What do you think?
Rate this book
Dead Cities
A riveting exploration of the tensions between nature and the built environment. The storm is here, crushed dams no longer hold, the savage seas come inland with a hop. Jacob van Hoddis As Mike Davis shows, prophecies of urban doom too often come true. Beginning with a trip to New York's Ground Zero, Davis pairs the horror of lower Manhattan's falling skyscrapers with Las Vegas' delirious delight in blowing up its landmark hotels, where environmental terrorism is practiced in the name of urban development. We stop at "German Village," the Utah wasteland where Allied scientists once perfected their plans to destroy Berlin, then move on to Los Angeles, the frontline of a "Second Civil War" that lies waiting to be ignited in cities across the country. The title essay is an autopsy of the metropolis dead on a slab, with reflections on "bomber ecology" and "ghetto geomorphology." The final chapter, with accounts of Montreal and Auckland brought to their knees by ice storms and heat, warns that our urban infrastructures are as little prepared to deal with climate change as with car bombs and hijacked airliners.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
30 people are currently reading
1204 people want to read
About the author
Mike Davis
232 books675 followersMike Davis was a social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lived in San Diego.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
Read
December 4, 2023Once upon a time, City of Quartz was a reference point, the quintessential LA book, name-checked in HBO dialogue and indie-rock songs. Mike Davis, though, seems to be dangerously at risk of being forgotten. I wish to do my small part to prevent this.
Dead Cities is a representation of his thought throughout, and a crystallization of everything you should love about his writing. A onetime SDS activist who stuck to his guns and bore witness to the Reagan bullshit, the Clinton bullshit, and all the rest, a proud representative of the California of hot rods and Okies and brushfires, explicitly not the California of gentle surf and sangria – all those things made Davis uniquely maladapted to the giggling end of history, and therefore made him a sharper analyst.
Dead Cities is a representation of his thought throughout, and a crystallization of everything you should love about his writing. A onetime SDS activist who stuck to his guns and bore witness to the Reagan bullshit, the Clinton bullshit, and all the rest, a proud representative of the California of hot rods and Okies and brushfires, explicitly not the California of gentle surf and sangria – all those things made Davis uniquely maladapted to the giggling end of history, and therefore made him a sharper analyst.
July 2, 2019
‘Dead Cities’ has been on my to-read list for at least seven years and I can make a plausible guess about why I decided to read it: the title. Urbanism and the apocalypse are particular interests of mine. I’ve previously read Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, which deals with similar themes while having a more specific focus. ‘Dead Cities’ is a collection of disparate essays and thus fascinating for its spatial range, from a single neighbourhood to the entire solar system. This extremely broad interpretation of urbanism is both entertaining and thought-provoking for the reader (or at least I found it so). The essays are grouped into four chapters, loosely themed around extremes of pollution and natural disaster, what went wrong with Los Angeles, global catastrophe, and miscellaneous. All are written in a fluid and involving style, neither academic nor journalistic, that I felt did the very serious topics justice while retaining a literary flair. Given that the collection was published in 2002 and the pieces within written in the late 90s and early 00s, it is instructive and depressing to note the further deterioration in the environment, housing affordability, and urban policy during the two subsequent decades.
There is insightful analysis to be found throughout, although Davis is most incisive when explaining how urban areas develop as they do:
While the level of detail in the essays about American cities, especially LA, is interesting, the same situations and themes recur: regulatory capture, corruption, racism, inequality, and environmental degradation. The shocking state of cities in America seems bizarre in comparison to the UK, where wealth is concentrated in dense city centres and poverty pushed to the outskirts. With its greenbelt protection, Britain has never embraced suburbs to anything like the same extent as the US. Rather than being abandoned to those unable to move, UK urban centres are highly desirable locations snapped up in fragments by international investors at inflated prices. Not a great situation either, but a very different spatial dispersion of development and wealth to that in America.
