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Titre:
City of quartz : excavating the future in Los Angeles, new edition

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$26.95
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Résumé:
This new edition of Mike Davis’s work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century. No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In "City of quartz", Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides an update on the city’s current status.

Titre:
Au-delà de Blade Runner : Los Angeles et l'imagination du desastre

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$11.95
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Résumé:
Cet essai sociologique, urbanistique et politique montre, à travers l'exemple de Los Angeles, ce que sera le visage futur de la ville, moins spectaculaire et plus effrayant que la vision futuriste offerte par Blade Runner. Los Angeles porte déjà en elle le modèle vers lequel vont tendre toutes les mégapoles : destruction de la mixité sociale par cloisonnement strict des couches de populations.

Titre:
Dead cities and other tales

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$38.95
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Résumé:
For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography. In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.

Titre:
Planet of slums

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$34.00
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Résumé:
From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory

Titre:
Au-delà de Blade Runner

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$14.95
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Résumé:
Véritable laboratoire social et urbanistique, Los Angeles préfigure le modèle à venir des mégapoles modernes : destruction de toute mixité sociale par le cloisonnement strict des populations dans des quartiers réservés, laissés, pour certains, à l’abandon et à la domination des gangs, tandis que les couches les plus aisées se « bunkerisent » grâce à la généralisation de la vidéo-surveillance et des milices de sécurité privées. La ville vit désormais dans un état perpétuel de « guerre sociale de faible intensité », susceptible à tout moment d’éclater. À la fois sociologique, urbanistique et politique, l’essai de Mike Davis offre, au-delà du cas de Los Angeles, un portrait poignant de l’Amérique contemporaine et présage de l’évolution qui menace les sociétés occidentales.

Titre:
Magical urbanism: Latinos reinvent the US city

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$33.95
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Résumé:
Is the capital of Latin America a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River? Will California soon hold the balance of power in Mexican national politics? Will Latinos reinvigorate the US labor movement? These are some of the provocative questions that Mike Davis explores in this fascinating account of the Latinization of the US urban landscape. As he forefully shows, this is a demographic and cultural revolution with extraordinary implications. With Spanish surnames increasing five times faster than the general population, salsa is becoming the predominant ethnic rhythm (and flavor) of contemporary city life. In Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and (shortly) Dallas, Latinos outnumber non-Hispanic whites; in New York, San Diego and Phoenix they outnumber Blacks. According to the Bureau of the Census, Latinos will supply fully two-thirds of the nation’s population growth between now and the middle of the 21st century when nearly 100 millions Americans will boast Latin American ancestry.

Titre:
Dead cities and other tales

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$44.95
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Résumé:
In his most syncretic writing yet, radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, a ceaseless battle waged both within cities and against nature. Using environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis examines themes of urban life today—white flight, deindustrialization, housing and job segregation and discrimination, and federal policy—and looks at areas he calls "national sacrifice zones," military landscapes that simulated warfare and arms production have rendered uninhabitable. Davis begins our apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York’s Ground Zero. He then takes us to "German Village," a Utah wasteland that was once a test site for Allied science advisors to rehearse the perfect plan for destroying Berlin, and to the diabolic miracle of Las Vegas, where environmental terrorism is practiced in the name of urban development. Davis also hits Los Angeles, the frontline of the "Second Civil War" sparked by American apartheid, and which lies waiting to be ignited in cities across the country.

Titre:
Magical urbanism : Latinos reinvent the U.S. big city

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Résumé:
Davis focuses on the great drama of how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Pundits are now unanimous that Spanish-surname voters are the sleeping giant of US politics. Though the overall vote in the 1996 elections declined significantly, the Latino share rose by a spectacular 16%. Yet electoral mobilization alone is unlikely to redress the increasing income and opportunity gaps between urban Latinos and suburban non-Hispanic whites. Thus in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the militant struggles of Latino workers and students are reinventing the American left. "Magical Urbanism" is fascinating reading for anyone who wants to grasp the future of urban America.

Titre:
Dead cities

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$35.95
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Résumé:
Le monde occidental est à la fois habité par un sentiment de toute-puissance et hanté par sa disparition. Étrangement, les apocalypses que met en scène la culture populaire, par exemple sous la forme de l’invasion étrangère ou extraterrestre, occultent le fait qu’il est d’abord menacé de l’intérieur, par son propre mode de fonctionnement : étalement urbain, surexploitation des ressources naturelles, utilisation massive de combustibles fossiles et de substances polluantes dont on entrevoit tout juste l’étendue des conséquences, déploiement d’une puissance de feu inouïe, soi-disant au service du bien et de la démocratie... Les récits contenus dans cet ouvrage révèlent qu’il faut cesser d’envisager la catastrophe comme un accident ou une exception. La multiplication des événements climatiques extrêmes, entre autres choses, nous le rappelle, il s’agit d’un état normal et permanent. Mike Davis a parfaitement vu que l’histoire humaine était encastrée dans l’histoire de la nature. Ici au sommet de son art prophétique, il nous raconte une humanité vouée à sa perte mais qui possède aussi les moyens de changer son destin.

Titre:
Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism : Evil Paradises

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$27.95
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Résumé:
Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel BertrandrnMonk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternaternrealities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfetteredrnby unions and state regulation. These developments—in cities, deserts,rnand in the middle of the sea—are worlds where consumption andrninequality surpass our worst nightmares.