Review Essays

At Home in the Heteropolis:
Understanding Postmodern L.A.

MICHAEL E. ENGH, S.J.

The teaming metropolis of Los Angeles has long stymied the explanatory efforts of pundits and scholars alike. One clearly frustrated commentator, Westbrook Pegler, wrote in 1938, "It is hereby earnestly proposed that the U.S.A. would be better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the city of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian . . . [N]either the size of the place nor the incoherence of its government accounts for the lunacy of the place."1 Such humorous, acerbic, or peremptory dismissals have long been a staple in commentaries about this city. The urban violence in 1965 and 1992, however, soberly reminds us that we as a nation ignore the complexities of this most modern American metropolis at our own peril.	1
In recent years, a notable proliferation of books, projects, and centers have launched serious reconsideration of Los Angeles as a subject worthy of national and international attention.2 The processes of transformation and the emergent forms of city life have attracted numerous investigators, who are discovering that there is more to this metropolis than earthquakes, fires, mudslides, corrupt police, and clogged freeways.3 The explanation for the singular or peculiar characteristics of Los Angeles, however, continues to provide current commentators as daunting a challenge as that faced by Mr. Pegler.	2
Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja have published a collection of essays in The City under the auspices of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of several new institutes for analyzing developments in Los Angeles.4 Another important scholarly venue is the Huntington Library with its regional history conferences and its Los Angeles History Research Seminar. The University of Southern California is creating the Information System for Los Angeles (ISLA), a vast multimedia electronic database of textual, cartographic, and visual evidence of the city's history. The "L.A. as Subject" Project of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the W. F. Whitsett Foundation, and the Historical Society of Southern California are sponsoring exhibitions, lectures, and publications on a wide range of topics related to the city.5	3
These brief references to a thriving cottage industry of Los Angeles studies provide the necessary context for evaluating Scott and Soja's accomplishments in The City.6 Serious questions exist on how best to understand this city, with its balkanized economic and ethnic enclaves so fiercely satirized in T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel The Tortilla Curtain.7 Scott and Soja are prominent in the emerging "Los Angeles school" of urban studies with a postmodern emphasis that distinguishes it from the earlier "Chicago school" of the 1920s and 1930s.8 The editors of The City speculate that there is a paradigm shift under way in urban studies, and Los Angeles has become the archetype of the postmodern city, an urban form and dynamic vastly different from the modernist metropolis exemplified by New York or Chicago.	4
Scholars such as Richard Longstreth disagree with Scott and Soja. Longstreth maintains that Los Angeles is actually the prototype of twentieth-century urban development throughout the United States.9 Against Scott and Soja's contentions that Los Angeles is unique and exceptional, Longstreth argues that this city provided the model that many other cities in the nation have imitated many times over. Dispersal of the population, decentralized business centers, commuting between one suburb and another, and the creation of "edge cities," for example, are common to American urban life. Such disagreements illustrate the vibrancy of Los Angeles studies and the varied interpretations of how best to characterize and understand the urban history of the nation's second largest city.	5
The fourteen essays Scott and Soja have selected all deal with some aspect of the distinguishing features of Los Angeles, particularly the restructured economy, the regionalism of urban development, and the globalism affecting its demographics and economy. While focused on urban theory, the volume also treats a number of other topics, such as transportation policy, economic development, the history of local urban planning, homelessness, immigration, and political history. Augmenting these essays are imaginative studies of architecture, technological development, and the economic importance of art and design centers. Virtually every author in this volume includes some discussion of the built environment, policy issues, and the political challenges inherent in the urban restructuring presently under way.	6
In their introduction, Scott and Soja dismiss as simplistic a common point of departure for analyzing the city in America, namely, does Los Angeles represent utopia or dystopia? In accord with many other scholars, they note that such an "either/or" proposition is misleading because Los Angeles is part of a broader and more complex global restructuring of urban centers and metropolitan life. What may be difficult for readers unfamiliar with the complex vocabulary and theory of postmodern urbanism, however, are the interpretations of Los Angeles found in several essays, particularly in Soja's conclusion of the book.10 Theory and assertions appear often in these conceptual treatments of postmodern urbanism, in contrast with the majority of the chapters in this volume, which rely on the substantive analysis of rich collections of empirical data. As a historian, this reviewer found the latter essays far more rewarding for the solid evidence presented and for the thought-provoking discussion of the significance of the topics studied.	7
The volume has valuable considerations on the challenges urban sprawl poses for transportation policy (Martin Wachs), the environment (Margaret FitzSimmons and Robert Gottlieb), and regional high-tech industrial development (Allen Scott). These authors focus primarily on the past thirty-five years. In that period, hundreds of thousands of immigrants have arrived from Asia and Latin America, drawn by the promise of economic prosperity widely portrayed in the films produced by the city's motion picture and television industries.	8
