| Is L.A. a Model or a Mess? | The American Historical Review, 105.5

Review Essays

Is L.A. a Model or a Mess?

CATHERINE COQUERY-VIDROVITCH

The book The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century results from an interdisciplinary program of research promoted at UCLA.¹ As the title suggests, it presents Los Angeles as one of the most, if not the most, original American city and the model of the postmodern metropolis. Nevertheless, due to the multiplicity of essays included, the reader never gets a clear idea of how and why Los Angeles is unique, supposing it actually is. Is L.A. a model or a mess? This question might be better answered by introducing a few comparisons with other cities in the world, especially metropolises that have emerged recently, echoing a more or less radical modernization of their environments. As I will suggest, Johannesburg probably is or shortly will become a clearer example of postmodern urbanism. 1

     Another shortcoming apparent is the role of history: what sets Los Angeles apart from other cities in the United States is above all its specific history. History is both much and little used in this book. It is a somewhat factual chronicle. But history is a factor as well as a fact, and it should better appear as an investigating and explanatory tool rather than just as a factual report. Unfortunately, few to none of the authors here may be called urban historians per se; most of them are brilliant social scientists, urban planners, geographers, or architects. 2

     Thus the book gathers together a lot of interesting details, but it partly fails to realize what the editors aimed at: proposing a theory and inventing a new postmodern urban school. The previous heritages of urban design are promptly rejected, city planners intending to understand the postmodern metropolis as having "increasingly turned away from traditional manufacturing cities and the conventions of the Chicago school."² As readers may know, the Chicago School sociologists, who blossomed between the two world wars, forged their theory on the study of a growing Chicago and the often brutal cultural encounters of migrant workers and older or newer urbanites that generated ethnic riots. Their empirical studies also stressed the emergence of a new urban way of life, made up of the synthesis of an ethnic mosaic of smaller immigrant communities inside the larger city with its industrial focus. This model, of course, no longer fits the Los Angeles case. The City's authors might also be alluding to the impossibility of applying Kevin Lynch's study of Boston to Los Angeles, with the idea that a city can only be totally understood from the image those urbanites forged of themselves.³ The empirical method privileged here is reminiscent of the Manchester school of sociology that developed in the 1950s and 1960s but for a notable difference: the approach is far from being a mere sociological observation of the urban market of labor. Social movements are given as such rather than analyzed, and thus a questioning of the labor force as a social agent is absent; the points stressed are racial inequality (the essay by Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg) and homelessness (by Jennifer Wolch) rather than the homeless.⁴ Political, economic, institutional, and spatial factors are privileged, and often carefully connected to their historical processes, but the connections between proposals and conclusions do not clearly appear. 3

     In spite of the subtitle, the book is mainly made up of case studies, "empirical vignettes," as the preface calls them, and of historical-geographic illustrations much more than theoretical interpretations: as a historian fond of practical observations, I will not complain of it. It is also good that the facets examined are varied: from the evolution of architectural forms (by Charles Jencks), to the process of transportation policy (Martin Wachs), to Los Angeles as design product (Harvey Molotch), to the city's high-technology industrial development (Allen J. Scott), to the place within it of varied minorities, above all African Americans (Susan Anderson) and Latinos (Raymond A. Rocco).⁵ Unfortunately, so many topics are introduced that the main thread of understanding is lost, if it ever existed. Variety is thus both a benefit and a limitation to the multi-sided, spatial, and social approach to understanding Los Angeles followed in this book. Moreover, one misses a comprehensive introduction or conclusion attempting to connect decisively the many paths offered here. There is fragmentation despite the fact that all fifteen contributors employ similar interdisciplinary methodologies. Most of the authors are urban planners or architects; they all come from the University of California, and most from UCLA; they include geographers, sociologists, political scientists, urban experts, and one historian. 4

