Los Angeles scholar of doom, Mike Davis, has shifted his critical gaze from the threat of urban chaos to the terrorist's latest weapon of choice - the car bomb, writes Karl Whitney.

Mike Davis, best known for his writings on the American city, is talking about his new book, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb: "I've been terrified by car bombs for a long time. When I was in Belfast in the 1970s I saw a car bomb go off. In 1993 after the World Trade Center was blown up for the first time, by a van bomb, I wrote a couple of articles about how critically vulnerable Los Angeles and the US were to this weapon, and like a virus, once implanted in the system, it never entirely goes away."

To be published in April, Buda's Wagon traces, through historical examples and grimly visceral descriptions, the development of the car bomb as a weapon in the 20th century and its persistence on into the 21st century. On Monday, February 26th, he will visit UCD's Clinton Institute of American Studies to give a lecture on the subject.

"The car bomb is the kind of weapon that anarchists dreamed of at the end of the 19th century: it can be used by groups with real social bases and the support of nationalist movements, but it can also give power to extraordinarily marginal groups of people: for example Timothy McVeigh and his friend. So I set out to try and understand historically where the car bomb had come from and its uses, but also something of how it's evolved, particularly how it has been linked with other technologies for self-publicity, self-advertising - like the internet. I was actually quite surprised to discover how frequently car bombs had been used: in Israel and Palestine, but also in Vietnam and Algeria."

BUDA'S WAGON TAKES its name from a bomb left by anarchist Mario Buda on September 16th, 1920 outside JP Morgan and Co's offices on Wall Street, New York. Parking his horse-drawn cart, packed with dynamite and shards of metal, on the corner of the street, Buda returned unnoticed to his native Italy, leaving beind him the destruction his wagon-bomb had wrought: 40 dead and 200 wounded. Buda's wagon, Davis argues, is, in essence, the prototypical car bomb.

The problems of the car bomb, Davis says, are its relative cheapness and its simplicity; added to this, it is virtually unidentifiable.

"It's an almost indefensible weapon: while it's possible to create rings of steel around the city centre in Belfast or green zones, all that tends to do is displace the target. So how do you defeat a weapon that looks like ordinary traffic, that could not be more anonymous? A weapon which can be compounded out of commercial ingredients, but can deliver the payload of a second World War bomber within a very accurate range of any target that you want."

Born and raised in California, Davis is the son of a member of the meat cutter's union, and has long been spurred into action by social injustices. In the mid-1960s he worked as an organiser for Students for a Democratic Society, a nationwide political action group that had grown out of the civil rights movement. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship by his father's union and chose to study in Edinburgh, carrying out research under the Irish-born historian Owen Dudley Edwards. His research brought him to libraries and archives in the Belfast of the 1970s.

"Owen Dudley Edwards immediately kicked me out into the field and told me to do something, so I spent most of the year I should have been in Edinburgh actually in Belfast working on research into the 1932 outdoor relief riots, going up to the Shankill Road public library to do research. It was obviously an insane but very interesting time to be there."

If a close call with a car bomb in Belfast planted the seed for his forthcoming book, it was also in Belfast that Davis's interests in the city began to take shape, a process that eventually led him to write City of Quartz (1990) a gripping study of the history of Los Angeles, covering land grabs and illegal water appropriation, set against the background of the mythologies of LA as portrayed in film and fiction.

"Obviously the city that I struggled to know the most sentimentally was Los Angeles, but there have also been other cities. I did nothing for a year but try to understand Belfast, which is a very interesting place to think about Los Angeles and the United States, less because of the Troubles and more because Belfast, when I lived there, was like the last 19th- century city in the western world. The gas lights were still operating down by the markets, and much of Belfast, to all intents and purposes, was an Edwardian city."

City of Quartz was the book that made Davis's name. It became a bestseller and is much acknowledged as the key text about that city.

His subsequent essays on LA served to heighten the identification between Davis and the city, so much so that he has been acclaimed as "LA's sole public intellectual".

He followed City of Quartz with books such as Magical Urbanism and Ecology of Fear - the latter examined the way LA imagined its own environmental destruction.

SO LONG IDENTIFIED with LA, Davis now lives with his wife and children in San Diego. He's also a professor in the history department of the University of California, Irvine. In 1998, he was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship, a highly lucrative award nicknamed the "genius grant".

In 2006, Davis published Planet of Slums, a study of the global expansion of urban slums. This global tendency, Davis points out, could, and indeed does, have implications for the West, as the slums often lie outside any societal control and frequently become breeding grounds for violent extremism and disease. Planet of Slums ends with this chilling conclusion: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their sides."

This led Davis on to subsequent books, including the forthcoming Buda's Wagon.

"Planet of Slums has two direct outgrowths: one was the book I wrote on avian flu [The Monster at Our Door], which is much to do with the ecologies of pandemic emergence and whether or not we haven't recreated on an even larger scale all the Dickensian conditions of disease and of poor cities as disease incubators. After Planet of Slums, I tried to figure out concretely what the gods of chaos really were: one was the significance of the avian flu, the other was the car bomb."

On his return to California in the late 1980s, after a spell as an editor at the New Left Review in London, Davis got a job as a long distance truck driver and remains fascinated with that life. He once pitched an idea to the BBC for a television series: a programme in which he would travel the world by truck.

"When I got back to California, I'd had it up to the gills with intellectuals and I went back on the road for most of the year. What I proposed to do was an 18-wheel Magellan and go around the world on heavy-duty trucks.

"It struck me that long-distance trucking opens up this spectacular window on the world. I remember meeting a Russian truck driver in Paris once who had driven all the way from Ukraine, and that just impressed the hell out of me. Later, my friend Tariq Ali described to me almost unbelievable magical realist scenes of people making gravel, sitting in the back of flatbed Indian trucks, driving at night under coloured lights, breaking rocks with hammers. It would have been a truck driver's view of the universe."

FOR A WRITER so engrossed in investigating the darker aspects of contemporary reality, Davis's books have always been lit up by a storyteller's sense of drama. And he has channelled that narrative talent into two books of children's fiction he's written for actor Viggo Mortensen's small press, featuring Davis's son, who lives in Ireland, as one of the main characters. The books combine Davis's fascination for environmental science with his love of a rollicking yarn.

"They're adventure stories in which I try to make the science as real as possible. The first one takes place in Greenland - I had got this MacArthur grant some years ago and I wasted all the money taking my kids to every corner of the earth, and took my son Jack to east Greenland."

The third part has yet to be written, Davis says, but, inevitably, both books have political and social messages: they emphasise the importance of "a consistent principle of kindness". And also, for Davis, the children's books act as a sort of wish-fulfilment: in the second book, the heroic children defeat the Bush administration.

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb will be published in April by Verso Books

Mike Davis will give a lecture as part of the UCD Clinton Institute of American Studies conference "Terrorism, the City and the State" on Feb 26. Phone: 01-7161560 e-mail: catherine.carey@ucd.ie

Karl Whitney is a doctoral scholar in the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland