LA School - History

The Los Angeles Schools
    It may come as a surprise that a region notorious for a certain contempt for its own history should, in fact, possess a rich intellectual, cultural and artistic heritage. Mike Davis’ history of Los Angeles encapsulates some of these traditions in a series of wicked metaphors—referring, as he does, to booster, debunker, noir, exile, sorcerer, communard, and mercenary traditions embedded in the city’s past. More specifically, Todd Boyd (Am I Black Enough for You?) has identified a distinctive LA cultural studies, Richard Cándida Smith a (Southern) Californian artistic canon (Art and Utopia), and David Fine an LA literature (Los Angeles in Fiction). Victor Burgin, Robbert Flick, Catherine Opie, Allan Sekula, and Camilo José Vergara are in the midst of creating a photographic record of LA landscapes, and there are also important public art and muralist traditions heavily influenced by Latino artists including Judy Baca and the ADOBE LA group. Finally, we cannot fail to mention the Hollywood ‘school’ of film-making.
    Closest to our concerns is the contemporary ‘LA school of architecture,’ which has enjoyed a rigorous documentation due to the efforts of that most intrepid chronicler, Charles Jencks.2 We hasten to add that there are many LA schools of architecture, both past and present, including Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Gregory Ain et al. in the 1930s,3 as well as members of the current LA Forum on Architecture and Urban Design. According to Jencks, the current LA school of architecture includes such luminaries as Frank Gehry and Charles Moore, and was founded amid acrimony in 1981:
The L.A. School was, and remains, a group of individualized mavericks, more at home together in an exhibition than in each other’s homes. There is also a particular self-image involved with this Non-School which exacerbates the situation. All of its members see themselves as outsiders, on the margins challenging the establishment with an informal and demanding architecture; one that must be carefully read.4
    Jencks concurs with architectural critic Leon Whiteson that LA’s cultural environment is one that places the margin at its core: “The ultimate irony is that in the L.A. architectural culture, where heterogeneity is valued over conformity, and creativity over propriety, the periphery is often the center”.5 Jencks’ interpretation is of particular interest here because of its implicit characterization of a ‘school’ as a group of marginalized individuals incapable of surrendering to a broader collective agenda. This is hardly the distinguishing feature we had in mind for this inquiry into an LA school of urbanism. Our search was originally for some notion of an identifiable cohort knowingly engaged in a collaborative enterprise. Jencks’ vision radically undermines this expectation as, in retrospect, have our personal experiences of the LA school of urbanism.
    A large part of the difficulty involved in identifying a ‘school’ is etymological. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary provides fourteen principal categories, including a “group of gamblers or of people drinking together,” and a “gang of thieves or beggars working together” (both nineteenth-century usages). Yet also from the mid-nineteenth century is something closer to the spirit of our discussion: “a group of people who share some principle, method, style, etc. Also, a particular doctrine or practice as followed by such a body of people.”6 The dictionary goes on to give as an example, the “Marxist school of political thought.”
    In a broad examination of a “second” Chicago School, Jennifer Pratt uses the term ‘school’ in reference to:
…a collection of individuals working in the same environment who at the time and through their own retrospective construction of their identity and the impartations of intellectual historians are defined as representing a distinct approach to a scholarly endeavor.7
    Such a description suggests four elements of a working definition of the term ‘school.’ The adherents of a school should be:
(1) engaged on a common project (however defined);
(2) geographically proximate (however delimited);
(3) self-consciously collaborative (to whatever extent); and
(4) externally recognized (at whatever threshold).
The parentheses associated with each of the four characteristics underscore the contingent nature of each trait. Conditions 1-3 may be regarded as the minimum, or least restrictive components of this definition. Second-order criteria for defining a school could include the following:
(5) that there exists broad agreement on the program of research;
(6) that adherents voluntarily self-identify with the school and/or its research program; and
(7) that there exists organizational foci for the school’s endeavors (such as a learned journal, meetings, or book series).
Most of these traits should be relatively easy to recognize, even though no candidate for the ‘school’ appellation might possibly satisfy all of the criteria.
    Verifying the existence of a school must always remain unfinished business, not least because we, who would identify such a phenomenon, are ourselves stuck in those particular circumstances of history and place to which our bodies have been consigned. But of greater practical concern is the fourth identifying characteristic, i.e. the external recognition needed to warrant the title of School. Outside recognition traditionally arrives only after most (if not all) of its participants have died, simply because there are so many incentives to deny the existence of a school. Accolades from outsiders are routinely refused because of professional rivalries, or routinely attacked as crass careerism. Outsiders also appeal to alternative standards of evidence in rejecting a challenge, most commonly seen in appeals to the ‘hardness’ of existing paradigms (as in ‘hard science’). Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, refers to real history as ‘hard work’ (something distinct from its postmodern analogue).8 Yet another variant of denial of School status is the unthinking, perverse pleasure taken by many in puncturing a novice’s enthusiasm using claims like: “There’s nothing new in that. It’s all been said and done before.” With such curt put-downs, existing orders and authority remain undisturbed, and old hegemonies once again settle about us like an iron cage.
    The refusal to even contemplate the existence of a distinctive (intellectually-focused, place-based) school of thought is both intellectually and politically conservative. It stifles the development of a synoptic gaze, both in epistemological and material terms; and it inhibits the growth of intellectual and political alliances. In short, the unexamined dismissal of a school’s claims is a denial of new ways of seeing and acting. Therefore, we do not intend to wait for outsiders’ recognition or permission; it is a far, far better thing to declare a school’s existence, raise the flag, and let the battle commence on one’s own terms.