     The main interest of the book is that most of the articles intend to question the process of urbanization. Therefore, nearly all the chapters deal with the historical past of the city, from its early beginnings in 1781 until the 1960s. In 1996, the date of publication, this historical interest in Los Angeles was relatively new for social scientists, though no longer (see Greg Hise's recent book, for example).⁶ Nevertheless, urban historians have been busy, all the more so since the twin ravages of riot and recession, reconstructing how this fallen City of the Angels was once upon a time born as a self-styled West Coast metropolis, especially in the crucial period of the oil boom from 1900 to 1920.⁷ It is rather surprising here that a chronology of urbanization is not clearly related to a similar chronology of economic history. For example, little is made of the past role and heritage of the oil industry, of the military, both U.S. Navy and armaments industry, and of L.A.'s love affair with the airplane, civilian as well as military. It is important to explain how L.A.'s low-cost public infrastructure represented a lure for fledging airplane manufacturers. With the coming of World War II, the region's entire manufacturing became heavily dependent on military spending. As a result, L.A.'s postwar economy has been highly vulnerable to national political funding cycles. In Fortress California (1992), Roger W. Lotchin showed how military booster projects created even more powerful city-wide growth coalitions. He also explained why, today, Department of Defense cutbacks are at the heart of the region's economic woes.⁸ Similarly, not enough is done with the fundamental factor of the omnipresent need for water, and its growth-limiting reality. In the twentieth century, the L.A. story probably resulted more from water imperialism than from gas imperialism. Indeed, L.A.'s story is a modern saga involving the complex planning, building, and managing of a gargantuan hydraulic society, featuring massive public works projects and suburban and urban settlements to house and serve massive migrations of workers.⁹ Unfortunately, most of these historical chapters not being written by historians, several sections are more descriptive or factual than problem-based; they propose at best a rough periodization of Los Angeles urbanism from 1751 to 1991 (see the essay by Michael Dear). The great exception is the clear chapter drawing a political history of the L.A. landscape, based on a solid analysis of the public land-tenure system and land speculation (by Mike Davis). We may also note the originality of Los Angeles seen as a laboratory for institutions trying to control the environment—and therefore the creation and control of green space—since its founding as a Spanish agricultural pueblo (the essay by Margaret FitzsSimmons and Robert Gottlieb).¹⁰ This "forces us to notice both historical and geographical ironies: the ironies of history—utopian Los Angeles become an environmental dystopia—intersect the ironies of geography—the oasis city become the city in the desert"; the clean and well-watered garden of heaven has "become a world symbol of urban pollution."¹¹ 5

     Certainly on purpose, modern Los Angeles is not proposed at first as it usually is: made by and for driving a car. Nevertheless, the fact cannot be avoided that L.A. was the first city intently based on the automobile, which largely accounts for its extreme discontinuities and fragmentation between a series of relatively remote denser nodes. An excellent chapter by Martin Wachs reminds us that the transportation network of Los Angeles is both the product and the means by which the city asserts its modernity. But this resulted in "an accumulation of poorly integrated elements representing different concepts of political expediency, each of which in its day was presented as a symbol of progress and technological achievement."¹² It is a pity that the reader is left either to connect this chapter or not to other chapters, such as the one by Charles Jencks on the "hetero-architecture" typical of the modern city (a phrase meaning the capacity of postmodern design to realize an ambiguous mixture of functionality and uselessness, a "calculated informality" multiplying lifestyles and juxtaposing with obvious pleasure heterogeneous styles and mixed cultural references in spite of growing ethnic zoning).¹³ 6

     The closer attempt at a theoretical synthesis is probably the essay by Richard Weinstein asserting Los Angeles as "the first American city." He argues that L.A. "is the first consequential American city to separate itself decisively from European models and to reveal the impulse to privatization embedded in the origins of the American Revolution."¹⁴ Let us put aside the fact that this assertion is probably disputable, because exaggerated; it would be more satisfactory to present Los Angeles not as the first American city but rather as the ultimate one to "separate decisively" from the European model. It was also the one where privatization was not "revealed" (urban privatization is indeed a very old American theme) but, rather, was aiming at a climax. Moreover, it would be wise to distinguish between European models; for, no doubt, the London model has very little to do with the Paris or the Berlin one. Europe is a continent and not a single state. In any case, this proposal is not specifically new (any urban writer might write about the same on any American metropolis, except perhaps Boston and San Francisco), but nevertheless it proves especially efficient in the case of Los Angeles, which maximizes what already appeared long ago in other American cities. 7

