Los Angeles is an exception among cities. Or, at least, we like to think of it as such. Its sprawling refusal to conform to Western notions of what a proper metropolis should be has generated continual debate amongst architects, planners and sociologists. Paradoxically, in one ethnocentric teleology, the urbanism that starts in Athens and Rome, and runs through Paris and New York, inevitably ends in Hollywood. (Quite where Beijing, Timbuktu or Tenochtitlan would fit into this scheme has never been very clear.) Los Angeles is a dream city of sunshine and mobility, and the infernal setting of every second disaster movie. It is also, of course, the home of an industry whose obsessive self-concern distorts its global image even more.
The Ecology of Fear—subtitled ‘Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster’—weaves together maps and words, dreams and matter, the physical city and (some of) its social divisions, and above all its human inhabitants and its natural environment, in startling and luminous ways. The heated reactions of academics, journalists and real-estate agents to this book can be taken as back-handed tributes to its unsettling power. Beautifully written, it constantly offers disconcerting insights and associations. Early on, recalling the arrival of Anglo-American conquistadors in this Mediterranean ecology, Davis observes that ‘in the most fundamental sense, language and cultural inheritance failed the newcomers. English terminology, specific to a humid climate, proved incapable of accurately capturing the dialectic of water and drought that shapes Mediterranean environments. By no stretch of the imagination, for example, is an arroyo merely a “glen”.’ The passage captures something of the strangeness of this land, as it must have appeared to each of those who entered it for the first time, but it also points ahead to a larger claim: that the Los Angeles basin still remains opaque as a historico-natural phenomenon to Anglo paradigms of urbanism.
Thus in an already famous chapter entitled ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’, Davis demonstrates the madness of building houses in a fragile, fire-prone zone of chapparal, and the further insanity of fire-fighting strategies calculated to intensify the inevitable conflagrations when they occur. The grim injustices of a city committed to boosting the property values of the super-affluent, regardless of fiscal cost, while tenements in inner-city barrios burn, come out in stark relief. But Davis does not offer a conventional picture of power and powerlessness. One of the most distinctive motifs in The Ecology of Fear is the way in which the elements, monstrously disfigured by nature-defying patterns of habitation, wreak their revenge on even the enclaves of the privileged. The dialectical retaliation of nature can visit well-nigh biblical retribution on human indifference.