The Chrysalis Unfolds
    Most births are inherently messy and the arrival of an LA School of urbanism is no exception. The genetic imprint of the school lies in some unrecoverable past, though we can identify the traces of inveterate city-improver Charles Mulford Robinson somewhere in the process. In his 1907 plan to render LA as City Beautiful, Robinson conceded that: “The problem offered by Los Angeles is a little out of the ordinary.”9 A peculiarly Angeleno urban vision was more convincingly established in 1946, with the publication of Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: an island on the land. This work remains the premier codification of the narratives of Angeleno (sur)reality, has served to establish LA’s status as “the great exception,” and has since colored both popular and scholarly perceptions of the city. McWilliams emphasized LA’s uniqueness with the assertion that the area “reverses almost any proposition about the settlement of western America.”10 He describes Southern California as an engineered utopia attracting pioneers from far away places like Mexico, China, Germany, Poland, France, Great Britain. Among the most exotic immigrants, however, were families from the American mid-western states who were crushed beneath the heel of an open shop industrial system and generated a hot-house of segregated communities. In McWilliams’ acccount, local communities were rife with bizarre philosophies, carnivalesque politics, and a confused cultural melange of immigrant influences imperfectly adapted to local conditions. The whole enterprise was pervaded by apocalyptic undercurrents suitable to a fictive paradise situated within a hostile and simultaneously fragile desert environment.
    McWilliams’ exceptionalism was confirmed and consolidated by Robert Fogelson’s The Fragmented Metropolis, which in 1967, the year of its publication, was the only account of the region’s urban evolution between 1850 and 1930. Fogelson summarized the exceptionalist credo in this way:
The essence of Los Angeles was revealed more clearly in its deviations from [rather] than its similarities to the great American metropolis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11

    But perhaps the canonical moment in the prehistory of the LA school came with the publication of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Responding to the notion that Southern California was devoid of cultural or artistic merit, Banham was the first to assert that Los Angeles should not be “rejected as inscrutable and hurled as unknown into the ocean.”12 Rather, he argued, the city should be taken seriously and only read and understood on its own terms instead of those used to make sense of other American cities. But while LA was an object worthy of serious study, according to Banham its structure remained exceptional:
Full command of Angeleno dynamics qualifies one only to read Los Angeles[T]he splendors and miseries of Los Angeles, the graces of grotesqueries, appear to me as unrepeatable as they are unprecedented.13
 