The two essays which I found most memorable and striking were in the final section: ‘Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage?’ and ‘Dead Cities: A Natural History’. The former discusses in some depth how disciplines including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology have been transformed by growing understanding of how many meteors hang around the solar system banging into things. I was only aware of such theories in the broadest possible terms (a meteor killed the dinosaurs, right?) so found this mind-expanding. It’s probably the densest and most difficult of the essays, yet also the most rewarding. I didn’t expect to find so much astronomy in a book on the urban environment; it was a pleasant surprise. Davis elegantly links a variety of scientific material, while acknowledging debates and uncertainties across fields:
The latter titular essay is very different. I appreciated it equally, albeit in a different way. It evaluates the environmental realism of early postapocalyptic literature, specifically After London: or, Wild England and Earth Abides. In some ways, this essay prefigures Alan Weisman’s compelling thought experiment The World Without Us, as Davis considers what happens to cities when humanity abandons them. The reminder of After London: or, Wild England’s lyrical vision was welcome, although I think Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud also deserved a mention. I particularly liked the discussion of which plants thrived in bombed-out cities during WWII:
I have some ambivalence about my obsession with post-apocalyptic visions; Davis acknowledges that such fascination with urban destruction has associations with eugenics and exterminism. Yet he manages to examine disasters real and theoretical while avoiding voyeuristic disregard for their human impact. I learned a lot from this collection of nuanced and thoughtful essays. Inevitably the content is largely depressing, but not hopeless. For some reason, the most painful environmental disaster to read about in this collection was not nuclear waste, climate change, or soil degradation, but industrial overfishing. Perhaps because deep sea trawling destroys so much and so wastefully, for no good reason, without it even being clear what irreplaceable biodiversity is being lost.
There is insightful analysis to be found throughout, although Davis is most incisive when explaining how urban areas develop as they do:
The terrible beauty struggling to be born Downtown is usually called growth, but it is neither a purely natural metabolism (as neoliberals imagine the marketplace to be) nor an enlightened volition (as politicians and planners like to claim). Rather it is better conceptualised as a vast game - a relentless competition between privileged players (or alliances of players) in which the state intervenes much like a card-dealer or croupier to referee the play. Urban design, embodied in different master plans and project visions, provides malleable rules for the key players as well as a set of boundaries to exclude unauthorised play. But unlike most games, there is no winning gambit or final move. Downtown development is an essentially infinite game, played not towards any conclusion or closure, but towards its endless protraction.
While the level of detail in the essays about American cities, especially LA, is interesting, the same situations and themes recur: regulatory capture, corruption, racism, inequality, and environmental degradation. The shocking state of cities in America seems bizarre in comparison to the UK, where wealth is concentrated in dense city centres and poverty pushed to the outskirts. With its greenbelt protection, Britain has never embraced suburbs to anything like the same extent as the US. Rather than being abandoned to those unable to move, UK urban centres are highly desirable locations snapped up in fragments by international investors at inflated prices. Not a great situation either, but a very different spatial dispersion of development and wealth to that in America.
The two essays which I found most memorable and striking were in the final section: ‘Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage?’ and ‘Dead Cities: A Natural History’. The former discusses in some depth how disciplines including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology have been transformed by growing understanding of how many meteors hang around the solar system banging into things. I was only aware of such theories in the broadest possible terms (a meteor killed the dinosaurs, right?) so found this mind-expanding. It’s probably the densest and most difficult of the essays, yet also the most rewarding. I didn’t expect to find so much astronomy in a book on the urban environment; it was a pleasant surprise. Davis elegantly links a variety of scientific material, while acknowledging debates and uncertainties across fields:
Evolution by catastrophe, Michael Rampino adds, also entails speciation through a different process than the classic gradualist mechanisms of geographic isolation and adaptive change. Catastrophe replaces the linear temporal creep of microevolution with nonlinear bursts of macroevolution. Comet showers accelerate evolutionary change by injecting huge pulses of sudden energy into biogeochemical circuits. Nutrient recycling is stimulated and bolides add new stocks of organic molecules. [...] Most importantly, catastrophes break up static ecosystems and clear adaptive space for the explosive radiation of new taxa - like mammals after the K/T horizon. Rampino, awed by this dialectic of creative destruction, openly wonders if impact catastrophe is not the real driving force behind the movement towards greater biological diversity, and if Gaia has not evolved in intricate choreography with Shiva.
