The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City - Wiley Online Library

Volume 35.1 January 2011 189–206

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00978.x

URBAN WORLDS The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City WALTER J. NICHOLLS

Abstract

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In the early 1980s, urban researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California embarked on a concerted effort to study and theorize the Los Angeles region. Their efforts resulted in a number of important theoretical and empirical writings that helped many rethink the ways in which contemporary cities work. Highlighting these contributions and examining how they inform our understandings of difference and the city, this article adopts a threefold approach. Firstly, it examines how the LA School integrated Marxist and poststructuralist theories to create a distinctive framework to interpret the sociospatial differences of the late-capitalist city. The article maintains that rather than being a mere exponent of ‘postmodern’urbanism, the unique theoretical contribution of the school has been its attempt to weave two theoretical traditions into a new interpretive framework. Secondly, the article examines the processes highlighted by the LA School that fractured the city–region into innumerable sociospatial pieces. Lastly, the article suggests the emergence of a second generation of the LA School, a generation retaining an interest in the issue of difference but seeking to explore how differences shape the possibilities for reactionary and progressive urban politics. The article concludes with a speculative discussion of what will become of the LA School with the departure of its most important contributors from UCLA and USC.

Introduction In the 1980s a handful of scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California began to examine urban restructuring processes through a series of theoretical essays and detailed case studies on Los Angeles (see Dear, 2002a). They discovered urban forms and processes that did not conform to the longstanding models of the Chicago School (Scott, 1999). Rather than find a city with concentric zones ordered by a dominant center, Los Angeles was a polynucleated urban region with a center that was too weak to impose any kind of order on all the different parts. Following on from these empirical observations, this group of researchers (known as the LA School) made a number of important theoretical assertions about the way cities developed in late-capitalist societies. While the large volume of reviews on this work is The author would like to express his gratitude to Roger Lee and three IJURR reviewers for their critical and engaging comments on previous drafts. © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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a testimony to its importance, reviews have tended to focus on many of the same issues, including the generalizability of Los Angeles, certain postmodern assumptions and the degree to which this body of literature has anything new to say about contemporary urbanization processes. The article takes a different approach from these reviews by focusing on the way in which the LA School has treated the issue of difference and the city. A central problematic of urban studies has been the quest to understand the ways in which differences (social and spatial) are both drivers and outcomes of urbanization processes. While the Chicago and LA Schools devoted considerable amounts of time and text to addressing the issue, in doing so they drew from contrasting theoretical traditions. The Chicago School drew on the theories of Durkheim and Spencer to argue that the city was differentiated by function and space, integrated by secondary social institutions and achieved relative stability and equilibrium. By contrast, the LA School drew from Marxist and poststructuralist theories to interpret the city as radically diverse, radically conflictual, radically open, and as a space that produces constant breakdowns, crises and change. Its distinguishing theoretical quality is therefore not its strict adherence to postmodernism as some reviewers have argued (see Nichols Clark, 2008; Shearmur, 2008 and other contributors to a recent collection published in Urban Geography1), but rather its effort to mix strands of Marxist, poststructural and postmodern theories to build up a conceptual framework in order to interpret the highly differentiated cities of late-capitalist societies. The article goes on to argue that the issue of difference became increasingly viewed through the lens of politics in the late 1990s. Whereas LA theorists in the 1980s and early 1990s examined the structural and cultural forces driving sociospatial differentiation, a newer generation of LA School researchers focused more closely on the politics of difference. In particular, they examined how differences affect political projects, how politics can contribute to sociospatial differentiation and the possibilities of building bridges across different groups to create better urban futures. This generation is distinct from the first generation because of its focus on politics, but it is a direct outgrowth of the older generation because of the institutional (i.e. students, colleagues, visiting researchers, etc.) and intellectual connections tying one to the other. The article draws attention to this newer generation because its contributions are important for a complete reading of the LA School. What has made the LA School a ‘school’ rather than individual researchers studying the same city? Thomas Gieryn (2006: 7) identifies several factors that made Chicago sociologists into a distinctive ‘school’ of urban studies. These include (1) common theoretical and normative positions, (2) institutional cohesion and (3) mechanisms for testing and disseminating theories. The factors that applied to the Chicago School apply to the LA School as well, especially during its most productive years of the 1980s and 1990s. The central figures shared general theoretical, methodological and political tendencies. These common tendencies, while never totally consistent, provided a general framework in which to interpret contemporary patterns of urban growth and decline. Also, these figures were based in particular institutional settings (Urban Planning and Geography at UCLA and Geography at USC). This made it easier for them to interact on a regular basis, work through overlapping ideas and bring a greater degree of intellectual cohesion to the study of the capitalist city. Lastly, this institutional setting provided senior scholars with countless graduate students to empirically ‘test’ theoretical claims and disseminate ideas throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Thus, a high degree of intellectual cohesion, institutional integration and diffusion mechanisms transformed individual urban researchers into a relatively coherent school of urban theory. 1

Most of the contributors to this volume have an extremely limited appreciation of the theoretical scope of the LA School, and as a result of this mischaracterize its contribution to urban studies.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The Los Angeles School: difference, politics, city

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Theorizing difference in the city: the unique contribution of the LA School The Chicago School and LA School both examined how sociospatial differences shape urbanization processes but they drew on sharply contrasting theoretical traditions to do so. This resulted in divergent conceptions of urban difference and the potential effects of difference on the stability of urban regional systems. The Chicago School: theorizing with Durkheim and Spencer