    More that any other single volume to that date, Banham’s celebration of LA landscapes served to legitimize the study of Los Angeles, and to temporarily neutralize the propensity of east coast media and scholars to chart the eccentricities of their west-coast counterparts with mock amazement.
    It was only in the 1980s that a group of loosely-associated scholars, professionals, and advocates based in Southern California became convinced that what was happening in the region was somehow symptomatic of a broader socio-geographic transformation taking place within the United States as a whole. Their common, but then unarticulated, project was based on certain shared theoretical assumptions, as well as on the view that LA was emblematic of a more general urban dynamic. One of the earliest expressions of an emergent ‘LA school’ came with the appearance in 1986 of a special issue of the journal Society and Space, devoted entirely to understanding Los Angeles. In their prefatory remarks to that issue, Allen Scott and Edward Soja referred to LA as the “capital of the twentieth century,” 14 deliberately invoking Walter Benjamin’s designation of Paris as capital of the nineteenth. They predicted that the volume of scholarly work on Los Angeles would quickly overtake that on Chicago, the dominant model of the American industrial metropolis.
    Ed Soja’s celebrated tour of Los Angeles (which first appeared in this journal issue and was later incorporated into his 1989 Postmodern Geographies) most effectively achieved the conversion of LA from the exception to the rule – the prototype of late twentieth-century postmodern geographies:
   What better place can there be to illustrate and synthesize the dynamics of capitalist spatialization? In so many ways, Los Angeles is the place where ‘it all comes together’  one might call the sprawling urban region  a prototopos, a paradigmatic place; or  a mesocosm, an ordered world in which the micro and the macro, the idiographic and the nomothetic, the concrete and the abstract, can be seen simultaneously in an articulated and interactive combination.15

   Soja went on to assert that L.A. “insistently presents itself as one of the most informative palimpsests and paradigms of twentieth-century urban development and popular consciousnes,” comparable to Borges’ Aleph: “the only place on earth where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.” 16

    As ever, Charles Jencks quickly picked up on this trend, taking care to distinguish its practitioners from the LA school of architecture:
   The L.A. School of geographers and planners had quite a separate and independent formulation in the 1980s, which stemmed from the analysis of the city as a new post-modern urban type. Its themes vary from L.A. as the post-Fordist, post-modern city of many city of many fragments is search of a unity, to the nightmare city of social inequities.17

   This same group of geographers and planners (accompanied by a few dissidents from other disciplines) gathered at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains on October 11-12, 1987, to discuss the wisdom of engaging in an LA School. The participants included, if memory serves, Dana Cuff, Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Margaret FitzSimmons, Rebecca Morales, Allen Scott, Ed Soja, Michael Storper, and Jennifer Wolch. Mike Davis later provided the first description of the putative school:
   I am incautious enough to describe the “Los Angeles School.” In a categorical sense, the twenty or so researchers I include within this signatory are a new wave of Marxist geographers—or, as one of my friends put it, “political economists with their space suits on”—although a few of us are also errant urban sociologists, or, in my case, a fallen labor historian. The “School,” of course, is based in Los Angeles, at UCLA and USC, but is includes members in Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, and even Frankfurt, West Germany.18

The meeting was, we can attest, as insightful as it was inconclusive, as exhilarating as hilarious. Davis described one evening as a:
somewhat dispiriting retreat … spent wrestling with ambiguity: “Are we the LA School as the Chicago School was the Chicago School, or as the Frankfurt School was the Frankfurt School?” Will the reconstruction of urban political economy allow us to better understand the concrete reality of LA, or is it the other way around? Fortunately, after a night of heavy drinking, we agreed to postpone a decision on this question ... So in our own way we are as “laid back” and decentralized as the city we are trying to explain.19

    Yet, despite these ambiguities and tensions (with their curious echoes in the LA School of architecture recorded by Jencks), Davis is clear about the school’s common theme:
One of the nebulous unities in our different research — indeed the very ether that the LA School mistakes for oxygen — is the idea of “restructuring.” We all agree that we are studying “restructuring” and that it occurs at all kinds of discrete levels, from the restructuring of residential neighborhoods to the restructuring of global markets or whole regimes of accumulation.20

Davis also recorded some substantive contributions made by the school’s early cadre of perpetrators:
To date [1989], the LA School has contributed original results in four areas. First, particularly in the work of Edward Soja and Harvey Molotch, it has given “placeness,” as a social construction, a new salience in explaining the political economy of cities. Secondly, via the case studies by Michael Storper, Suzanne Christopherson, and Allen Scott, it has deepened our understanding of the economies of high-tech agglomeration, producing some provocative recent theses about the rise of a new regime of “flexible accumulation.” Thirdly, through both the writing and activism of Margaret FtizSimmons and Robert Gottlieb, it has contributed a new vision of the environmental movement, with emphasis on the urban quality of life. And, fourthly, through the collaboration of Michael Dear and Jennifer Wolch, it is giving us a more realistic understanding of the homeless and indigent, and their connection to the decline of unskilled inner city labor markets.21

