Reading City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) changed everything. In it two radically different worlds were brought together, each of which I had known only separately. When the book was published, I was living in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a considerable number of my neighbors were squatters and anarchists. Marxist literature was common among the books we read and discussed. In a separate world I had been schooled in architecture and design, which had nothing to do with Marxism—or so we thought. In City of Quartz, these two worlds collided. It was exhilarating to read.
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