City of Quartz

What Hacker News says

1. l3mureMay 2023
   Reluctant Metropolis looks interesting, thanks. I'd also recommend Mike Davis' City of Quartz.
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2. andrewlFeb 2023
   This is a review of the book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. From the article:

   [The book] cuts past the deceit, examining the histories the fable dresses up in heroic garb. Doing for Palo Alto — population 70,000 — what Mike Davis’s classic “City of Quartz” did for Los Angeles, Harris reconsiders 200 years of history that many in the town would rather forget. Over more than 600 concussive pages, Harris narrates the town’s evolution and influence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He theorizes, above all, that it is defined by its distinctive approach to capitalism and profit, known as the “Palo Alto System”: a rapacious, violently exploitative mode of capitalism that generations of would-be moguls have perfected. “Palo Alto” is a skeptic’s record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California’s two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money.

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3. charlescearlFeb 2023
   Some references to the long history of class struggle in California include

   Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Golden Gulag https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag

   Huey P Newton (co-founder of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA October 1966) Revolutionary Suicide, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide

   Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/...

   Mike Davis, City of Quartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz

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4. jeffhwangOct 2022
   I remember reading City of Quartz many years ago and it changed how I thought about Los Angeles and southern CA. RIP.
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5. gdubsApr 2017
   City of Quartz, by Mike Davis is a good book on the city's architecture.

   It's a young city, relatively speaking, and it grew up with the automobile - leading to the infamous sprawl you see today.

   It's a city that's meant to be experienced by car (historically), meaning that many things are primarily accessible by car, to the extent that without a car you were basically of another class, kept out of the various "fortresses" (shopping malls, etc.)

   Hence the famous song, "nobody walks in LA."

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6. coldteaApr 2016
   Was mostly referring to the zoning restrictions the grant-parent mentioned, here are some examples:

   https://mises.org/library/zoning-laws-destroy-communities

   http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/zoning-l...

   http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/12/17/best-of-blog-t...

   Though the situation and intent of lots of these is much worse, "City of Quartz" (book on LA's development) is quite illuminating for example.

   But lots of bad food laws too, e.g:

   http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/apr...

   We have a share of BS laws in Europe too, that killed small producers with "safety regulations" and requirements designed so that only big buck corps can afford them -- despite having no issues whatsoever with said producers' products for centuries up until the 1990s or so when the laws got drafted...

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