Other contributors examine the social and ethnic consequences of massive immigration, decentralized government, and increased competition for employment in times of "economic restructuring." The loss of thousands of industrial manufacturing jobs during the 1980s, for example, severely affected the city's blue-collar workers of African-American descent and forced many to relocate across the state and the nation in search of work. This exodus of African Americans from the southeastern portion of the city and county opened entire communities to Latin Americans willing to labor for less than minimum wage, without benefits, and frequently in unsafe working conditions.11 The consequences of such massive economic and demographic shifts have led other contributors to examine carefully the relationship between income and racial inequalities (Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg) and the widely varied challenges faced by African Americans and Latinos (Susan Anderson and Raymond Rocco). Jennifer Wolch offers an insightful review of the rise of homelessness, which particularly afflicts the mentally disabled. These are rich essays worthy of thoughtful consideration for the significant issues raised.	9
Two contributors attempt to provide the reader with a greater understanding of why Los Angeles diverges so widely from other American cities. Examining the many consequences of "cultural yeast" in the metropolis, Harvey Molotch provides a cogent investigation of how art "works" in the city. He reveals how thousands of residents with specialized skills find employment in the motion picture industry, tourism, dining, the clothing industry, furniture design and production, and the design of automobiles. In explaining why Los Angeles architecture is so different from other cities, Charles Jencks observes that Angelenos are "heterophiliacs" who thrive on the differences among themselves in their 18 urban village cores, 86 languages spoken in the schools, 13 major ethnic groups, and 140 incorporated cities across the county. One expression of this notable diversity is an inclusive local architecture that is improvisational and informal, as seen in local examples of restaurants, churches, schools, and workplaces throughout this "heteropolis." Given the tension that pluralism has long evoked in urban settings, however, one wonders if the singularity Jencks notes in Los Angeles has already occurred in other major American cities. David Ward and Olivier Zunz suggest that such architectural diversity developed decades ago in New York City.12	10
Richard S. Weinstein observes that fundamental American values and impulses, such as extreme individualism and the devotion to private property, come into conflict in Los Angeles with modern problems such as decentralized urban sprawl and fragmented government. The very texture of the urban landscape in Los Angeles reflects a problematic social impermanence. Privatism, though, has long characterized major American urban centers and is not limited to certain spatial and political forms, as Sam Bass Warner has argued in The Private City.13 Weinstein also notes the need for voluntary associations to provide new urban "tissue" for the modern civic community, but once again, this holds true for virtually any American city because of federal cutbacks in funding for many social welfare programs.	11
In more alarmist tones, Michael Dear and Mike Davis review the challenges in urban planning confronting Los Angeles and suggest that chaos and cataclysm face the city unless drastic steps are taken quickly. They are pessimistic that either the experts or the general public will gain control of transportation and land-use planning and thereby bring informed order to the tumultuous areas of civic life. Furthermore, Dear laments that Los Angeles lacks a "clear collective intentionality" to sustain a social cohesiveness; yet studies show that such a void exists in many American cities.14 Readers familiar with the passionate works of Mike Davis will find his familiar jeremiad approach to the city both unsettling and provocative.15	12
Curiously absent from The City are separate chapters investigating in greater depth the mammoth importance to the city of the television and motion picture industries, the century-long importance of tourism in the local economy, and vital roles played by religious and educational institutions. One wonders, too, about the absence of rigorous comparison of Los Angeles with other cities that would have provided the necessary context for a refined sense of American urban development, as well as the basis for systematic analysis of the city's alleged singularity.	13
What most intrigues this reviewer, though, is the near absence of serious discussion of the vast number of informal social networks that knit the civic community together and create the means for the city to cohere. What comes to mind is Lynell George's description in No Crystal Stair of the ways in which energetic people in the African-American community turn to their schools, to community organizations, and, above all, to their churches to create innovative projects to make the city "work" for them.16 The Religion and Civic Order project, a joint study of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Santa Barbara, has documented the many efforts of religious coalitions to respond to the urban violence of 1992.17 These religiously based endeavors are manifestations of what Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam calls "social capital," that is, networks of trust, mutuality, and cooperation that sustain and fuel democracies.18 Religious sociologist John A. Coleman further argues that religious institutions with their communitarian character contribute more social capital to the renewal of American political life than any other institution.19	14