Davis was, to the best of our knowledge, the first to mention a specific LA school of urbanism, and he repeated the claim in his popular contemporary history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1990). But truth be told, following those fateful and strange days of quasi-unity at Lake Arrowhead, the LA school had already begun to atomize, even as the floodgates opened and tentative claims for a prototypical LA trickled forth.
    Journalist Joel Garreau understood more clearly than most urban scholars where the country was heading. The opening sentences in his 1991 book, Edge City, proclaimed: “Every American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles.” 22 By 1993, the trickle of Southern California studies had grown to a continuous flow. In his careful, path-breaking study of high technology in Southern California, Allen Scott noted:
Throughout the era of Fordist mass production, [LA] was seen as an exception, as an anomalous complex of regional and urban activity in comparison with what were then considered to be the paradigmatic cases of successful industrial development [Yet] with the steady ascent of flexible production organization, Southern California is often taken to be something like a new paradigm of local economic development, and its institutional bases, its evolutionary trajectory, and its internal locational dynamicsas providing important general insights and clues.23

Charles Jencks added his own spin on the social forces underlying LA’s architecture when he argued that:
Los Angeles, like all cities, is unique, but in one way it may typify the world city of the future: there are only minorities. No single ethnic group, nor way of life, nor industrial sector dominates the scene. Pluralism has gone further here than in any other city in the world and for this reason it may well characterize the global megalopolis of the future.24
    
    The foundations of a putative school were completed in 1993 with Marco Cenzatti’s first explicit examination of the thing called an LA School of urbanism. Responding to Davis, he underscored the fact that the School’s practitioners combined precepts of both the Chicago and Frankfurt Schools:
Thus Los Angeles comes into the picture not just as a blueprint or a finished paradigm of the new dynamics, but as a laboratory which is itself an integral component of the production of new modes of analysis of the urban.25

Since then, the rate of scholarly investigations into LA has accelerated, just as Scott and Soja predicted it would. For instance, in their 1993 study of homelessness in Los Angeles, Wolch and Dear situated their analysis within the broader matrix of LA’s urbanism.26 However, the pivotal year in the maturation of the LA School may yet prove to be 1996, which saw the publication of three edited volumes on the region: Rethinking Los Angeles (Dear, Schockman, & Hise); The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the end of the Twentieth Century (Scott & Soja); and Ethnic Los Angeles (Waldinger & Bozorgmehr). The forty or more essays in these volumes represent a quantum leap in the collective understanding of the region and the implications of these new insights for national and international urbanisms. By 1996 there were also a growing number of predominantly university-based centers that legitimized scholarly and public-policy analyses of the region, among them USC’s Southern California Studies Center, UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles.  Other institutions consolidated parallel interests in regional governmental and nongovernmental agencies, including the Getty Research Institute and RAND.