     In Los Angeles, the extended city is, according to Weinstein, "characterized by a medium-density housing tissue of subdivisions laced with commercial strips" of stores and businesses. It includes small industrial spaces, and it is "periodically marked by centers of varying size," including a "shopping mall with a cineplex, a cluster of commercial buildings, and a health care facility." Therefore, the matrix is a repetitive pattern of "intersecting grids in which a variety of uses are distributed," with regularly scattered nodes or activity centers of higher density.¹⁵ These fragmented discontinuities, which were looked at by professional observers as "anti-urban structure," began as early as 1971 to be defined by the British historian Reyner Banham as a positive urban experience and a possible model of future metropolitan form: "Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape . . . Yet the city has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph."¹⁶ 8

     Arthur Krim, who rediscovered this historiography of L.A. studies, argued, as is suggested in the present book, that these discontinuities are not necessarily "anti-urban": this "anti-urban geographic image of LA [is] an invention of tradition (or anti-tradition) distinct from the 'normal' American city."¹⁷ Discontinuities also result from urban history; according to Weinstein, they "operated on both the new development and the infill between existing (but already dispersed) communities that preceded the automobile"; the rapid extension of this nonhierarchical, flexible model was favored by the accelerated entry of women into the work force during the 1970s and the increasingly widespread ownership of automobiles. This unceasingly "repetitive fabric" of the city, "bounded by the sea or mountain edge," explains the "absence of integrated hierarchical order in either the built or the institutional environment." Los Angeles is "unordered," but "compartmentalized, multileveled, multiscaled, and fragmented." In this, it symbolizes the postmodern United States: "the kind of democracy that accompanies an apotheosis of privatization in which the multiplicity of competing parts leads to a uniform texture of political activity."¹⁸ Therefore, this reflects, as well, the truly American ideals of way of life, policy, and psychic needs: "'The strip is trying to tell us something about ourselves: namely that most Americans prefer convenience, are determined to simplify as much of the mechanical service and distribution sides of life as possible, and are willing to subsidize any informal geographic setting that helps.'"¹⁹ 9

     There occurred in Los Angeles a drastic opposition: on one side, an extended city where local communities organized around the sanctity of privatized space, and where environmental, traffic, and even social constraints might be accepted if they were seen as a way of preserving the essential freedoms of a middle-class lifestyle; on the other side, extreme poverty in the vestigial core of the city and among the poor and working-class communities of every color. For the city's ghettos and barrios were more suburban than anywhere else in America: a century of obsessive Anglofication had increasingly "purified" the population of the old center of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles to the point that, in 1960, more than 80 percent of the population were "Anglos." Los Angeles, after a long history of racist administration, zoning, and violence, had become one of the most segregated cities in the country. No wonder huge riots exploded in 1965. Harsh segregation, and a specific history of this segregation, accounted for the 1965 riot in the ghetto of Watts, even if neither factor is enough in itself: as a matter of fact, we can state about the same for most southern cities, which nevertheless were not necessarily in the forefront of urban violence. Thus the question is open on the especially large scale and high level of these factors, and their conjunction with other ones: notably the fact that Los Angeles was hardly unique in its refusal of federal funds for public housing. (But this issue is not suggested at this point in the book.) A more recent study focusing on contrasted ethnicities in L.A. attributes part of the responsibility for this extreme blacks versus whites polarization to the federal policy concerning armaments and transportation.²⁰ 10

     The central idea of the book is that modern Los Angeles was definitively shaped by two major events: the 1965 and 1992 urban riots. Before the Watts riot of 1965, little was known of Los Angeles as a city. The prototypes of the American City between the wars studied by the academic world were Chicago, Boston, and New York. By contrast, Los Angeles was nicknamed "Six Suburbs in Search of a City." (In fact, it encompasses today 160 separate municipalities in five counties, stretching outward for sixty miles in almost every direction, and counting a current population of 15 million.)²¹ Between the two riots, the restructuring of the city accelerated, but in spite of lavish development, it resulted in an immense failure. 11

