Dead cities and other tales

Now in paperback, a brilliant book in which radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the decline of the American city.

Using environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis examines themes of urban life today - white flight, deindustrialization, housing and job segregation and discrimination, federal policy - as well as the areas he calls "national sacrifice zones" where warfare and arms production have rendered the landscape uninhabitable.

The apocalyptic tour of urban America includes as destinations New York, Utah, Las Vegas, Hawaii, Los Angeles and San Diego.

As Mike Davis shows in this extraordinary book, prophecies of urban doom too often come true.

Writing by the light of burning cities - Berlin in 1945, L.A. in 1992, and New York in 2001 - he explores the future of urban life in the face of catastrophic terrorism, global warming, and runaway capitalism.

His unifying theme - and challenge to conventional theory - is the radical contingency of the metropolis.