The American writer and activist Mike Davis, who has died of cancer aged 76, was billed as an “urban historian”, but his work also took in geography, politics, economics, sociology and literature. His main subject was the dislocation and separation brought on by capitalist society: people from land, work from ownership, individuals from each other, all in the service of profit.
Although he was, in the words of one critic, an “old-fashioned countercultural Marxist”, he wrote from the inside out, imposing his topics on the theory, rather than the other way around. Crucially, he also tried to separate historical myth from reality.
That quest was at the core of his bestselling book, City of Quartz (1990), which tracked the development of Los Angeles from pre-history to post-Hollywood. Subtitled “Excavating the Future”, it became a sensation two years later, when riots sparked by the acquittal of LA police officers videoed beating a black man, Rodney King, after a traffic stop, seemed to fulfil its predictions of inevitable urban violence.
Later his 1998 book, Ecology of Fear, was also seen as prophetic, covering as it did the effects of “natural” disasters on urban environments, while Planet of Slums (2006) argued that fiscal policies around the globe, as enforced by the International Monetary Fund, were driving subsistence workers off the land and into the cities to work in factory jobs that were already disappearing.
Davis’s polyglot approach reflected his own auto-didactic development, which involved years of actual working, rather than academic study. Born in Fontana, California, he grew up in postwar El Cajon in a hamlet on the developed edge of San Diego County, bordered by vast orange and avocado farms. His father, Dwight, was of Welsh heritage, a meat-cutter and union man. His mother, Mary (nee Ryan), was of Irish descent and Davis said he had inherited his radicalism from her strength.
A self-described “ordinary redneck”, he quit school at 16 to work as a butcher when his father had a heart attack. But one of his cousins was married to Jim Stone, a black warehouse worker who organised for the Congress of Racial Equality, and took Davis on pickets of segregated businesses. Stone convinced him to return to school, and he won a scholarship from the butcher’s union to attend Reed, a small liberal arts college in Oregon.
He lasted three months, nominally expelled for living in his girlfriend’s dorm room, but in reality because “I couldn’t cut it; I felt like a country bumpkin, an idiot.”
Impressed with Tom Hayden’s manifesto for Students For a Democratic Society, a student activist body, he went to New York to work for the organisation, which sent him to Los Angeles, where he supported himself selling its literature.
In LA he joined the Communist party, running their bookstore in the city, and mixed street activism with various manual jobs, including driving a Gray Line tourist bus.
In 1973, aged 27, he enrolled at UCLA to study history and economics. Three years later, still “functionally illiterate”, he won a grant to go to Scotland to study Irish history; he moved to Belfast and then London, where an essay he wrote impressed the editor of the New Left Review, Perry Anderson, who offered him a place on the magazine’s editorial board.
In 1986 their Verso Books imprint published his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, a series of essays linked loosely by their takes on Reagan-era America.
He then returned to UCLA and worked as a lorry driver while finishing his PhD dissertation on the history of Los Angeles. It was either rejected outright or accepted provisionally requiring his resitting classes he had never finished. Instead, it became City of Quartz, which Verso published to unexpected sales, despite one reviewer calling it the work of a “city-hating socialist”.
After the riots proved its thesis, he received a grant from the Getty Foundation and the offer of a chair at UCLA, which was withdrawn after he criticised the university for its treatment of striking campus food workers.
The success of City of Quartz led to an advance from the Knopf publishing group for a book about the LA riots, which he eventually returned, feeling his writing was “exploitative”.
Instead he ensconced himself at the Cal Tech library, producing Ecology of Fear. Earthquakes, fires and droughts made the book seem farsighted; now he was regularly denounced as a doom-crying Jeremiah or Cassandra. One chapter of the book, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, suggested resources would be better used protecting the inner city rather than mansions built on remote hillsides. It led one Malibu estate agent to distribute a debunking of Davis’ arguments, published as front-page news in the Los Angeles Times.
A MacArthur Fellowship grant in 1998 allowed Davis more freedom, and he wrote Magical Urbanism (2000), which showcased the way Latino people have humanised the environment of Los Angeles. An invitation from Hayden to write an essay for a book marking the 150th anniversary of the Irish famine then led to Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), connecting 30-60m deaths through famine in India, China, South East Asia and Brazil between 1870 and 1890 to the same forces in Ireland that withheld food from subsistence growers in the name of “market forces” and demanded surrender of land in return for aid.
Davis’s next book, Monster at Our Door (2005), was an examination of how the avian flu pandemic influenced societal policies and political tensions, and again proved prophetic when Covid-19 hit. After the publication of Planet of Slums the following year, Davis rejoined academia; teaching history at California-Irvine and creative writing at California-Riverside.
In all he wrote 20 books, including two young adult novels published by Viggo Mortensen’s Perceval Press. His last book, Set the Night on Fire (2020, with Jon Weiner) chronicled Los Angeles’ decade of radicalism in the 1960s. In it he acknowledged that the new left had failed where the civil rights movement had succeeded, and said his one regret was “not having died at a barrier”.
His personal life was as peripatetic as his career. He is survived by his fifth wife, the artist Alessandra Moctezuma, and their son James and daughter Cassandra; a daughter, Roisin, from his third marriage, to Brigid Loughran; and a son, Jack, from his fourth marriage, to Sophie Spalding.
• Michael Ryan Davis, writer and activist, born 10 March 1946; died 25 October 2022
