My Los Angeles

Abstract

Like Carey McWilliams, Reyner Banham, and Mike Davis, Ed Soja fights against the distorted imagery so adhesively attached to Los Angeles, and he uses Los Angeles to rekindle our urban imagination about major issues affecting the world today. Here is a Los Angeles worthy to be learned from, an exemplary city region consisting of a network of at least forty cities with populations greater than one hundred thousand. This polycentric regional city, once the least dense American metropolis, is now the country’s densest urbanized area. Traditionally seen as one of the most business-centered environments, Los Angeles has become a major focus for the American labor movement and a generator of some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. A model in the past of unrooted “placeless” urbanism, it has become a hive of neighborhood organizations practicing sophisticated forms of location-based politics. Once the most WASP metropolis in the country, Los Angeles is now among the most culturally heterogeneous cities the world has ever seen. Soja takes us through his evolving interpretations of this urban metamorphosis, combining varying doses of radical political economy, critical postmodernism, comparative urban studies, and the new regionalism. He reaches the confident conclusion that over the past thirty years, Los Angeles has been experiencing a profound deconstruction and reconstitution, a breakdown of the familiar model of metropolitan growth and the formation of a new mode of regional urbanization, which is spreading to many other megacities in the world. Soja’s highly personal and assertively spatial look at Los Angeles inspires, informs, challenges, and entertains.

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