The latter titular essay is very different. I appreciated it equally, albeit in a different way. It evaluates the environmental realism of early postapocalyptic literature, specifically After London: or, Wild England and Earth Abides. In some ways, this essay prefigures Alan Weisman’s compelling thought experiment The World Without Us, as Davis considers what happens to cities when humanity abandons them. The reminder of After London: or, Wild England’s lyrical vision was welcome, although I think Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud also deserved a mention. I particularly liked the discussion of which plants thrived in bombed-out cities during WWII:
The botanical census of bomb sites in the City and the East End revealed a new pattern of urban vegetation adapted to fire, rubble, and open space. Uncommon natives and robust aliens dominated this unexpected ‘bomber ecology’. The most successful colonist of blitzed sites, for example, was the formerly rare rosebay willowherb, which in Jefferies’ time could only be found in Paddington Cemetery and on a few gravelly banks. [...] Among other aliens that flourished during the Blitz were the Canadian fleabane, already a familiar plant on railway embankments, the redoubtable buddleia, and the Peruvian Galinsoga parviflora, an escapee from Kew Gardens.
I have some ambivalence about my obsession with post-apocalyptic visions; Davis acknowledges that such fascination with urban destruction has associations with eugenics and exterminism. Yet he manages to examine disasters real and theoretical while avoiding voyeuristic disregard for their human impact. I learned a lot from this collection of nuanced and thoughtful essays. Inevitably the content is largely depressing, but not hopeless. For some reason, the most painful environmental disaster to read about in this collection was not nuclear waste, climate change, or soil degradation, but industrial overfishing. Perhaps because deep sea trawling destroys so much and so wastefully, for no good reason, without it even being clear what irreplaceable biodiversity is being lost.
May 17, 2009
this collection of essays is a mixed bag. there's a few fantastic pieces ("berlin's skeleton in utah's closet," "who killed L.A.?: a political autopsy" and "dead cities: a natural history" come to mind), some that are only interesting if you really study the fields they address ("burning all illusions," "cosmic dancers on history's stage"... which i failed to finish) and a few that aren't so hot, like his intro piece about 9/11. as usual, davis is best when he's politicizing catastrophes and using literature and the arts to mirror his arguments. my favorites essays rely heavily on journalistic scholarship. davis is refreshing among "theory" types in that he seems to fall back on public policy and newspaper reports more than freud/marx/nietzsche/derrida/butler/fanon, and so forth. and he has a knack for asking great, punchy questions, like "was the cold war the earth's worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years?" i kinda wish he's be more forthcoming about his own fascination with the apocalypse, which borders on outright fetishistic at times. this is actually part of what's interesting about davis, but often sets his scholarship at an awkward distance from his own desires.
May 3, 2021
Davis is endlessly fascinating and illuminating. Even when I don’t agree with him or don’t share an interest in his topic, he’s thought-provoking. The danger in reading a collection like this is that it gives me hundreds of new side topics to explore and man, I just don’t have the time to read the stuff that’s already on my list.
November 28, 2025
Un descubrimiento. La mezcla de relato e investigación con su buena dosis de hard data es increíble. Aunque a veces da la sensación de que Davis no llega donde quiere llegar por falta de espacio creo que señala con ese estilo mesiánico tan particular lo que la necropolitica urbana podría ser.
October 31, 2025
Mark Davis 🐐 the only guy who could get me to care about the inner machinations of politics regarding SoCal real estate in the 70s-90s
July 18, 2007
Pretty amazing. It seems like all his stuff is pretty much a reiteration of the same basic tenets, but it’s illuminating on a variety of obscure topics: working class teen riots in the early 60s, fake corporate cities in South LA, dead animal garbage dumps in Nevada nuclear testing grounds, and of course more on Bunker Hill, which seems to be endlessly fascinating and able to supply whatever theoretical or literary fuel you request for your apocalyptic fire.