To overlook church-based undertakings in a metropolitan region such as Los Angeles—or in any American city—is to miss the major source of grass-roots vibrancy by which a significant number of residents contribute to the creation of a livable civic community. Church-based initiatives are as simple and necessary as day care, schools, detention ministry, counseling, soup kitchens, food pantries, and bereavement support. Their outreach in Los Angeles is also as broad and complex as the Nehemiah West and Esperanza low-income housing projects, the Interfaith Coalition to HEAL LA, the Museum of Tolerance of the Simon Weisenthal Center, Father Greg Boyle's Jobs for a Future for barrio youth, the Skirball Institute on American Values, the Mothers of East L.A., the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, and the Genesis Plus Project of Greek Orthodox and Latino church leaders for neighborhood economic renewal.20	15
Synagogue and church-based community organizing, interracial cooperation, and efforts to unionize janitors and sweatshop workers explain much of the energy behind the numerous cross-neighborhood coalitions by which this postmodern city continues to draw strength. As sociologist R. Stephen Warner has noted, religion is the institution in American culture that most effectively tolerates differences and builds bridges among people.21 The religiously based idealism of participants demands further study and serious attention if we wish to comprehend what Los Angeles is and how it works. Here we see that the tradition of American voluntarism, which has its origins in rural communities and small towns of the early nineteenth century, has found new multi-ethnic forms of expression in wide-ranging projects sponsored by churches in a postmodern city at the dawn of a new millennium.	16
Questions about Los Angeles remain unstudied or unresolved, as the preceding example of religiously inspired institutions and initiatives indicates. How has the civic culture of the city emerged and developed? Who were the decision-makers who guided the creation of Los Angeles and the city's evolution of the past forty years? What were the circumstances they faced that influenced their conclusions? How have shifting demographics affected the patterns established by social and cultural elites? How has public education contributed to both the coherence and dysfunction of the metropolis? There is plenty of work for a generation of historians and urban theorists who wish to contribute to our understanding of the city. The virtual absence of historians among contributors to this volume often leaves the reader without sufficient perspective and analysis to move beyond suggested paradigms of Los Angeles as weird, outlandish, and incoherent (Pegler and others), as singular and unique (Dear, Soja, Carey McWilliams), or as corrupt, disintegrating, and disaster-plagued (Davis).22	17
A wide breadth of issues requires serious consideration if one is to understand the dynamics of this vast, complicated, and energetic metropolis. We need further investigations as enlightening as those written by Jennifer Wolch on homelessness, Harvey Moltoch on the economic importance of the creative arts, and Martin Wach on transportation policy. The findings of these scholars ought to be required reading for local civic, business, and religious leaders. Other topics, as noted above, require study of equal caliber and insight, and one would hope that Scott and Soja would compile a further volume that would be equally thought-provoking and challenging for the issues raised and the variety of interpretations offered.23 There is much in this volume upon which the members of the scholarly community can build in their efforts to comprehend more clearly the challenges of living in and guiding this complex urban reality, this "City of the Angels."	18
Michael E. Engh, S.J., is an associate professor of history at Loyola Marymount University, where he is also a member of the executive committee of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, which he helped found. Author of Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles (1992), he studied with Allan G. Bogue at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His major interest is the history of Los Angeles, and in 1991 he founded with Howard Shorr the Los Angeles History Seminar at the Huntington Library, a group he has co-chaired since its inception. Presently, he is working on a book-length biography of Mary Julia Workman, a Los Angeles progressive and civic figure who was active from 1890 to 1960. At press is a chapter in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, edited by William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley, Calif.) He has also published on the history of religion in the American West, including a documentary volume he co-edited, The Frontiers and Catholic Identities (1999). Notes The author wishes to thank the following for their assistance: Martin Ridge, Clark Davis, Anthony B. Brzoska, S.J., John McManamon, S.J., John A. Coleman, S.J., and the anonymous reviewers of this article; student research assistants Denis Delja and Gena Arriola; and, once again, the Jesuits of Casa Luis Espinal, Los Angeles. 1 Westbrook Pegler, syndicated column, "Fair Enough" (November 22, 1938), quoted in W. W. Robinson, comp., What They Say about the Angels (Pasadena, Calif., 1942), 59. 2 The opening of the Getty Museum complex in December 1997 offers one example of the attention Los Angeles has received from cultural critics worldwide. See Kurt Andersen, "Letter from Los Angeles: A City on a Hill," New Yorker (September 29, 1997): 66–73; and Martin Filler, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," New York Review of Books (December 18, 1997): 29–33. 