88 CITY OF QUARTZ AT 20: THE OTHER VALLEY AND UNINCORPORATED DREAMS Twenty years after its initial publication, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz remains a unique work in terms of scope and intellectual ambition: covering the history, politics, economics, and power structure of Los Angeles; and seeking to understand the rela- tionships between capital and urban space, and rep- resentation and materiality. It also stands as a singular work of popular critical geography. As a coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (2012; with Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough), if we had had to limit ourselves to one published book as a resource, City of Quartz may well have been it. Our book presents 115 sites of struggles over power and alternative and minority histories throughout Los Angeles County in a popular guidebook format. Like no other book we consulted during our many years of research, Davis’s engages with the dynamics of the imposition and ne- gotiation of power in a stunning array of sites ranging from suburban neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley to the LAPD headquarters downtown. With its abiding interest in how power operates, City of Quartz showed how everyday landscapes and actions were implicated in the production of lasting patterns of inequality, particularly through capitalist develop- ment, and the production and enforcement of racial and economic hierarchies. Accordingly, although Davis himself points out that “twenty years in the life of a metropolis as dynamic and unpredictable as Los Angeles is an entire historical epoch” (Davis 2006, ix), the book still has much to teach us as a model of urban scholarly praxis, as Alexander Tarr asserts in his essay in this collection. What we have learned and can still learn from Davis is enormous. First, as I have already mentioned, is in his interest and skill in illuminating how power – political, economic, and cultural – operates in everyday land- scapes. Second, he writes passionately and seemingly from the heart about large-scale social, economic, and political processes. He writes as both a lover and critic of Los Angeles, in the tradition of what Matt Garcia, describing Carey McWilliams, has characterized as “passionate regionalism” (Garcia 2001). Davis is not afraid to make ambitious claims, to use dramatic metaphors and imagery. Indeed his polemical lyricism is among the most seductive traits of City of Quartz. It is easy to get carried away – and as readers we might wish to be carried away, to believe that this one book can carry so much of the weight of the symbolism and complexity of LA’s complex history and present. Davis wants to convince us that it can, After all, he subtitles the book “Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,” sug- gesting openly that the book has something to teach about “the future” in a general sense. However, relating to this second point, what kind of vision of the future, exactly, were we to excavate from Davis’s Los Angeles? Although the book hints at the utopian promise we might ind in the multilay- ered histories and social relations of Los Angeles (for Wendy Cheng Asian Paciic American Studies/Justice and Social Inquiry School of Social Transformation Arizona State University