     The 1965 riot forced an awareness in the United States of black urban unrest. Observers understood it as such.²² That is probably the reason why several essays deal with the evolution of L.A. segregation and the changing condition of the African Americans in the city (Susan Anderson, Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, Jennifer Wolch).²³ We may find a few contradictions between these authors, which are not solved by the editors: previously, the harshness of a remote segregation was stressed; now, a more detailed chronology allows them to assert that, ironically, before racial lines began to harden, Los Angeles had been for a time, from 1850 to the 1920s, a kind of Eden for its growing black population. This is obviously an overstatement, since it is compared to the persecution in the South and the privations of large-scale migration to the North. It is true nevertheless that W. E. B. Du Bois recognized in 1913 the existence of a prosperous black middle class in Los Angeles. Harsh segregation was put in place later, with the large-scale migration of southern blacks and whites by the 1930s. Since then, forced residential rules have become intense, imposed by a strong and brutal police force, while the black population has increased from 18,000 in 1920 to 30,000 in 1930 and 75,000 in 1940.²⁴ Between 1942 and 1965, 600,000 African Americans moved into Los Angeles County alone. A hyperactive military and naval industry and a huge industrial zone attracted them. In spite of this prosperity, one third of the African-American work force was unemployed, and almost 60 percent lived on welfare. Most of them settled on the south side, the core of the urban civil war of 1965. By the late 1940s, crowded and inadequate housing was a city-wide problem; but the real estate lobby, an intricate network of banks, and public opinion as expressed by the Los Angeles Times succeeded in refusing federal funds for public housing. This denial resulted in increased overcrowding in the inner city: between World War II and 1960, the black population swelled to nearly 14 percent of the population; but "less than 2 percent of all the housing financed with federal mortgage insurance was made available to blacks."²⁵ (As with other economic factors mentioned above, this last argument should be more developed.) 12

     The fact that L.A. racial contradictions reached their apex at the same time as the Civil Rights Movement and national desegregation made it possible for the city to elect a black mayor (1973). This was Tom Bradley, a member of the city council since 1963, who expressed the moderate sangfroid of the black middle class. Moreover, being an ex-policeman, he was able to reconcile the African-American community with the powerful and previously racist Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and he succeeded in mobilizing poor and working-class black voters.²⁶ 13

     But, as Anderson reports, "the Bradley administration presided over a city undergoing wrenching changes—massive migration," dilution of ex-ghettos into the city (today, only 7 percent of black Angelenos live in all-black neighborhoods compared with 37 percent in other cities), "economic change, and political shifts." Bradley did not solve the problem of the economic degeneration of the poor in the cities, and he failed to maintain a fragile African-American unity. One may regret that Anderson personalizes a bit too much and privileges a political history of the period, while one needs a more acute social and cultural analysis. Nevertheless, she enhances the shift from a rather familiar "race riot" in 1965 to the first "multiethnic riot" in the country. In 1965, South L.A. was 81 percent black. Today, it is at least 52 percent Latino. And the downward spiral of poverty in the city is hardly limited to the confines of once-black neighborhoods. Let us note that recent social monographs on Los Angeles now focus on the history of other minorities than African-American ones.²⁷ 14

     At the very point when the restructured Los Angeles was comfortably consolidated as one of the paradigmatic metropolises of the late twentieth century, the "new" Los Angeles exploded, eight years ago, in the most violent urban insurrection in American history.²⁸ It is probably the best quality of this book—as unordered and multi-nucleated as the city it evokes—that it underscores how cautious urban planners must be, and how attentive to the long trend of past urban history they need to be, to try and understand the present and future of urban life. Today in Los Angeles, extremes of creativity, unreality, postmodern design, and wealth go along with extremes of poverty rivaling the Third World. High rates of poverty extend through all communities, including the Asian. The violence of 1992 brutally asks the question of how to survive in the era of postmodernity. Once more, Los Angeles demonstrates its perverse gift: "the city as oracle, the prophetic urban place that utters a message no one wants to hear."²⁹ 15

     It is regrettable that none of the authors know the masterpiece on Los Angeles published by Bernard Marchand, a French city planner and specialist in quantitative geography, whose doctoral thesis summarizes ten years of research dedicated to that city.³⁰ One may add two recent French syntheses on American urbanism and on Los Angeles, which offer interesting outside observers' viewpoints.³¹ 16