3 Significant works in recent years include Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore, Md., 1999); Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, 1997); William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Point Arena, Calif., 1997); Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London, 1997); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow (Los Angeles, 1994); Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Hynda L. Rudd, comp. and ed., Los Angeles and Its Environs in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography of a Metropolis, 1970–1990 (Los Angeles, 1996); Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, eds., Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996); Dear, ed., Atlas of Southern California (Los Angeles, 1996); Dear, et al., eds., Atlas of Southern California, vol. 2 (Los Angeles, 1998); Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York, 1996); James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Northridge, Calif., 1997); Los Angeles County Children's Planning Council, Ethnic Community Profiles: Planning for a New Los Angeles (Los Angeles, December 1996); Carolyn Kozo Cole and Kathy Kobayashi, Shades of L.A.: Pictures from Ethnic Family Albums (New York, 1996); Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, N.J., 1993); Gerald S. Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, Va., 1995); Rodolfo F. Acuña, Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (London, 1996); Andrew Rolle, Los Angeles: From Pueblo to City of the Future, 2d edn. (San Francisco, 1995); Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong, eds., Los Angeles: Struggles toward Multiethnic Community: Asian American, African American and Latino Perspectives (Seattle, 1994); and David Reid, ed., Sex, Death and God in L.A. (Berkeley, 1992). 4 The following institutes have been established in the past five years: the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California; the Center for Southern California Studies at California State University, Northridge; and the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. These institutes complement older research departments at UCLA and USC, as well as the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles. See also Cultural Inheritance/L.A.: A Directory of Less-Visible Archives and Collections in the Los Angeles Region (Los Angeles, 1999). 5 Examples of these publications include G. Harold Powell, Letters from the Orange Empire, Richard Lillard, ed. (1990); Southern California Local History: A Gathering of the Writings of W. W. Robinson, Doyce Nunis, Jr., ed. (1993); and Mike Eberts, Griffith Park: A Centennial History (1996). 6 Three new or forthcoming volumes will further explore the city's history: Clark Davis, Company Men: White Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892–1941 (Baltimore, 2000); William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., Building the Metropolis: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley, Calif.); and Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago). 7 T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (New York, 1995). 8 For a helpful summary of the characteristics of the Chicago and Los Angeles schools, see Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, "Postmodern Urbanism," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (1998): 51–52. 9 Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). See also Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis, 1999). 10 For a glossary of the neologisms of postmodern urban theory, see Dear and Flusty, "Postmodern Urbanism," 54–68. 11 See also Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities (New York, 1997); Dianne Walta Hart, Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant's Story (Wilmington, Del., 1997); David Rieff, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, 2d edn. (New York, 1995); and Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London, 1990). 12 David Ward and Olivier Zunz, eds., Landscaping of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940 (New York, 1992), 4. 13 Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia, 1987). 14 See, for example, the work of Robert D. Putnam, "The Decline of Civil Society: How Come? So What?" Optimum 27 (1996): 27–36; and "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 65–78. Michael Dear, "In the City, Time Becomes Visible: Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781–1991," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 99. 15 Two of the more familiar works by Mike Davis are City of Quartz; and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998). 16 Lynell George, No Crystal Stair: African-Americans in the City of Angels (London, 1992). 17 John B. Orr, et al., Politics of the Spirit: Religion and Multiethnicity in Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1994). 18 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alond: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000); Putnam, "Bowling Alone, Revisited," The Responsive Community 5 (Spring 1995): 18–33; and Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaela Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J., 1993). See also James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 300–21. 19 John A. Coleman, S.J., "Discipleship and Social Capital," chapter 2 in his forthcoming book, Public Discipleship: Paradenominational Groups and Citizenship. 20 For a discussion of the urban renewal efforts of the Genesis Plus project, for example, see Margaret Ramirez, "Teamed Up to Clean Up," Los Angeles Times (June 5, 1999): B1, B3. For a broader discussion of emerging citizens' organizations, see David Bornstein, "A Force Now in the World, Citizens Flex Social Muscle," New York Times (July 10, 1999): A15, A17. 21 R. Stephen Warner, "Religion, Boundaries, and Bridges," Sociology of Religion 58 (Fall 1997): 219. 22 Carey McWilliams developed his influential interpretation of Los Angeles as a unique city in Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946; rpt. edn., Salt Lake City, 1973). 23 Kevin Starr, California State Librarian, USC professor, and author of well-received histories of Los Angeles, has forcefully urged that civic and business leaders make better use of the talent available in the city's academic institutions for addressing contemporary urban challenges. See Starr, "L.A.'s Universities Can Help Heal the City," Los Angeles Times (November 21, 1999): M 1, 6.

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