July 14, 2022
Excellent collection of essays from the always insightful Mike Davis. His analysis of the planned under investment and sabotaging of the urban cores in the 70s, 80s, and 90s paints a fascinating and infuriating narrative.
December 17, 2007
Super powerful book by Mike Davis about the intersections between economics, culture, geography, and politics.
December 18, 2008
man there is so much good stuff especially the beginning about nuclear test sites and documentation and the end about geological catastrophes. im reading it again now
April 22, 2025
READ IT!!!
Despite being the most typo-laden physical book I've ever read, Dead Cities is equal parts edifying and terrifying. Most of the articles in here were written about 8 or 9 years before I was born. I didn't know about so many things Davis discusses; it doesn't feel like these events were "hidden" so much as obscured by everything else going on at the time.
Most interesting to me were the articles focused on Los Angeles (Bunker Hill, Compton, Downtown, the Metro), discussing the various ways in which the city and its administration has failed its citizens whether that is through uneven development or brazen corruption. I also loved the piece that comes near the end about geomorphology and the role of meteor impacts in Earth's long long life.
Nuclear waste, casinos, trains, floods, fires, disease, riots, youth, enclaves, tsunamis, CATASTROPHES
Can be quite depressing because the tone and tenor was the exact same in 1992 as it is now. But flip the coin and it becomes hopeful, a book of lessons instead of plagues.
Despite being the most typo-laden physical book I've ever read, Dead Cities is equal parts edifying and terrifying. Most of the articles in here were written about 8 or 9 years before I was born. I didn't know about so many things Davis discusses; it doesn't feel like these events were "hidden" so much as obscured by everything else going on at the time.
Most interesting to me were the articles focused on Los Angeles (Bunker Hill, Compton, Downtown, the Metro), discussing the various ways in which the city and its administration has failed its citizens whether that is through uneven development or brazen corruption. I also loved the piece that comes near the end about geomorphology and the role of meteor impacts in Earth's long long life.
Nuclear waste, casinos, trains, floods, fires, disease, riots, youth, enclaves, tsunamis, CATASTROPHES
Can be quite depressing because the tone and tenor was the exact same in 1992 as it is now. But flip the coin and it becomes hopeful, a book of lessons instead of plagues.
March 5, 2023
doesn’t miss, although still varies in quality, like every other essay collection ever collected. Davis is at his best cohering world-size ideas into relatively granular material nuggets, and there are countless moments of startling, internationalist clarity in this collection. for example, regarding the interethnic gang warfare of nineties Los Angeles:
‘“Dios me salve Maria…” An old catholic custom, the same in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles as Palermo or Galway, it is a vigil kept by women, praying to another woman whose son was murdered two thousand years ago.’ (292)
the cosa nostra, the IRA, the midcity locos—it’s trite and reductive to compare specific gang wars like so much produce, but of course davis never falls into such simplifications, offering instead the insistent reminder that we require solidarity with each other to get out of any of this—all of this—and that we are not so far removed from one another as we might imagine.
‘“Dios me salve Maria…” An old catholic custom, the same in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles as Palermo or Galway, it is a vigil kept by women, praying to another woman whose son was murdered two thousand years ago.’ (292)
the cosa nostra, the IRA, the midcity locos—it’s trite and reductive to compare specific gang wars like so much produce, but of course davis never falls into such simplifications, offering instead the insistent reminder that we require solidarity with each other to get out of any of this—all of this—and that we are not so far removed from one another as we might imagine.
June 14, 2019
These stories are interesting and relevant 20 years after the fact. I learned a lot about LA and surrounding cities. I grew up in Orange County, and I didn't learn the complicated history of South Central LA when I was a little.