     Moreover, one may ask whether these monographic essays on Los Angeles only question specific features of this quintessence of a city or suggest further thoughts on other metropolises in the world. The question is asked in the introduction, but no answer follows. No attempt is made at any kind of comparison: the contrast is obvious with its neighbor San Francisco, which in spite of close environmental conditions is opposite from L.A. in point after point, historically, and in its urban style of life. With its tolerance and cultural innovation, San Francisco exemplifies another American dream, a humanized urban center. As for Los Angeles, it perhaps created the model, but now most American cities imitate its secure and golden-gated paradises.³² To find a case to compare to Los Angeles, one also needs to look outside the United States. More and more often, similar social contrasts and polarization, and similar experiments of residential insulation of security-obsessed "carceral cities," may be observed today in Third World metropolises. The editors could have made a comparison with Asian cities, such as Tokyo or Singapore, equally rich in "hypersimulations" aiming at restructuring the urban imaginary. 17

     Why not juxtapose Johannesburg? This is a metropolis whose restructuring goes still more rapidly through quite similar constraints: the same historical prosperity (based on gold instead of gas), same heritage of harsh segregation, same impact of repolarization, with a rapid deterioration of a center previously reserved to the white upper-middle class and now invaded by poverty, same exacerbation of a perverse symbiosis between the extremes of wealth and poverty, same construction of increasingly protected home spaces: the well-off urbanites are privatized inside gated and walled-in residences; we may add a somewhat similar architectural variety and the recent and multi-sided flourishing of art and creativity. But the city is fractured, fenced off, fenced in. The lush gardens, paved roads, staid office buildings, and high-security residential areas of white Johannesburg stand in dramatic contrast to the chaotic, indigent life of the African townships.³³ Today, in the post-apartheid era in South Africa as with the end of legal segregation a generation ago in the United States, the contrast between Sandton and Alexandra or Soweto is quite similar to the contrasts in Los Angeles between Hollywood paradises and the black or Latino ghettos. The need for traditionally polarized communities to come face to face with each other is probably much more urgent for the wealthy white suburbanites from Sandton or Hollywood than for the residents of Alexandra or Los Angeles suburbs who leave their poor residential districts every day to work in predominantly white-run businesses, factories, and homes: "People from the northern suburbs, hiding behind their high walls, think the only thing happening in Alex is rape, car hijacking and murder."³⁴ If a postmodern city is growing somewhere, it may be as much in Johannesburg as in Los Angeles. 18

     Therefore, is Los Angeles an exception? Will it be the model for postmodern cities? Is it the ultimate point of the process of "destructive creation" symbolized by Californian capitalism, according to the formula of Joseph Schumpeter? If so, even if one does not accept the apocalyptic view developed since this book by Mike Davis, who definitely sticks to the destructive part of the process, thus provoking controversial reactions, The City does not offer an optimistic view for our future, except for the very wealthy few.³⁵ For the book, which does not propose in the end the redemption prophesized by Davis "beyond Blade Runner" (after the achievement of the present destructive craziness), is poor in suggestions for remedy, except general humanitarian assertions. To be sure, the question is difficult. Are urban planners able to solve wild inequalities in L.A. urbanism? This would imply a complete ideological and political reversal, probably imaginable in a few European countries that still privilege state interventions (such as the "French exception"), and conceivable in developing metropolises of the Southern Hemisphere, where national and still more international institutions enjoy a prevalent power of decision and planning. But what about non-privatized urban planning in the United States? And if urban planners do not try to solve the problem, who will, if the traditional democratic political structure is no longer able to impose its will? 19

     Nevertheless, this thick collection of essays is full of knowledge; it does not pretend to conclude the case, only to open the debate and to propose a few issues. From this point of view, it is a frank success. 20

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch is a professor of modern African history at the Université Paris-7-Denis-Diderot and an adjunct professor at SUNY Binghamton's Department of Sociology. She trained in Paris and has trained in African universities many French-speaking African historians, and has published half a dozen books, including Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara, (1988), and African Women: A Modern History (1997), and Histoire des villes d'Afrique noire: Des origines à la colonisation (1993). The editor of about twenty books on African studies and the Third World, in 1999 she was given the ASA Distinguished Africanist Award. She is a member of the International Congress of Historical Sciences (ICHS) International Bureau.

