The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century

The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century
Allen J. Scott,Edward W. Soja | 1998-04-09 00:00:00 | University of California Press | 483 | Social Sciences
Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. The editors of THE CITY have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. 58 illustrations.
Reviews
Although I don't like living in big cities I am fascinated with them. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century is a collection of essays on the history and culture of Los Angeles.



The City is one of the most serious books I've read in ages. It was nice to exercise the old brain cells again. Topics covered include a brief history of the city, it's architecture, urbanism, transportation policy, loss of agriculture, metropolitan space, urban art, industrial development, racial issues, and homelessness.



My favorite essay in the book is "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policies and Future Prospects." It covers the on-going competition between mass transit (rail and bus) and the automobile. At the time that the book was published, Los Angeles had just completed its first round of subway and light rail construction. Since then the Pasadena Gold Line has opened. While the rail lines aren't back to what they once were there is more careful (although bureaucratic) oversight to the system. This essay explains the flaws of the previous rail system and it proposes ways to avoid those problems in the future.
Reviews
This is a broad collection of readings that exposes the roots of what is now postmodern urban theory as seen by most of the major thinkers of the LA School. It is an intellectual contemporary of Soja's Thirdspace, and predates Michael Dear's "Postmodern Urbanism" by two years.

This was one of the first coherent statements of purpose from LA School, and as should be expected from a nascient effort it is a bit scattered and not very convincing for the reader who is not aware of the ontologic project that motivated the collection. In short, this volume was a concerted response to the reassertion of cultural materialism led by David Harvey and others against the wave of postmodern theory that swept urban studies following the publication of Soja's "Postmodern Geographies" in 1989.

For those who find Keno Capitalism an interesting metaphor for the city I strongly suggest "From Chicago to LA" (Dear 2002, Sage,)which is a much more mature statement from some of the same authors and a much stronger collection.

I give this book high marks more for its value in tracing the intellectual geneology of the authors and for its importance as a respose to David Harvey's critique of Postmodern Theory than for any of the articles in particular.
Reviews
The City starts with admirable intentions in its attempts to identify the major problems currently besetting Los Angeles. To a wide-eyed USC urban theory grad student, this collection of essays succeeds, replete as it is with jargon such as "post-fordist economies" and such. However, to any other reader, the writing style seems to be an attempt at making the book inaccesible to anyone without a Masters degree. If the writers wished to be read only by academics, then they should state that aim on the cover. Despite the "urban planners symposium synopsis" feel of The City, several valuable points are made. Most notable was the interesting explanations of the dangers of the current hour-glass economy and the subsequent creation of first-world and third-world cities within a city. In addition, the multi-aspect historical essays exploring the growth of the cities (I especially enjoyed the "L.A. as a design product" piece) were interesting and even occasionally enjoyable. However, the essays, in their self-described (and laudable) and not entirely succesful attempts at approaching urban theory from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, became somewhat redundant (not necessarily a bad thing considering the density of the stuff) in trying to force a tie-in to each other. Finally, the authors clearly mark their territory as knee-jerk liberals with their conclusions regarding the so-called LA 4 as "angry young men in search of social justice and making a point by beating Reginald Denny to a bloody pulp." As a former and soon to return resident of Los Angeles, I felt that such an apologist point of view is sorely out of touch with the realities of the place. Their points on racial and social injustice in the city are well-taken, but this sort of racialist pandering is absurd. If you can keep your eyes from glazing over while reading this, there are some valuable conclusions here which make The City worth reading. But be prepared to wade through a morass of academi! c dribble on the way.

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