... and the LA School emerges
In these postmodern times, the gesture to an LA school might appear to be a deeply contradictory intellectual strategy. A ‘school’ has semantic overtones of codification and mastery [sic]; it has structure and authority. Modernists and postmodernists alike might be inclined to shudder at the irony implied by these associations. And yet, ultimately, we are comfortable in proclaiming the existence of a Los Angeles School of Urbanism, even though such a proclamation seems an after-the-fact conclusion for two reasons.
    The first is one of demonstrable traces. The Los Angeles School exists as a body of literature. It exhibits an evolution through history, beginning with analysis of Los Angeles as an aberrant, curiosity distinct from other forms of urbanism. The tone of that history shifts gradually shifts to the point that, at present, the city is now commonly represented as indicative of new forms of urbanism augmenting (and even supplanting) the older, established forms against which Los Angeles was once judged deviant. Further, the current body of literature on Los Angeles, and the swollen population of urbanists situated in the region, attest to the city’s ‘critical mass’ in contemporary urban theorizing. Second, we assert the existence of a Los Angeles School by reason of its existence as a discursive strategy. In acknowledging a Los Angeles School, we demarcate a space both for the exploration of new realities and for resistance to old hegemonies. The body of writing about Los Angeles provides alternative models to past orthodoxies on the ‘essential’ nature of the city, and is proving to be far more successful than its detractors at explaining the form and function of the urban in a time of globalization.
    In issuing a proclamation, however, we acknowledge the danger that a Los Angeles School could become another panoptic fortress from whence a new totalizing urban model is manufactured and marketed, running roughshod over divergent ways of seeing like the hegemonies it has so recently supplanted. This danger of creating a new overbearing urban paradigm stands at every step of our project: in defining the very boundaries of a Los Angeles School; in establishing a unitary model of Los Angeles; and in imposing the template and experiences of Los Angeles upon the rest of the world.  Let’s consider each of these threats in turn.
    Who is, and who is not a member of the LA School? The fragmented and globally-oriented nature of the Los Angeles School counters the threats of a new hegemony. The avowal of an LA School can become a decolonizing, postcolonial impulse, even as it warns us of new colonialisms marching down the historical path. In declaring our enterprise, therefore, we hope to promote inclusiveness. Those who worry about the hegemonic intent of an LA School may rest assured that the LA School is in fact pathologically anti-leadership. Few of the contributors to this volume (or those discussed in their essays) will readily identify themselves as members of an LA School, and some adamantly reject such a notion. But all are unable (so we believe) to deny their implication in the genealogy uncovered in this investigation. The programmatic intent of the LA School remains fractured, incoherent, and idiosyncratic even to its constituent scholars, who most often perceive themselves as occupying a place on the periphery rather than at the center. The LA School invites as members all those who take Los Angeles as a worthy object of study and a source of insight into the nature of contemporary urbanism. Such a School evades dogma by including divergent empirical and theoretical approaches rooted in philosophies both modern and postmodern, ranging from Marxist to Libertarian. Admittedly, such a school will be a fragmentary and loosely-connected entity, always on the verge of disintegration — but, then again, so is Los Angeles itself.
    Is there a single Los Angeles to speak of? A unified, consensual description of Los Angeles would necessitate excluding a plethora of valuable readings on the region. For instance, numerous discursive battles have been fought since the events of April 1992 in LA to decide what term best describes them or, more cynically, which term most effectively recasts them as a weapon adaptable to a particular rhetorical arsenal. Those who read the events as a spontaneous, visceral, opportunistic (and ill-justified?) reaction to the acquittal of Rodney King employ the term riot. For those who read the events within the context of economic evisceration and social polarization, the term uprising is preferred. And those who see in them a more conscious political intentionality apply the term rebellion. For its part, civic authority skirts these issues by relying upon the supposedly depoliticized term, civil unrest. But those concerned with the perspective of Korean participants, literally caught in the middle of the turmoil itself as well as the subsequent rhetoric war, deploy the Korean tradition of naming an occurrence by its principal date and so make use of the term, Sa-I-Gu. Which name is definitive? The polyvocality of the Los Angeles School permits us to replace the question, “Which is it?” with, “Which is it, at which stage of events, at which location in the region, and from whose perspective?”  Such an approach may well entail a loss of clarity and certitude, but in exchange it offers a richness of description and interpretation that would otherwise be forfeited in the name of achieving an “official” narrative.
    Finally, is Los Angeles the world? Being Angelenos ourselves (more or less), we are sometimes tempted to answer this question in the affirmative. But contributors to the LA School are well aware that time and space regularly throw speed-bumps in our path. One the one hand, the processes at work in Los Angeles may be simultaneously at work in other cities around the world. Yet, from a temporal perspective, much work of the LA School explicitly recognizes the inherently peculiar and slippery nature of history, that influences us even as it allows us to differentiate the present character and function of one world city from another. There are industries and settlements in Los Angeles very distinct from those in Paris, which, in turn, are a major contrast to those in Lagos and elsewhere. These differences cannot be simply conjured out of existence in the name of some vague Angeleno standard.
    Spatially, the urban landscapes of Los Angeles are not necessarily original to LA. The luxury compound atop a matrix of impoverished misery, the self-contained secure community, and the fortified homes can be found first in places like Manila and São Paolo.  Indeed, Anthony King has suggested that all things ascribed to postmodern urbanism can be seen decades earlier in the principal cities of the colonial world. Thus, the LA School justifies a presentation of LA not as the model of contemporary urbanism, nor as the privileged locale from whence a cabal of theoreticians issue pronouncements about the way things really are, but as one of a number space-time geographical prisms through which current processes of urban (re)formation may be advantageously viewed.
    The literature of the LA School has largely (although not exclusively) shown itself to be less about looking to LA for models of the urban, and more about looking for contemporary expressions of the urban in LA. Thus, the School and its concepts of contemporary Angeleno urbanism do not represent an emerging vision of contemporary urbanism in total, so much as they are one component in a new inter-urban geography working from Los Angeles but requesting the participation of (and placing equal importance upon) the on-going experiences and voices of Tijuana, Miami, São Paolo, Marseilles and the like.
    Even as we write, the claims of an LA School are being challenged by an nascent ‘Orange County School.’ In an essay contained in Postsuburban California, Gottdeiner and Kephart claimed that in Orange County:
We have focused on what we consider to be a new form of settlement space – the fully urbanized, multinucleated, and independent county  As a new form of settlement space, they are the first such occurrence in five thousand years of urban history.27

