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