Daniel Bertrand Monk holds the George R. and Myra T. Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, where he is professor of Geography and Middle East Studies. He is the author of An Aesthetic Occupation, as well as a number of other studies on the territorial and spatial practices of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Monk is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Security [SSRC-CIPS], as well as a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship [WWICS] for his contributions to research on contemporary conflict.

Michael Sorkin was Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. He served as president of Terreform, a nonprofit urban research and advocacy center, publisher and editor of UR Books, and architecture critic for The Nation. Sorkin passed away from Covid-19 on 26 March 2020.

From the Introduction by Daniel Bertrand Monk

The jacket blurbs of any of Mike Davis’s ten monographs present the reader with the image of an activist, former meatcutter, and truck driver who only happens to have won a MacArthur genius award and written some stuff about impending ecological and social doom. And yet, the man that The Nation has described as the “master of disaster prose” is clearly more than that. The disruptions he has caused in the process of examining our shared imagination of disaster actually point to a rigorous and coherent intellectual project that is too easily misrepresented or overlooked. Even sympathetic evaluators seem unable to resist making statements like “judgement day is every day with Mike Davis.” His work is “overlooked” even as it is ubiquitously cited in the sense that Davis’s systematic destruction of our collective destruction imaginary is part of an intellectual trajectory that can only be defined by what it negates…

Davis’s entire oeuvre rehearses a dialectic of catastrophe and revolution—that is, of an apocalyptic Nature that will not be subordinated to normative periodizations that would instrumentalize it as an adjunct to human history, but that, in the course of that refusal, potentiates both the consciousness and possibility of a revolutionary time. This accounts for the contrarieties animating Davis’s early works, in which the problem of collective action—the failures of labor to gain political hegemony in the US—are examined instead as triumphs of collective action, and indeed of class war, waged by “postreformist” interests against both the racialized and indigenized poor in North America and the targets of American imperialism abroad. In Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) and City of Quartz (1990), the “sunbelt Bolshevism” of homeowners’ associations in California’s suburbs and neoliberal boosters in LA pointed to the need for insurgent alliances among members of a global precariat. A commodified Nature and naturalized political economy alike are referenced in these volumes, but chiefly in order to focus on their effects on the production of a grotesque urbanism.

This dialectic of catastrophe and revolution approaches self-conscious expression in The Ecology of Fear (1998), where a “natural” revolution—in the form of capitalism’s encroachments on the Western landscape—meets a revolutionary environment in the form of firestorms that, in turn, reveal Angelinos’ anxieties about an alienated Nature to be synonymous with dread of an imagined “incendiary other.” (This is how the volume makes a sound case for “letting Malibu burn,” for example: as the naturalized “view corridors” of the real estate industry reveal themselves to have always been the fire corridors of an ignored ecology, the return of a repressed Nature is then acknowledged and displaced onto the indigenized poor, who are in turn disproportionately sacrificed to the blaze . . .) The demographic authors of what Davis termed “a magical urbanism” to describe the Latinx remaking of the American metropolis in this way become the denizens of his Dead Cities (2002) instead.

Daniel Bertrand Monk holds the George R. and Myra T. Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, where he is professor of Geography and Middle East Studies. He is the author of An Aesthetic Occupation, as well as a number of other studies on the territorial and spatial practices of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Monk is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Security [SSRC-CIPS], as well as a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship [WWICS] for his contributions to research on contemporary conflict.

Michael Sorkin was Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. He served as president of Terreform, a nonprofit urban research and advocacy center, publisher and editor of UR Books, and architecture critic for The Nation. Sorkin passed away from Covid-19 on 26 March 2020.

From the Introduction by Daniel Bertrand Monk

The jacket blurbs of any of Mike Davis’s ten monographs present the reader with the image of an activist, former meatcutter, and truck driver who only happens to have won a MacArthur genius award and written some stuff about impending ecological and social doom. And yet, the man that The Nation has described as the “master of disaster prose” is clearly more than that. The disruptions he has caused in the process of examining our shared imagination of disaster actually point to a rigorous and coherent intellectual project that is too easily misrepresented or overlooked. Even sympathetic evaluators seem unable to resist making statements like “judgement day is every day with Mike Davis.” His work is “overlooked” even as it is ubiquitously cited in the sense that Davis’s systematic destruction of our collective destruction imaginary is part of an intellectual trajectory that can only be defined by what it negates…

Davis’s entire oeuvre rehearses a dialectic of catastrophe and revolution—that is, of an apocalyptic Nature that will not be subordinated to normative periodizations that would instrumentalize it as an adjunct to human history, but that, in the course of that refusal, potentiates both the consciousness and possibility of a revolutionary time. This accounts for the contrarieties animating Davis’s early works, in which the problem of collective action—the failures of labor to gain political hegemony in the US—are examined instead as triumphs of collective action, and indeed of class war, waged by “postreformist” interests against both the racialized and indigenized poor in North America and the targets of American imperialism abroad. In Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) and City of Quartz (1990), the “sunbelt Bolshevism” of homeowners’ associations in California’s suburbs and neoliberal boosters in LA pointed to the need for insurgent alliances among members of a global precariat. A commodified Nature and naturalized political economy alike are referenced in these volumes, but chiefly in order to focus on their effects on the production of a grotesque urbanism.

This dialectic of catastrophe and revolution approaches self-conscious expression in The Ecology of Fear (1998), where a “natural” revolution—in the form of capitalism’s encroachments on the Western landscape—meets a revolutionary environment in the form of firestorms that, in turn, reveal Angelinos’ anxieties about an alienated Nature to be synonymous with dread of an imagined “incendiary other.” (This is how the volume makes a sound case for “letting Malibu burn,” for example: as the naturalized “view corridors” of the real estate industry reveal themselves to have always been the fire corridors of an ignored ecology, the return of a repressed Nature is then acknowledged and displaced onto the indigenized poor, who are in turn disproportionately sacrificed to the blaze . . .) The demographic authors of what Davis termed “a magical urbanism” to describe the Latinx remaking of the American metropolis in this way become the denizens of his Dead Cities (2002) instead.