While those who are familiar with the more southerly regions of Southern California may regard this as a somewhat exaggerated if not entirely melodramatic gesture, such counter-claims are in fact an important piece of the comparative urban discourse that we hope this book will help generate. To repeat, we are certainly not trying to create an LA School in the counterproductive sense of an exclusionary, hegemonic, institutionalized mode of thought. Instead, in this book, we have simply begun to map the intellectual terrain surrounding a perspective on twenty-first-century cities. An important component in that landscape is Southern California. It may or may not be prototypical. It certainly is not unique. But it is redefining the way we understand cities, and we ignore its lessons at our peril.

References
Banham, Reyner, 1971.  Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies.  Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Boyd, Todd, 1997. Am I Black enough for you?: popular culture from the 'Hood and beyond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cenzatti, Marco, 1993. Los Angeles and the L.A. school: postmodernism and urban studies. Los Angeles : Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

Davis, Mike, 1992. City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles.  New York: Vintage Books.

Dear, Michael J., Schockman, H. Eric, and Hise, Greg, eds., 1996.  Rethinking Los Angeles. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Derrida, Jacques, 1990.  Quoted in Carrol, D., (ed.), The States of Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 63.

Fine, David, ed., 1995.  Los Angeles in fiction: a collection of essays. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Fine, Gary Alan, ed., 1995. A second Chicago school?: the development of a postwar American sociology.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fogelson, Robert, 1993, The Fragmented Metropolis, UC Press: Berkeley CA.

Garreau, Joel, 1992. Edge city: life on the new frontier. New York: Anchor Books.

Gebhard, David, 1989.  Los Angeles in the thirties, 1931-1941.  Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls.

Himmelfarb, G., 1992: “Telling It as You Like It: Post-Modernist History and the Flight from Fact,” Times Literary Supplement, October 16, p.12

Jencks, Charles, 1993. Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the riots and the strange beauty of hetero-architecture.  New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

Kling, Rob, Olin, Spencer, and Poster, Mark, eds., 1991.  Postsuburban California: the transformation of Orange County since World War II; Berkeley: University of California Press.

McWilliams, Carey, 1973. Southern California: an island on the land. Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith.

Robinson, C.M., 1907, The City Beautiful, Report to the Mayor, City Council and Members of the Municipal Art Commission, p. 4.

Scott, Allen J. and Soja, Edward W., eds., 1996.  The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scott, Allen J., 1993.  Technopolis: high-technology industry and regional development in southern California.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Richard Candida, 1995. Utopia and dissent: art, poetry, and politics in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Soja, Edward W., 1989. Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory.  New York, NY: Verso.

Waldinger, Roger and Bozorgmehr, Mehdi, eds., 1996.  Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Wolch, Jennifer and Dear, Michael, 1993.  Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City, Jossey Bass: San Francisco, CA.
 
End Notes:

1.    Derrida, Jacque, 1990.  Quoted in Carrol, D., (ed), The States of Theory.  New York: Columbia       University Press, p. 63.

2.    Jencks, p. 34.

3.    See Gebhard and von Breton, Los Angeles in the Thirties.

4.    Moore, 1981, p. 34.

5.    Jencks, p. 34.

6.    Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1999. Oxford University Press: Oxford England, p. 2714.

7.    Quoted in Fine, 1995, p. 2.

8.    Himmelfarb, 1992.

9.    Robinson, 1907.

10.    McWilliams, 1973.

11.    Fogelson, 1993; original printing 1967.

12.    Banham, 1971, p. 23.

13.    Banham, 171, p. 24.

14.    Scott and Soja, 1996.

15.    Soja, 1989, p. 191.

16.    Soja, 1989, p. 248.

17.    Jencks, 1993, p. 132.

18.    Davis, 1992.

19.    IBID

20.    IBID

21.    IBID

22.    Garreau, 1991.

23.    Scott, 1993, p. 33.

24.    Jencks, 1993, p. 7.

25.    Cenzatti, 1993, p. 8.

26.    Wolch and Ocas, 1993.
       
27.    Gottdeiner and Képhart in Kling et al. 1991, p. 51.