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Fighting the distorted imagery attached to Los Angeles, Edward Soja uses LA 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 100,000; 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 that is spreading to many other megacity regions in the world. Sojas highly personal and assertively spatial look at Los Angeles inspires, informs, challenges, and entertains.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • When It First Came Together in Los Angeles
2 • Taking Los Angeles Apart
3 • Inside Exopolis: Views of Orange County
4 • Comparing Los Angeles
5 • On the Postmetropolitan Transition
6 • A Look Beyond Los Angeles
7 • Regional Urbanization and the End of the Metropolis Era
8 • Seeking Spatial Justice in Los Angeles
9 • Occupy Los Angeles: A Very Contemporary Conclusion
Appendix 1: Source Texts by the Author
Appendix 2: Complementary Video Sources
Index
About the author
Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions and the co-editor of The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century among other books.
Summary
At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, My Los Angeles provides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. Once the least dense American metropolis, Los Angeles is now the country’s densest urbanized area and one of the most culturally heterogeneous cities in the world. Soja takes us through this urban metamorphosis, analyzing urban restructuring, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, the globalization of capital and labor, and the formation of an information-intensive New Economy. By examining his own evolving interpretations of Los Angeles and the debates on the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies, Soja argues that a radical shift is taking place in the nature of the urbanization process, from the familiar metropolitan model to regional urbanization. By looking at such concepts as new regionalism, the spatial turn, the end of the metropolis era, the urbanization of suburbia, the global spread of industrial urbanism, and the transformative urban-industrialization of China, Soja offers a unique and remarkable perspective on critical urban and regional studies.
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"An accessible, informative and often entertaining intellectual memoir and tour of the city as seen through the L.A. School, which has contributed some of the most provocative and productive ideas to our understanding of cities in recent history."
