Davis, who died of complications from esophageal cancer yesterday at 76, served as both the reluctant prognosticator-in-chief for L.A. and a guide to the overlapping urban crises that now cascade across U.S. cities with alarming frequency. In his immensely influential 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davis dispenses with L.A.’s typical dichotomies — sunshine and noir, utopia and dystopia — yet provides the first clear framework for understanding the city’s blistering inequality: “spatial apartheid,” wherein white single-family homeowners collude with developers and law-enforcement agencies to banish and criminalize the city’s Black and brown, working-class, and poor residents. The oft-cited chapter “Fortress L.A.” is a wry tour of how this carceral urbanism manifests in an unwelcoming civic landscape, and it provides a visual explanation for why so many places that Americans design, from malls to schools, also feel like jails. On the cover of the book, symbolically, is a federal prison that occupies some of the best real estate in downtown L.A...
Obituaries