The Chicago School drew on the mid-career writings of Emile Durkheim to understand the distinctive processes of sociospatial differentiation found in the modern metropolis (Saunders, 1986). For Durkheim, the process of social differentiation involved both social fragmentation and social integration. On the one hand, differentiation in industrial societies (i.e. the division of labor) fractured the occupational structure into innumerable and unconnected pieces (Durkheim, 1984; Alexander, 1992). This weakened social ties between people and undermined the individual’s sense of moral commitment to others. Moreover, the concentration of people in large, heterogeneous and densely populated urban centers accelerated fragmentation by making it difficult to form strong and durable ties with others. The structural forces favoring fragmentation made society prone to disintegration and individuals prone to anomie. On the other hand, Durkheim went on to argue that secondary institutions could perform needed ‘social integration’ functions by providing new mechanisms to bind the differentiated masses into a common system of rules and norms. Parties, the military, state educational systems and professional associations were best positioned to assume these integration functions. When these institutions failed to perform these functions, higher rates of deviant behavior and social problems would arise and threaten the stability of the system. Thus, Durkheim argued that the structure of industrial societies accelerated processes of differentiation and fragmentation, but that such processes were counterbalanced by secondary institutions that performed crucial social integration functions. Durkheim’s focus on social differentiation as a two-pronged process of fragmentation and integration would frame the Chicago School’s thinking on the matter. However, to understand how the process of differentiation plays out over urban space, the Chicago School turned to the social ecology theories of Herbert Spencer (Saunders, 1986). For Robert Park, competition between different groups typically resulted in the dominance of one group over others within the city. As this group established its control over the geographic and symbolic center of the city, it helped set up the scale of property values throughout the urban system. The scale of land values in turn sorted individuals according to their social function and status, with different groups settling in their own particular niches of the city. A stage of equilibrium was reached when institutional mechanisms were established to regulate the interactions of different groups within and across the different social spaces of the city. At this ‘climax’ stage, exogenous disturbances (i.e. natural disaster, migration, etc.) produced instability in the system, weakening the capacities of institutions to perform integration functions (Saunders, 1986: 58). The weakening of social integration controls was reflected through increased deviancy and social problems in the areas where these disturbances were felt the most (i.e. zones of transition). Once the institutional grid adapted to these disturbances (e.g. integration of migrants into the system), the system resumed its stability and equilibrium. This reading of the city framed ideas concerning urban problems in the United States. Disturbances, social problems and deviance were associated with difference. Without common rules and normative precepts, differences would fester into permanent competition and fragmentation, resulting in greater levels of anomie and uncontrollable social problems. Though there was a general recognition that sociospatial differences are the natural outcome of all ecological systems, it was also stressed that the failure of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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secondary institutions to integrate these differences into a coherent whole would inevitably lead to system-threatening problems.

