Dead Cities, published more than twenty years ago and now finally back in print, is a blistering and characteristically prescient analysis of what happens to the urban environment when profit is left to rule unrestrained.

The third book in a trilogy that began with City of Quartz, Dead Cities' wide-ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays ask us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provide a riveting account of urban disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make.

Using environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the Twin Towers in the wake of 9/11, identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of Ground Zero, and closes by considering how underprepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. Along the way, we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.

Dead Cities abounds with visions of the future, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies proliferate and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken. Davis’s unifying theme—and challenge to conventional theory—is the radical contingency of the metropolis.