How America Became Hostile to Shade
Like many young writers on the left with an interest in California, Bloch is clearly a disciple of Mike Davis, whom he interviewed and quoted at length for his initial article. The late historian appears in Shade, too, though his presence is more gently pervasive than explicit. Even the chapters that aren’t about L.A. betray his influence. For instance, Bloch’s take on our turn away from natural cooling, and the brief window when architects realized which way the air was blowing and tried to do things differently, is classic Davis: glimmers of an alternate future, foreclosed upon. (“We could have embraced shade,” he writes. “Instead, we doubled down on AC.”)
In many ways, Shade reads as an homage to “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis’s classic essay on L.A.’s disparate response to two types of blazes: the infernos that engulf neglected tenements in Westlake and the inevitable wildfires that threaten its moneyed canyons. Amusingly, each writer’s choice of focus is reflected in their style. As with Henry Miller, Davis’s tone is often one of holy zeal; his argument in “Letting Malibu Burn” is incendiary in more ways than one. Bloch, meanwhile, stays cool: measured, given to reconsideration, fond of constructions hedged with “perhaps” and “maybe.” He clearly feels strongly about the inequality he portrays, but his tone is so evenhanded that it can belie the urgency that would seem to follow from his diagnoses. The last third of the book is devoted to a series of shady interventions that range along a spectrum from adapting to our environment to trying to modify it, and the solutions that Bloch ultimately expounds are all eminently reasonable.
The La Sombrita debacle provides an occasion to explore various global cities that have adapted their physical layout for maximal shade rather than trying to MacGyver it into the existing built environment, as L.A. has done. Barcelona, Bloch writes, has reconstructed its urban zone to install traffic-free “superblocks,” created an ingenious irrigation system to ensure that its street trees stay hydrated, and collapsed various agencies that deal with transit and city planning into a single entity to avoid the sort of bureaucratic stumbling blocks that doom such innovation in Los Angeles. Sun-drenched Australia, meanwhile, has embarked on a robust public health campaign to educate residents about the dangers of solar exposure, which one research scientist compares to America’s successful imposition of a tobacco taboo during the second half of the twentieth century.