The LA School: theorizing difference with Marx and Foucault

The Los Angeles School is rooted in theoretical traditions that conceptualize the processes of differentiation in sharply contrasting ways to those described above. What is distinctive about the LA School has been its efforts to draw liberally from both Marxist and poststructural theoretical traditions. Rather than reproduce a theoretical binary between these traditions, LA School writers combined insights from both to inform their analyses of differences, conflicts and crises in late-capitalist urban systems. The early LA School was strongly rooted in the Marxism of the 1970s and 1980s, with two strains being particularly influential in shaping its general views of difference. Firstly, theories concerning the ‘logic of capitalism’ and crisis were prominent during the formative years of the LA School. Crisis theory posited that the differentiation along class lines was a central driver of systemic contradictions and eventual crises (Wright, 1997; Burawoy and Wright, 2001). Workers and capitalists were bound to one another in an interdependent relation, with the former selling their labor power to capitalists in order to survive and capitalists relying on this labor power as the principal source of profit (‘the inverse interdependent welfare principle’, see Wright, 1997). The need for workers to claim a greater share of the profit required capitalists to respond by employing different strategies to save on rising labor costs. The different strategies used by capitalists eventually resulted in system-threatening economic crises. In this way, social differentiation in capitalist societies (i.e. class differences) was a principal cause of instabilities and crises in the system. As these relational contradictions stood at the heart of capitalism, crises were therefore direct and necessary outcomes of the system itself and not the result of exogenous factors (i.e. immigration) temporarily disturbing a hitherto stable system (as proposed by the Chicago School). Secondly, the theory of uneven development was the spatial offshoot of crisis theory. It suggested that in their efforts to recuperate declining profit rates in advanced regions (from rising wages and increased use of technology in the production process), capitalists were required to create new exploitation possibilities in underdeveloped areas of the world. The ability to make a profit was therefore contingent on the availability of spaces where labor could be exploited at more intense rates. Capitalists created and reproduced sociospatial inequalities to ensure their continued survival. While the strategy of geographical unevenness allowed capitalists to overcome one potential crisis (i.e. the tendency of the profit rate to fall in advanced economies), this particular strategy planted the seeds of new rounds of systemic crises. Crisis and uneven development therefore served as the twin pillars supporting the theoretical assumptions of the LA School, providing them with a starkly different starting point from the functionalism of the Chicago School. Several contributors to the LA School suggested that each crisis of capitalism produced its own round of economic restructuring and uneven urban forms and structures. While these ‘spatial fixes’ provided a temporary reprieve from a mounting crisis, they also planted the seeds of the next crisis directly into the sociospatial fabric of the city. This formulation is captured in Soja’s (1996a) oft-used formulation, ‘from crisis-generated restructuring to restructuring-generated crisis’. As Soja maps out the history of Los Angeles, we are shown how each round of urban development over time has resulted in distinctive sociospatial structures. As each sociospatial structure provided the system with a temporary fix, it also laid the foundations for the next big urban crisis. For structural Marxists, these crises served as breaches in capitalism’s systemic walls, providing progressive forces with opportunities to make radical changes in the system. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Though Marxism provided the LA School with key insights on difference, space and conflict, several observers became interested in integrating poststructural theories of difference into their readings of the city (Soja 1989; 1996b; Davis 1990; Dear et al., 1996; Dear, 2002a; Dear and Flusty, 2002). The following poststructural assertions played important roles in shaping the LA School’s conception of difference: 1 In contrast to functionalists and Marxists, poststructuralists conceived of power as radically plural. Power is expressed through a range of institutional sites (i.e. prisons, clinics, asylums, etc.) and addresses a range of issues concerning the human condition (i.e. freedom, sexuality, the body, etc.). A core structure (i.e. capitalism or the state) does not produce a singular logic of power which orders the different pieces of society into a coherent whole. 2 If power is plural then the subjects forged from its knowledge are then, by necessity, plural. This could be understood at two levels. At one level, ideas about group subjectivities are forged across a range of different power sites. Each of these sites develop discourses concerning the roles, positioning, obligations and mannerisms of the groups that come to occupy a site (i.e. worker/manager, doctor/patient, husband/ wife, etc.). Technologies are then employed to transmit these discourses to the various individuals within the site, shaping their perceptions, feelings, dispositions and practices. At another level, individuals typically operate across multiple sites of power (i.e. work, home, clinic, market, etc.) and encounter and internalize multiple subjectivities. Any single person is therefore positioned at the intersection of a plurality of subjectivities. They are man, worker, Latino, American, gay, etc. simultaneously; without any one of these subjectivities enjoying an inbuilt advantage over the other. Thus, poststructural pluralism operates at a general social (i.e. the plurality of subjectivities in a social system) and individual level (i.e. a plurality of subjectivities constituting the internal world of the individual). This vision of difference is radically plural because it identifies the multiple sites for creating plural subjectivities and stresses the absence of a structural center to order these plural subjectivities into internally coherent hierarchies within the social system or within ourselves. 3 Where there is power, there is resistance. People occupying different sites of power (i.e. prison, workplace, the clinic, etc.) resist the articulation of power in countless ways, from the passive acts of foot-dragging to the more brazen acts of open rebellion. Resistance produces alternative discourses about subjects and their relations to the powerful in these different institutional sites. This means that the formation of subjectivities is a dynamic, open and conflict-ridden process. Each institutional site produces its own points of conflicts, its own unstable subjectivities and its own struggles in the world. Rather than institutions like schools and professional associations serving to integrate an increasingly differentiated world (i.e. Durkheim’s proposition), they play the opposite role: they multiply power, subjectivities and conflicts, with each institutional site becoming an autonomous nodal point that fosters and drives a plurality of political expressions in the social world. 4 Lastly, real places can be found in the world where incompatible differences are juxtaposed and power is too weak to impose order over these things. These places of disorder open up possibilities for individuals to escape the technologies of power and exercise a greater degree of ‘freedom’ within their worlds. Through the concept of ‘heterotopia’, Foucault (1986: 24) envisioned places where ‘all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. Such conditions provide individuals with greater room for play, innovation and in certain cases rebellion. Thus, heterotopias are considered the places where incongruent differences agglomerate in intense and uncontrollable ways, providing people within them unique opportunities to exercise alternative imaginaries and practices. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Difference is therefore conceived in radically plural ways: power is plural, subjects are plural, politics are plural, and the concentration of incompatible pluralities in time and space creates unstable places within a society. This conception diverges from the functionalist and Marxist conceptions described above. In contrast to the former, institutions are viewed as sites that aggravate differences rather than mechanisms that integrate them into a normative whole. In contrast to the latter, power is not centered on an economic base. It emerges from a plurality of different sites, with each site producing different subjects whose equivalent conflicts unfold at various rhythms and tempos across space and time (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). In the mid to late 1980s, LA School writers began to integrate some of these ideas into a conceptual framework that had solidified around several Marxist tenets. On the one hand, the radical pluralization of the urban sociospatial system was seen as driven by the dynamic of unevenness — crisis — restructuring. However, rather than this dynamic producing a system split socially and spatially along class lines (i.e. the Marxist view), new class divides intermeshed with new ethnic forces to produce a radically differentiated social and spatial structure. The city now became an open field of diverse socioeconomic nodes, with the different nodes pinning down the urban fabric in decentered and uneven ways. In mixing Marxist notions of uneven development with poststructural ideas of difference, the radically plural city is viewed as the result of socioeconomic processes that fracture the metropolis into infinite numbers of pieces. On the other hand, the radical diversity found in the city destabilizes traditional identities and blurs the boundaries separating one group from the other. The cacophony of multiple subjectivities in the same city facilitates new hybrid identities and the multiplication of ‘heterotopic’ places throughout the urban region (Soja, 1996b). Thus, Marxist and poststructural theories were combined to seek explanations for the social, spatial and symbolic fragmentation found in late-capitalist cities. It is this combination of theoretical currents that distinguish the LA School from the more functionalist Chicago School.

Difference and the city: bringing it all together in Los Angeles The research strategy of the LA School resembles the ‘general theory — case study’ feedback loop characterized by Burawoy (1998) as the ‘extended case method’. General theorizations on the city framed their interpretations of the concrete case, and insights learned from case studies were used to adjust, modify and expand general theories of the late-twentieth century city. For these scholars, the dynamics of differentiation described above played out in a series of urbanization processes. Each process was conceived as being relatively autonomous from the other: they operated according to a distinctive logic of their own but they also fed back into one another to create a dynamic of accelerated sociospatial fragmentation. Decentering the economy: crisis, restructuring and agglomeration economies

Most contributors to the LA School agreed with the Marxist assertion that the cycles of capitalism and urban development are strongly related to one another. Expanding on David Harvey’s (1978) work on capitalist urbanization, Soja and his colleagues argued that a central strategy for overcoming economic crises in capitalism has been to reconcentrate certain aspects of capital and labor processes in certain places while dispersing others across space. In response to the economic crisis of the 1970s, capitalists embarked on a series of strategic maneuvers that radically altered the shape of contemporary cities. While the processes of concentration and dispersion selected which industries would thrive and die, LA researchers drew upon the Regulation School to argue that those industries that did survive in places like Los Angeles were increasingly organized according to post-Fordist principles (Scott and Storper, 1986; Storper and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Chistopherson, 1987; Scott, 1988; Storper and Walker, 1989; Storper, 1997). Firms increasingly embraced new models for organizing the production process which centered on more flexible production systems where small and medium-sized firms were linked to one another in agglomerations of transaction-intensive networks. These agglomerations improve the abilities of firms to reduce uncertainties; respond to new information, trends and competitors; contain labor costs; and maximize collective innovation capacities. Agglomeration economies were unevenly spread throughout the urban region, with specialized production systems (i.e. high technology, entertainment, garments, etc.) defining the economic and social character of the different areas of the region. The Fordist crisis of the 1970s therefore resulted in two responses that would radically restructure the fortunes of cities: (1) durable manufacturing had begun to be dispersed to low-wage regions across the globe while services and certain forms of nondurable manufacturing were being concentrated in different ways in a number of cities in the global North; and (2) the economic activities reconcentrated in cities like Los Angeles have been reorganized in decentered, vertically disintegrated and transaction-intensive agglomerations throughout the urban region. Differentiating the social structure: polarization and ethnic diversity

