City Of Quartz

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles is a 1990 book by American author Mike Davis proposing a theory that contemporary Los Angeles has been shaped by different powerful forces in its history.... explores how different groups wielded power in different ways: the downtown Protestant elite, led by the Chandler family of the Los Angeles Times; the new elite of the Jewish Westside; the surprisingly powerful homeowner groups; the Los Angeles Police Department. He covers the Irish leadership of the Catholic Church and its friction with the numerically dominant Latino element. The book concludes at what Davis calls the "junkyard of dreams," the former steel town of Fontana, east of LA, a victim of de-industrialization and decay. The second edition of the book, published in 2006, contains a new preface detailing changes in Los Angeles since City of Quartz was first published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz

• In the Boston Review, Mark Haefele called the book "a black hole of Southland noir," but also wrote, "What's brilliant about Davis's book is his perception of Los Angeles as incarceration, its new prisons a major industry... He's right that a broad landscape of the city is turning itself into Postmodern Piranesi. And to young black males in particular, the city has become a prisoner factory."