Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.
Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the Ph.D. program in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a 1996-1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.
Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain. As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written frequently for, among others, The Nation and the UK's New Statesman.
He is a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist". He writes in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cites in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of Revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like other Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as French anarchist Daniel Guérin, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U.S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U.S.
Davis is also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of The Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons.
Reviewers have praised Davis' prose style and his exposés of economic, social, environmental and political injustice. His book Planet of Slums inspired a special issue of Mute Magazine on global slums. City of Quartz is notable for predicting some of the tensions that would lead into the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The popular success of Davis' many critical studies has incited some to denounce or scrutinize aspects of his reporting. Malibu Realtor Ross Ernest Shockley (aka "Brady Westwater") argued that Davis distorts or makes up facts to overdramatize his case against the contemporary capitalist city. This argument was subsequently repeated by Los Angeles communications professional Jill Stewart, who labeled Davis a "city-hating socialist" in the New Times Los Angeles. These views were brought to a broader audience in Salon.com. According to Todd Purdum's unfriendly 1999 piece, Davis "acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local environmentalist, Lewis McAdams, for a cover story he wrote for L.A. Weekly a decade ago (in the late 1980s); he defends it as an early attempt at journalistic scene-setting." However, in his October 2004 Geography article, "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City," Kevin Stannard held that this "controversy is explained by Davis's ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage," although that same balance has also been noted for its informative readability and effectiveness (see above). Jon Wiener in the Nation has defended Davis, maintaining that these arguments against the validity of Davis' findings and interpretation are based in little more than big city boosterism.
Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis' less-than-celebratory focus on the material impacts of capitalist inequality. Citing Jane Jacobs' attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) has attacked Davis' analysis as "harsh" (p. 170). Davis' work, particularly Planet of Slums, has been criticized by Merrifield and urban studies professor Tom Angotti as "anti-urban" and "overly apocalyptic." These critics charge that Davis fails to focus on what they see as the potential of activist groups among the poor and working class to address the problems of the contemporary metropolis on a local or citywide basis, as advocated by Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman. Davis, however, is less interested in such a reformist approach to the existing city as an end in itself, than he is in a global working-class social movement toward a revolutionary transformation of the city, along with capitalism itself, to ecological sustainability and socialist regionalism, as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo advocated.