Two overlapping processes contributed to the radical differentiation of the social structure of cities. Firstly, the process of economic restructuring discussed above also helped reshape patterns of class inequalities (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982; Soja et al., 1983; Friedmann, 1986; Scott, 1988). Globalization, labor-saving technologies and plant closings weakened the durable manufacturing sector in most large American cities (Soja et al., 1983). As the supply of middle-income jobs in durable manufacturing declined, intense growth in other sectors of the economy (high technology, craft, finance, etc.) contributed to the expansion of jobs at both the top and bottom ends of the occupational structure but relatively weak growth of mid-level jobs. Friedmann and Wolff (1982; Friedmann, 1986) added that the rapid growth at the top of the occupational structure fuelled growth at the bottom end by creating new demands for labor-intensive services (personal services, restaurants, hotels, etc.). These different factors combined to create a new pattern of inequalities characterized by a high degree of occupational and earnings polarization. These assertions were later viewed as the central socioeconomic features of ‘informational’ and ‘global’ cities (Castells and Mollenkopf, 1991; Sassen, 1991). Secondly, several waves of immigration transformed American cities into spaces of intense ethnic and racial diversity. The Hart Celler Act of 1965 opened the door to a flow of Asian immigrants responding to provisions for skilled foreigners (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, 1996). The ‘capital’ (economic, human and social) held by some Asian migrants resulted in a unique pattern of integration that departed from traditional understandings of assimilation. This was characterized by both rapid economic integration and continued residential segregation of upper-middle-class migrants in ethnic communities. Moreover, the end of the temporary migrant program in 1962 (Bracero Program) prompted Mexican migrants to settle in the United States and triggered a powerful process of chain migration. Civil conflicts in Central America during the 1980s resulted in another round of migration of Latinos to major urban centers like Los Angeles. The predominance of low skills in this population channeled many into the low-end labor market, transforming this group into a new urban proletariat. The economic restructuring described above therefore intersected with major demographic changes to produce a new and highly differentiated social landscape: In the end, the demographic transformations of the past twenty years have created a new ethnic division of labor in which ethnicity intersects with class. The region’s Chinese and Japanese Americans make up a professional middle-class integrated into the region’s core industries in manufacturing and professional services. Koreans, Iranians, and Chinese immigrants make up a diversified business grouping . . . African Americans divide into two groupings, an emergent International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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middle-class component linked to government and other large employers and an impoverished, lower-skilled segment increasingly excluded from the employment system itself. Mexicans are likewise divided into a native-born, working/lower middle class of skilled laborers, and lowerlevel bureaucrats that overlap little with the foreign-born ranks and an isolated immigrant proletariat confined to the bottom tiers of the region’s economy where they are joined by Central Americans, the latest addition to the region’s low-wage labor pool (Waldinger, 1996: 454–5).

These processes were seen as transforming the social structures of all advanced capitalist cities but these scholars maintained that such processes were particularly advanced in Los Angeles: ‘Nowhere can one detect the shape of emerging America better than in LA, where newcomers to the United States have transformed the country’s second largest metropolis in complex ways and have set the region on a new course sure to be followed by other urban areas’ (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, 1996: 4). Differentiating the spatial structure: making the polycentric city region

A dominant tendency in recent decades has been the rise of an urban form characterized by multiple poles of socioeconomic activities. The increased importance of ‘agglomeration economies’ plus intensified social differentiation have been the primary motors of decentering the sociospatial structure of urban areas. In Los Angeles, these social and economic processes intersected with pre-existing institutions and spatial forms to accelerate its fragmentation into a polycentric region. From a very early stage, Los Angeles was different from older industrial cities where population density and a downtown core dominated urban form. The early adoption of the automobile and the rapid construction of freeways in the postwar years consolidated the city’s distinctively flat form (Wachs, 1996). Changes in the urban economy in the 1970s intersected with Los Angeles’s pre-existing spatial form to transform a lowdensity and flat city into a polynucleated region. The post-Fordist turn in the urban economy triggered important changes in the spatial structure of the region as activities in the most dynamic economic sectors (i.e. entertainment, technology, finance and insurance, crafts, etc.) agglomerated in different districts throughout the metropolitan region. As observed by Soja et al. (1983: 214), these economic agglomerations served as magnets for new residential developments: ‘Rather than being satellites of heavy industry and blue collar workers or suburbanized office and retail nodes, these new outer cities are large conglomerations of technologically advanced industry and service, huge new shopping and leisure-oriented complexes, and high-income and expensively-housed technicians, managers, and professionals, sprawling science-based New Towns’. These multiple poles have become structuring forces of regional development, with the ‘new poles of urban growth in the periphery stretching and pinning down the urban fabric in a re-centered regional constellation of cities’ (Scott et al., 2001: 19). Dear and Dahmann (2008: 266) go on argue that such spatial patterns indicate a radical departure from ‘modernist’ patterns of urbanization: ‘Most notably, in modernist urbanism, the impetus for growth and change proceeds outward from the city’s central core to its hinterlands. But in postmodern urbanism, this logic is precisely reversed: The evacuated city core no longer dominates its region; instead, the hinterlands organize what is left of the center. By this, we mean that urban space, time, and causality have been altered’. Decentering governance: weak sociospatial integration + diffused repression

