This program takes you back to the year 2000, it is the third of TUC Radio's four part series on the fate of California cities and the forces that shape them. When Davis spoke in San Francisco he was already widely known as author of Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear; Prisoners of the American Dream; and City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.
This conversation between Mike Davis and the editor of the SF Bay Guardian, Tim Redmond, was recorded at a benefit for the SF Anti-Eviction Coalition. Standing room only audience had come to see the man who had taught Los Angelinos to see their city with new eyes. In his book, the City of Quartz, Davis recalls the citrus groves and cooperative farms of the turn of the century that were replaced with unregulated urban growth driven by a blade runner style capitalism. Unearthing the forces that now shape cities Davis says that Los Angeles, San Francisco and other American cities might share a common future and that we all might share a common strategy to protect the places we need and care for.