Mike DavisCity of Quartz Los Angeles, capitale du futur

Punctuated by a constant movement between culture and society, real and imaginary, between past and present, City of Quartz explores the destiny of Los Angeles through its urbanism and architecture, its political and economic elites, its intellectuals and its artists, its police and its multi-ethnicity. Steeped in Hollywood myths and ecological and social contradictions, the megalopolis L.A. is described as the magnifying prism that allows us to grasp some of the heavy trends of American society: the growing privatization of public spaces, fiscal and residential separatism of the propertied, social polarization and drug economy, development of security and surveillance systems. A paradigm of the Far West, Los Angeles also tells us about the virtualities of our social and urban future. This book is now a classic of urban sociology, but also a profoundly original book addressing a wider audience than urban problem specialists and deploying an astonishing range of intellectual and aesthetic resources. As much as a creative synthesis of the tradition of the Chicago School and critical theory of European origin, this unclassifiable work is to the postmodern city what Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century of Walter Benjamin is to the world of Haussmann and Baudelaire.