The LA School employed general theories to explore governance issues in the Los Angeles case. Three elements characterize the modes of governance in the late-twentieth century city: weak regional institutions; a desiccated welfare state; and heavy dependence on repressive techniques (Davis, 1990; 2000; Wolch, 1990; 1996; Wolch and Dear, 1993; Keil, 1998). The combination of these traits produced modes of governance International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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with very weak mechanisms to integrate urban regions undergoing intensified differentiation along social and spatial lines. In such a context, power was exercised through repressive techniques tailored to the conditions of the different spaces found in the urban region. Contemporary urban systems in the United States have been characterized by weak metropolitan and regional institutions. In Los Angeles, the weakness of overarching institutions resulted from three events. Laws restricting municipal annexations by large central cities in the 1940s made it impossible for the city of Los Angeles to grow and absorb the suburban municipalities on its edges. In addition to this, a developer-inspired scheme (i.e. the Lakewood Plan) allowed residents to create new municipalities out of suburban tracts by contracting out expensive, revenue-intensive services to the county (Davis, 1990). This scheme was quickly adopted by suburban residents throughout the county and resulted in 60 new municipalities being created between 1940 and 1970 (Soja, 2000: 132). Lastly, Davis (1990) argues that middle-class suburbanites were effective in conveying their political will through a dense network of Homeowner Associations (HOAs). This network of HOAs provided residents with an infrastructure to roll back property taxes, resist racial integration and enhance the punitive powers of the local state. Thus, limits on municipal annexation, the facility of municipal incorporation, and a reactionary and highly mobilized suburban social movement reinforced the decentralization of political power and blocked the development of regional institutions that could integrate the urban system along spatial lines. The poor record of institutions in integrating along spatial lines has been matched by the poor record of institutions in integrating people along social lines. The sharp rollback of the welfare state has further undermined the capacity of local institutions to assume social integration functions. The increase in poverty and homelessness during the 1980s resulted in cuts in welfare provisions. In addition to the massive reductions in federal subsidies to all big cities in the United States (see Eisinger, 1997), revenue to Los Angeles was further reduced by severe cuts in property taxes and welfare expenditures by the California legislature (Wolch, 1990; 1996; Wolch and Dear, 1993; Davis, 2000). Facing these massive cuts in revenue and embracing the spirit of roll-back neoliberalism, Los Angeles County officials pursued a three-pronged strategy of cutbacks, closures and coercion (Wolch, 1996: 396). This resulted in reductions in General Relief payments, the closure of health clinics in the poorest neighborhoods of the county, the elimination of a third of the county’s outpatient mental health clinics and the introduction of workfare programs. The city of Los Angeles initiated its own deep cuts in economic development (82%), housing (78%) and job training (63%) programs during the same period of time (Davis, 2000). The local welfare state was not only cut to its bare-bone minimum, it was also reorganized. The city and county in the 1980s ‘hollowed out’ the welfare state by contracting out many services and programs to the non-profit sector (i.e. ‘shadow state’) (Wolch, 1990). Thus, the radical roll-back of the local welfare state ultimately undermined its capacities to assume social integration functions in a context of intensified differentiation, deepening poverty, and sharpening class and ethnic conflicts. As the local state lost its capacity to integrate the radically different spaces and groups that make up the metropolis, a fearful middle class embraced ‘law and order’ policies (police, repression, strict sentencing guidelines, etc.) and private security measures (surveillance, private security forces, gated communities, defensive urban design, etc.) (Davis, 1990: 220; Soja, 2000; Dear, 2002b). This ‘carceral’ culture favored strongarmed policing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and the widespread use of privatized security measures in prosperous areas. This transformed the urban landscape into thousands of fortified zones ranging in scale from privately guarded homes to barricaded inner-city neighborhoods to entire gated municipalities. Reflecting on these changes in urban governance, Davis (1990: 224) noted that: The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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and the middle classes as a zero-sum game. In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort.

Thus, this system of urban governance was characterized by weak institutions that lacked the capacity to integrate a city undergoing advanced social and spatial differentiation. In such a context, social control was ensured through the deployment of private and public repressive techniques, combining in various ways to create unique security regimes that addressed the particular issues of the region’s diverse populations. Thus, the weakness of institutions contributed to intensifying sociospatial fragmentation rather than mitigating it. Urban consciousness as pluralism unbound: hyper-reality and hybrids

Just as past observers of the city attempted to understand the relation between the city and forms of human consciousness (Wirth, 1938; Simmel, 1950; Lefebvre, 1991), several observers argued that the particular traits found in regions like Los Angeles have fuelled a new, postmodern urban consciousness (Dear, 2000; 2002a; Soja, 2000; Dear and Flusty, 2002). The region’s fragmented and decentered character has blurred the real and imagined boundaries that once underpinned modernist categories for knowing the world. Whereas the sociospatial structure of the ‘modern’ city reinforced traditional cognitive constructs based on rigid binary logics (i.e. city–suburb, public–private, work– home, etc.), the blurred character of the postmodern metropolis has rendered such schematic constructs useless for mapping and knowing new urban worlds (Soja, 1996b). This pattern of urbanization has also favored the production of places where incompatible differences are juxtaposed to one another (i.e. heterotopias), with each of these places contributing to the erosion of modernist ways of knowing the world. The ‘deconstruction’ of modernist precepts has resulted in greater conceptual instability, with signs and information no longer rooted in or indicative of underlying realities. This has resulted in two important developments in urban consciousness: First, our perceptions of the world are increasingly based on simulations of other simulations (i.e. simulacra). In this way, the information and signs we use to interpret different aspects of the world (i.e. economy, politics, war) are further removed from the ‘real’ objects of analysis. The implications of this are rather profound considering the importance of simulacra in shaping decisions in the ponzi-based finance and real estate schemes that drove the urban economic bubbles of recent years. Second, the radical cultural diversity found in cities like Los Angeles has resulted in a process of hybridization, characterized by the ‘fragmentation and reconstruction of identity and cultural life’ (Dear and Dahmann, 2008: 272). At the cultural level, LA School researchers have explored how new forms of expression mix and match the cultural markers of diverse groups. At a political level, Soja (1996b; 1996c; 2000) maintains that the weakening of universalizing and essential political truths has provided ideological conditions for establishing new hybrid alliances across traditional political divides (ideological, racial, class, spatial). In such a context, alliances are based on pragmatic concerns for achieving mutually beneficial goals rather than the truthfulness of one ideological position or another. ‘Neither the liberal strategy of redistribution and equality of opportunity, nor the socialist strategy of class struggle is entirely rejected. Instead, both are recast and tactically combined in a more open cultural politics of justice that is relational, contextualized, situationally specific, and achievable primarily through strategic coalitions that confront and redirect the social, spatial, and historical workings of power’ (Soja, 1996c: 191). Thus, post-metropolis provides an environment that is conducive to a new postmodern imaginary characterized by hyper-reality and hybrid cultures and identities. These five urbanization processes are general but they have unfolded in Los Angeles with a particular force and intensity, making it a strategic case for studying the emergence of a new type of city–region. ‘The effects of these restructuring processes International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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may be more intensely developed and perhaps also easier to analyze in their complex interconnections in Los Angeles than in most other places, but this does not mean that the same windows of interpretation cannot be opened for other cities. Stated differently, what has been happening in Los Angeles can also be seen taking place in Peoria, Scunthorpe, Belo Horizonte, and Kaohsiung, with varying intensities to be sure and never in exactly the same way’ (Soja, in Brenner, 2003: 214, emphasis added).

