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

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.

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.