On this show we feature the late writer and activist Mike Davis, who dabbled as an “urban historian,” who took on geography, politics, economics, sociology and literature. His focus 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. And he showed how this dislocation resulted in climate, environmental, and social disasters. His solution was communities connecting together and to the land. Mike Davis was a true intellectual visionary, who was down to get into the streets and walk his talk.

I met Mike Davis as a graduate student when he taught at UCLA in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. At the time, he was writing his incendiary and prophetic shadowing of the social and environmental calamities that the city of Los Angeles, and our world at large, continues to face.

We begin with an introduction of Mike Davis and will come back to a question and answer by Vijay Prashad, an Indian Marxist historian and commentator. This is from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst History Department Feinberg Lecture Series from 2020.

We also feature a lecture by Mike Davis about his book Planet of Slums, which investigates the increasing inequality of the urban world. According to the U.N., more than one billion people now live in extreme poverty in mega-cities facing environmental and social collapse from perpetual and worsening climate disruptions. Mike Davis explores the meaning and the future of this radically unequal and unstable urban world.
The Planet of Slums lecture comes from a talk given at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, in 2015.



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Mike Davis, [https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5214-the-works-of-mike-davis] who passed away in 2022, was a writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. Once a meat cutter and a truck driver, he was Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside, a Macarthur Fellow, and the author of more than 20 books. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and Late Victorian Holocausts (2001).

Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He writes for a PBS SoCal Artbound project called High & Dry [https://www.pbssocal.org/people/high-dry]. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs. He also publishes articles and podcasts on Substack [https://jackeidt.substack.com/].


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Executive Producer and Intro: Jack Eidt
Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats

Episode 171
Photo credit: Annie Wells, LA Times