The next generation: thinking of difference in political ways One overlooked aspect of the LA School has been the importance of ties between scholars and activists. In universities like UCLA, USC and Occidental College, constant dialogues between the two communities provided scholars with a window into streetlevel activities, and activists with a framework in which to interpret their changing urban worlds. The section explores how these ties helped give rise to a new generation of LA School researchers, a generation that continued to pay close attention to the issue of difference but through a distinctly political lens. These interactions occurred in several universities but they developed with the greatest intensity at UCLA during the 1980s and 1990s. Structuring a dialogue: theory, practice, politics at UCLA

During the 1980s, the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning2 (GSAUP) at UCLA housed both urban theorists like John Friedmann, Edward Soja and Michael Storper, and urban activists like Gilda Haas, Jacqueline Leavitt and Goetz Wolff. Observers remark that the divide separating these groups was rather blurred, leading to rich, combative and dynamic conversations. Wolff remembers these relations in the following way: The department was a vibrant environment back then [1980s]. There were a great number of activist types in Urban Planning at the time. Ed [Soja] was willing to use his political economy class to focus on plant closings going on in Los Angeles. Ed was very much into structural analysis at the time, the capital logic prevails thing, and there were those of us who were suggesting that maybe this was a tad too pat and that some of the things that happened were due to class struggle. I remember one time Ed was so irritated by the repeated interruptions that he went, ‘Class Struggle! Class Struggle! Class Struggle! Class Struggle! Is that enough!?’ From the point of view of academia, there was a very strong environment for applying radical concepts to things that were happening throughout the city (interview with author, March 2002).

Channels between these worlds were created through the graduate program and through the employment of practice faculty from the Los Angeles area. While both groups may have been oriented by different interests, professional concerns and theoretical orientations, their common commitment to radical politics sustained deliberation and debate. Jacqueline Leavitt, a faculty member, notes that this environment was fostered by institutional conditions that provided department members with a great degree of autonomy: ‘It was prior to the university becoming conscious of its position in the university world. This provided some degree of autonomy and freedom in the things we did. There was a whole air of tolerance that was conducive to this kind of atmosphere and work’ (interview with author, March 2002). The open dialogue between radical urban 2 This was the department’s ofﬁcial name during the ﬁrst two decades of its life. The name was changed to the Department of Urban Planning when it became incorporated into the School of Public Policy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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theorists and radical urban activists was therefore fostered by a commitment to systemic urban change and a great degree of institutional autonomy. In addition to the traditional tension between intellectuals and activists, the more theoretical members of the faculty were rooted in structural Marxism (i.e. capital logic, crisis theory, uneven development, etc.). By contrast, the activists were more interested in issues of politics and agency as expressed through the discourse of class struggle. For urban theorists like Soja, understanding the structure of the system would reveal the points of crisis that created opportunities for progressive social forces. The activists on the other hand were less interested in locating structural opportunities and more interested in making opportunities by building up the political power of the masses. For them, the central theoretical question was how to maximize the political power of the working class in cities like Los Angeles. The focus on theory and structure won out during this time as most of the senior faculty continued to focus on the structural forces driving differentiating, crisis and restructuring. However, the interest in politics was to emerge more forcefully in the writings of a new generation of LA School in the 1990s. The institutional conditions that permitted this discursive and relational environment changed in the 1990s. Increased competition between universities reduced departmental autonomy, and compelled policy and planning programs to conform to a standard non-critical model. This general process resulted in the department’s incorporation into the School of Public Policy, which had as one of its goals to become a west coast version of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Not only did this reduce the ideological autonomy of the faculty but it also marginalized the nonpermanent ‘practice’ faculty, helping to weaken one of the most important links between the regular faculty and practitioners. ‘Once the university restructured, they [the practice faculty] were never respected and never provided with decent work conditions. Once that happened, those of us talking to each other had less opportunities to do so because people either bailed or went to their own sources of funding’ (Leavitt, personal interview with author, March 2002). Thus, institutional reforms along a neoliberal line (i.e. increased competition, assessments based on market models, intellectual and pedagogical standardization) resulted in reforms that made interactions between radical activists and scholars more difficult. These moves slowly weakened the conditions that made the department a unique place for urban theory and practice in the United States.

The ‘new’ LA School: a new generation emerges

In spite of its marginalization, the practice faculty and some supportive faculty continued their efforts to turn university resources out to progressive battles throughout the city. In a context where the senior faculty found themselves increasingly distant from department matters (due to job changes and travels), the continued existence of channels between the department and the local activist world allowed students to think about difference and the city in particularly political ways. In this sense, the declining presence of the senior faculty opened up an intellectual space that allowed a new generation of scholars to explore politics and difference with greater rigor than had been possible in the 1980s. Moreover, many of these students had one foot directly planted in the world of theory (as students of senior faculty) and the other foot firmly planted in the activist world (as students of the practice faculty and militants in this thriving political landscape). The mutual positionality of these students permitted many to explore issues of difference, conflict and crisis through a more political lens. Out of this context emerged a second generation of the LA School, a generation that was strongly informed by the theoretical insights of the first generation but with a clear interest in exploring these insights through the lens of politics. Roger Keil’s (1998) book on Los Angeles serves as an interesting bridge between the two generations. On the one hand, the book seeks to understand how structural International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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contradictions shape the dynamics of urbanization processes. On the other hand, Keil (ibid.: 222) suggests that the structural contradictions shape the ways in which actors mobilize and seek to change their urban worlds, articulating his thoughts thus: In the absence of a metropolitan emancipatory strategy, progressive social activists in Los Angeles have restricted their coalition-building efforts to the mobilization of partial territories and political spaces. The agents in these spaces are not members of any middle segments of urban society, but rather are peripheralized by economic exploitation and racism. In Los Angeles, progressive politics has been the attempt by displaced industrial workers, impoverished and marginalized citizens (and noncitizens), and radical activists to fight the wave of Republicanism and globalization that threatens to wipe them from the landscape of their city.

This text was not the first to perform an intensive empirical study on politics in Los Angeles, but it was the first to link structural forces in the city to the dynamics of urban politics. This has made the text an intellectual bridge between the two generations of the LA School. Politics and difference in the city: the new LA School