September 28, 2020
Interesting collection of essays on urban theory ideas and history. I enjoyed the LA and Vegas stories especially. The essays are from the late 90s and early 2000s, so some of the essays are already dated. Besides that good book for the Mike Davis enthusiasts out there.
March 31, 2020
The ongoing relevance and prescience of this book continues to amaze. It was a core text for my writing the apocalypse courses. Pound said literature is News that stays News. This is that.
May 4, 2025
Dismal! Enlightening! Misery-inducing! Perhaps the widest span of interconnected phenomena I've ever seen cohesively tied together in a nonfiction book. I loved it.
October 14, 2025
Socialist critique of plate tectonics! Freeway and anchovy paranoia!
Just because you're crazy doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Just because you're crazy doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
December 15, 2015
I didn't really know much about Mike Davis going into this but was pretty sure I wasn't gonna love his work. Considering that he's a self-described urbanist and that the only label I'm even close to comfortable with for myself at this point is anti-civ it's kind of surprising I even decided to start this. His name had just come up so many times endorsing other books I've read that I had to see who he was. There actually are some interesting essays in here, mainly the first couple and last couple chapters. The rest basically just focuses on Los Angeles's poor planning and political corruption in the 80's and early 90's, which doesn't really make much difference to me since no matter how well planned a city is I'd still say it's destined for failure. He almost seems to agree with that himself at times while at other times talking about deindustrialization and low population densities as if they're bad things and worthless construction projects ("creating jobs") as if they're good things. It's hard to make out what exactly his view on urbanism really is. Is he promoting it or just studying it? He does at least seem to have his heart in the right place when talking about minorities, poor people, the environment, etc. Added to the problem of obscurity though this is also outdated and written in kind of a pedantic style. Even the interesting parts might not be accurate. So while I didn't hate it as much as I feared I might I still can't see any good reason to recommend that anyone else waste their time with it. Maybe one of his newer ones would be better.
September 8, 2014
Another doozy by about Mike Davis. Not really cities per se...but large swaths of land that happen to be urbanized. Several of the essays focus on LA and LV as emblematic of corporate greed and environmental intransigence. Davis, an urban environmentalist is concerned with how urban America - "in the West" has been poisoned by postmodern urbanism and is as good as dead because of that greed and those assorted environmental catastrophes. This is coupled in LA's case with the inevitable big one, climate change and fire, not to mention the class/race divide. Incredibly researched and foot-noted, it would be interesting to read an updated version of this essay collection, as it was published in 2002, with most of them written pre-9.11, which as we know, changes everything. All you read about Amerikan Downtowns is that they are coming back from the edge and are full of vibrancy, diversity and cultural excitement. Not really true, or true if you are of the meritocracy with education, a job and disposable income. I think the next time I visit my son in LA, I will at least drive through Compton. The final paragraph begins with this sentence: None of this, of course, has had the slighest impac on the (future tropical) city on the Potomac. He ends his last book, "In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire," with a similar tip-of-the-hat to the new Rome on the Potomac. Actually, it was a question, who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac?
December 4, 2015
Some really interesting essays, mostly focused on the western states of the US and Los Angeles in particular, but covering a wide range of topics. The theme of how cities and other inhabited areas "die" because of pollution, politics, government intervention, and economic pressures. There are also interesting bits about mock-ups of European cities built for military experiments during WWII, the prospects of meteor strikes wiping out civilization, and other fun stuff. I get the impression though that the essays were assembled from the author's previous work and the book as a whole does not really give a sense of continuity or sustained argument. My other warning would be that the essays are fairly academic, and some get pretty dry.
September 4, 2008
Very high brow "When buildings fall down," full of neat facts like:
During WWII, scientists in nevada and utah recreated german buildings and furniture out of traditional german materials so they could blow it up as accurately as possible.
During WWII, scientists in nevada and utah recreated german buildings and furniture out of traditional german materials so they could blow it up as accurately as possible.
Currently reading
June 12, 2007We're DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED DOOMED.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews