We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. Mike Davis is the author of several books including "Planet of Slums," "City of Quartz," "Ecology of Fear," "Late Victorian Holocausts," and "Magical Urbanism.

It shows how the contest of power shaped, under the promise of progress through endless growth, the city’s spatial and social development in ways that presaged a dystopian future. Interest in City of Quartz was also propelled by the growing idea of the United States as an “incarceration nation” par excellence. A. Weekly's food section, I interviewed one of the founders of a Grand Central Market coffee bar, and he turned to me suddenly, mid-conversation, and said, "My identical twin is now attending a Walter Benjamin conference in Frankfurt.I grapple with what exactly it says about globalisation, and it is primarily about a restructuring economy, the offshoring of industry, the plant closures. It is] a working theory of global cities writ large, with as much to teach us about multiculturalism as it does racial apartheid in Los Angeles.

At the time of writing, much of Downtown Los Angeles’ power, and even Hollywood’s, is outsourced to wealthy Japanese businessmen. For three days, I trod the largely soulless streets of a then-dilapidated section of downtown, without realising the City of Angels was partly fringed by mountains. Shining under local headquarters neons, the emblems of a city of belts boarding the battlefields of ambitions come to grip with each other. Whenever I find myself resting too easily on the idea that scholarship and activism are incommensurable genres, driven by different motivations, I think of Mike Davis, and of his synthesis of Marxist and environmental thought, and think again, think better.The Red in Tooth and Claw SP808 remix is ethereal, haunting and deeply beautiful in its re-imagining of one of Rosetta's classic tracks. A. was ‘in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail’ (114). If one of my personal regrets about myself is that my intellectual interests do not always flow from my political convictions, I think of Davis's work as a model of what that might look like. Homegrown Revolution: long and rambling and in the preface he said he was worried to read it again, but I think it’s one of the key chapters in the book really.

Indeed, one of the core contributions of Davis's text is his detailing of how criminalizing impulses and explicitly carceral functions have been woven into the dystopic geography of the modern city, where suburban neighborhoods and even once democratic public spaces are now increasingly privatized, securitized, and surveilled. Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. And they would love that Sen asked them to let her live… spend all her life, half-dead, washing our lies stuck to the linoleum of these golden cells. Although the market determines Los Angeles’ immigration and urban design, the wealthy elites and middle classes who live in the more affluent parts of town have sought to remain faithful to the Boosters’ dream by campaigning to incorporate their neighborhoods and pass laws that make them inaccessible to the less affluent and nonwhite. Keeping despised communities enclosed in their areas isn't cost effective and the consequent strain on infrastructure is a recipe for disaster.The "bumproof" benches and spike-adorned ledges were everywhere; reducing the places a person could sleep rough. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. The book’s critical insight is that in Los Angeles, land was the key resource – available, in seemingly endless quantities, for “commodification”. Broading over it as they’re laying at the table that’s when we realize some incredible shit : School’s football players and geek have given up college uniforms (and) wear John Travolta outfits and yet they still follow the norm. The epilogue and prologue are united where new names and faces draw the well built lines of the labyrinth sheltering windmills at the feet of which we once laid down our arms.