The writings of this newer generation have addressed how social and spatial differentiation affects urban politics: 1 Los Angeles scholars have shown great interest in how social differences affect the capacities of progressive urban actors to achieve their political goals. On the one hand, researchers have examined the effects of race and class on progressive coalitions in the city. Pulido’s (1996; 2002) work on multiracial organizing has been exemplary in this respect. She demonstrates how the co-implication of race and ethnicity has shaped the life chances and political outlook of different groups in the region. While the racialization of struggle made multiracial coalitions difficult to achieve in the past, she suggests that the lessons and networks produced by past efforts have facilitated bridge-building efforts in more recent years. On the other hand, researchers have also examined efforts to overcome the differentiation of the city’s progressive organizations. From a more historical perspective, the work of Gottlieb et al. (2005) at Occidental College shows that the degree of collaboration between different progressive organizations (i.e. unions, rights organizations, parties, churches, etc.) is cyclical, with certain periods giving rise to more bridgebuilding efforts than others. Others have focused more closely on the most current cycle of bridge-building efforts (1990s to the present). Pastor (2001) was one of the first to identify new networks that stretched across traditional organizational and sectoral divides. Building on this work, Nicholls (2003) mapped out the organizational infrastructure binding radically diverse organizations into a common social justice movement in the city. The existence of this infrastructure has allowed diverse groups to pool their resources and launch a series of successful campaigns to challenge the neoliberal logic of urban governance. In a similar vein, Milkman (2000; 2006) has spent much time examining how connections between immigrant communities and the labor movement have played a crucial role in making Los Angeles a potent center of progressive politics in the United States. 2 Others have examined the effects of spatial differentiation on politics and urbanization processes. Firstly, researchers have examined how a fragmented territorial landscape affects the dynamics of urban politics. Mike Davis (1990) provided important insights into this in his discussions of homeowners and NIMBY movements in the region. In a similar way, Boudreau and Keil (2001) examined suburban separatist movements in the region and the effects of such movements along hardening class, racial and spatial lines. For these scholars, the state rescaling International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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created greater possibilities for these types of urban separatist movements to push their agendas of break-off from the city of Los Angeles. Secondly, other scholars have examined the emergence of regional political alliances aimed at creating smarter, more equitable and more sustainable urban regions (Pastor et al., 2000; Soja, 2000; Pastor et al., 2009). Soja in recent years has turned to the study of formal politics and movements. He has argued that injustices are constituted spatially and that the movements responding to them articulate their claims and tactics in increasingly spatial terms (i.e. spatial justice). Paralleling this view, Pastor et al. (2009) have argued that the types of coalitions that have emerged in Los Angeles have begun to recognize that major problems are generated through uneven spatial processes operating at the regional scale. To effectively deal with housing inequities, low wages and pollution, coalitions have scaled up and addressed the regional constitution of major injustices in the urban region. Social and spatial differences therefore influence the dynamics and trajectories of urban politics. These approaches stress that difference can certainly weaken the power of urban movements, but also that difference is an essential resource for enhancing collective powers. What distinguishes the first and second generations of the LA School is their distinctive approaches to the issue of difference and politics. Whereas the first generation suggested that radical differentiation reduced the possibilities for progressive politics (largely a reflection of its neo-Marxist roots), the second generation has stressed that progressive politics are as possible as reactionary ones in cities characterized by radical difference. Several of these observers have built on their empirical observations to develop a theoretical framework to interpret difference, politics and cities. This has been done in two complementary ways. Firstly, Nicholls (2008) has outlined a theory for how cities like Los Angeles play a strategic role in social movements operating at national scales. He suggests that the radical diversity and relative spatial proximity found in cities provide conditions that facilitate the pooling of a rich variety of resources. These collective resources are not bound to a single campaign (e.g. living wage) but are deployed across a range of battles that concern the different network members, from union campaigns to housing struggles to environmental battles. Such an urban-based infrastructure therefore draws strength from diversity while simultaneously providing diverse members with a mechanism to pool and deploy their resources in a variety of different campaigns. Secondly, Purcell (2008) has examined how the democratic practices of these urban movements present important challenges to the neoliberalization of our cities. Largely inspired by the post-Marxist tradition, he argues that the type of democratic ‘attitudes’ and practices employed by movements shape their critique of the system and the type of alternative urban futures they offer. A politics that respects difference offers the best hope of creating a viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Thus, efforts to theorize the politics of difference have come from two very different angles, with one grounded in network and organizational theory and the other in post-Marxist democratic theory. However, both arrive at complementary conclusions: power is achieved through the ability to harness diversity, and the politics of diversity is a precondition for the articulation of real urban alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. This section makes the argument that a second generation of LA School researchers has emerged. The lines of continuity with the first generation are institutional and intellectual, with most of the second generation having gained an interest in difference, crisis and urban change through their time spent in the halls of UCLA and USC as students or visiting researchers. However, this generation is distinct from the first generation because of its interest in difference from a distinctly political angle. The continuity with and distinctiveness from the first generation has provided this group of researchers with a unique view of difference, politics and progressive change in capitalist cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Conclusion: whither the LA School? This article has argued that the most important contributions of the LA School have been in terms of providing insights into patterns of social and spatial differentiation in contemporary cities. In sharp contrast to the Chicago School theory of functional differentiation, the LA School drew upon Marxist and poststructural theoretical traditions to argue that cities were spaces of radical difference, conflict, instabilities and change. Difference inevitably led to crisis but it was also viewed as the driving force of prosperity, innovation, justice and radical democratic practices. Whereas the older generation addressed the issue of difference through structural and cultural perspectives, a newer generation has addressed the issue of difference through the realm of agency and politics. Rather than contradicting one another, this generational split has resulted in a more complete picture of how differences contribute to shaping the trajectories of cities. In the last decade, this school has undergone several important and somewhat contradictory changes. On the one hand, the institutional bases that once concentrated the intellectual powers of these urban theorists have weakened considerably. Most of the first-generation scholars have left or are in the process of leaving UCLA and USC (due to retirement and other opportunities). In addition, institutional and academic trends have created less welcoming environments for radical and innovative theorizing. In this instance, the central nodes that gave birth to the LA School have weakened considerably. On the other hand, countless graduate students and visitors have developed strong intellectual ties to the older generation of urban theorists, resulting in the continued use of many of their central ideas. While some of these scholars continue to be based in Los Angeles and study the city, most have taken positions at universities elsewhere in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America and Asia, and study other cities. Thus, while the central nodes of the LA School have weakened considerably, mechanisms of diffusion have strengthened with time. These twin developments have resulted in the decentering of the LA School at two levels: in terms of the institutions that house the LA School (no longer LA); and in terms of the cases used to test general theories of urban change (no longer LA). Considering these changes, the article concludes by speculating on the following question, will the LA School wither away or will it thrive in a different form? Second-generation LA School researchers who continue to work on politics in Los Angeles and elsewhere have a common object of analysis (i.e. politics in postmetropolis). This common interest and the maintenance of professional and personal networks between them have provided the group with a degree of intellectual coherency. Moreover, several universities across North America have attracted a critical mass of Los Angeles-trained researchers. Sustained intellectual, social and institutional cohesion will permit these researchers to continue their focus on difference, politics and the city, but the geographical dispersion of this group will take them away from Los Angeles as the central case for testing their propositions. This geographical decentering could have two potential effects: (1) it could allow this generation to develop the central theoretical concerns of the LA School without entering stale polemics over the use of Los Angeles as the paradigmatic case; and (2) as authors move beyond Los Angeles, they could develop a greater interest in performing comparative studies of urbanization processes in advanced capitalist societies. Although conditions exist that favor the circulation of LA School ideas, the particular factors that made Los Angeles a center of intellectual innovation in urban studies no longer exist. Several factors aligned in a particular place to create favorable conditions for highly innovative thinking on cities. In particular, we find supportive university institutions, a commitment by senior faculty to radical thought and change, environments that permitted regular interaction between radical scholars and activists about real and possible changes for the city, and a real city experiencing a series of dramatic restructurings. The combination of these factors favored the emergence of a cluster of colleagues who collaborated with one another to produce innovative, imaginative and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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theoretically cohesive writings on the city. The decentering of the LA School has meant that the conditions that produced this uniquely innovative environment are no longer present. Though researchers continue to produce interesting work on cities, decentering makes it unlikely that the LA School will resume a role as an intellectual pole of innovation in the world of urban theory. In response to the question, whither the LA School, I finish the article with the following hypothesis: the continued connections of LA School researchers and their dispersal beyond Los Angeles favor the circulation of ideas and notions to wider and less partisan audiences. However, this same decentering has weakened the conditions that might allow it to become a cohesive force of innovation in contemporary urban theory. Walter J. Nicholls ([email protected]), Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Résumé Au début des années 1980, des spécialistes de la recherche urbaine d’universités californiennes (UCLA et USC) se sont lancés dans une entreprise concertée d’étude et de théorisation de la région de Los Angeles. Leurs efforts se sont traduits par plusieurs textes empiriques et théoriques importants qui ont aidé à repenser les modes de fonctionnement des grandes villes contemporaines. Mettant en valeur ces contributions et analysant leur éclairage sur notre compréhension de la différence et de la ville, cet article adopte une triple approche. D’abord, il examine comment l’école de Los Angeles a intégré les théories marxistes et poststructuralistes pour créer un cadre analytique distinct permettant d’interpréter les différences sociospatiales de la ville à l’ère du capitalisme tardif. Plutôt qu’une simple interprétation d’un urbanisme ‘postmoderne’, la contribution théorique spécifique de l’École a été sa tentative de tisser deux axes théoriques classiques en une trame interprétative nouvelle. Ensuite, l’article étudie les processus repérés par l’école de L.A. qui ont fragmenté la région métropolitaine en d’innombrables divisions sociospatiales. Enfin, il suggère qu’une deuxième génération se dessine pour l’école de Los Angeles, une génération qui, fidèle à l’enjeu de la différence, tente d’examiner comment les différences modulent les possibilités de politique urbaine progressiste ou réactionnaire. La conclusion s’intéresse au devenir de l’école de Los Angeles lorsque ses principaux acteurs auront quitté l’UCLA et l’USC.
