| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles. By Jared Orsi. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiii + 267 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)

Hazardous Metropolis is a well crafted, carefully argued analysis of metropolitan nature in Southern California. Jared Orsi set out to explain greater Los Angeles as an urban ecosystem and as a landscape type and he has largely succeeded at both. He takes as his model turbulence (a concept borrowed, no doubt, from his study of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers) and asks what calculus (political, economic, cultural, and ideological) might explain a history of efforts to factor turbulence out of a dynamic system. How might we best interpret a history of "flood" and "drought" perceived as anomaly and then begin to ask different questions: about our understanding of a putatively disorderly nature, about past decisions and actions that shaped a particular urban ecology, and about the structural drivers that made what has been seen to be accidental almost inevitable? The author's grandest ambition is to use the history of a particular hydraulic regime (Los Angeles) to think about like regimes and their implications for urban ecologies in other cities and regions.

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