Notes

¹ Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1996).
² Michael Dear, "In the City, Time Becomes Visible: Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781–1991," in Scott and Soja, The City, 84.
³ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
⁴ Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, "Income and Racial Inequality in Los Angeles"; Jennifer Wolch, "From Global to Local: The Rise of Homelessness in Los Angeles during the 1980s," in Scott and Soja, The City.
⁵ Charles Jencks, "Hetero-Architecture and the L.A. School"; Martin Wachs, "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Polices and Future Prospects"; Harvey Molotch, "L.A. as Design Product: How Art Works in a Regional Economy"; Allen J. Scott, "High-Technology Industrial Development in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County: Observations on Economic Growth and the Evolution of Urban Form"; Susan Anderson, "A City Called Heaven: Black Enchantment and Despair in Los Angeles"; Raymond A. Rocco, "Latino Los Angeles: Reframing Boundaries/Borders," in Scott and Soja, The City.
⁶ Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, Md., 1997). See also Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, eds., Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1997).
⁷ William B. Friedricks, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (Columbus, Ohio, 1992); Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York, 1992); Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford, Calif., 1992); Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York, 1990); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
⁸ Lotchin, Fortress California; and see Steven P. Erie, "Los Angeles: Past Imperfect," Urban Affairs Quarterly 29 (September 1993): 182.
⁹ Starr, Material Dreams; and Erie, "Los Angeles," 179.
¹⁰ Dear, "In the City, Time Becomes Visible"; Mike Davis, "How Eden Lost Its Garden: A Political History of the Los Angeles Landscape"; Margaret FitzSimmons and Robert Gottlieb, "Bounding and Binding Metropolitan Space: The Ambiguous Politics of Nature in Los Angeles," in Scott and Soja, The City.
¹¹ FitzSimmons and Gottlieb, "Bounding and Binding Metropolitan Space," 186–87. See a recent expression of this ecological revival: Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore, Md., 1999).
¹² Wachs, "Evolution of Transportation Policy," 107.
¹³ Jencks, "Hetero-Architecture," 64.
¹⁴ Richard S. Weinstein, "The First American City," in Scott and Soja, The City, 22.
¹⁵ Weinstein, "First American City," 29.
¹⁶ Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; rpt. edn., London, 1973), 21.
¹⁷ Arthur Krim, "Los Angeles and the Anti-Tradition of the Suburban City," Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992): 121.
¹⁸ Weinstein, "First American City," 30, 35.
¹⁹ Quoted in Weinstein, "First American City," 31, from Grady Clay, How to Read the American City (New York, 1974): and E. C. Relph, Place and Placenessness: The Essence of Place (London, 1976).
²⁰ Roger Waldinger and Medi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York, 1996).
²¹ This nickname was based on the 1921 avant-garde Italian play by Luigi Pirandello, "Six Characters in Search of an Author," opening in New York City in October 1922, thus the comparisons with the night views of Los Angeles of the early 1920s. Reported by W. W. Robinson, Los Angeles: A Profile (Norman, Okla., 1968), 27, and quoted by Krim, "Los Angeles," 132, 134, 136.
²² On the riot itself, see Gerald S. Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, Va., 1995).
²³ Anderson, "City Called Heaven"; Ong and Blumenberg, "Income and Racial Inequality"; Wolch, "From Global to Local."
²⁴ Anderson, "City Called Heaven," 341–42, 342.
²⁵ Quoted in Anderson, "City Called Heaven," 345, from Dennis R. Judd, "Segregation Forever?" Nation (December 9, 1991): 740.
²⁶ On the LAPD, let us note two recent studies: Steven Kelly Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis, 1997); Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (New York, 1997).
²⁷ Anderson, "City Called Heaven," 350. See Brian Masaru Hayashi, For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (Stanford, Calif., 1995); Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley, 1999).
²⁸ Edward W. Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis," in Scott and Soja, The City, 426.
²⁹ Anderson, "City Called Heaven," 357.
³⁰ Bernard Marchand, The Emergence of Los Angeles: Population and Housing in the City of Dreams 1940–1970 (London, 1986).
³¹ Sophie Body-Gendrot, Les villes américaines: Les politiques urbaines (Paris, 1997); Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin, Los Angeles: Le mythe américain inachevé (Paris, 1997).
³² Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1997).
³³ Annabel Biles and Adele Sulcas, "Hands across the Highway," Urban Age: The Global City Magazine (Summer 1999): 29–30.
³⁴ Biles and Sulcas, "Hands across the Highway"; see also Alan Mabin, ed., Organization and Economic Change (Johannesburg, 1989); and Alan Mabin and Dan Smit, Reconstructing South Africa's Cities 1900–2000: A Prospectus (or, a Cautionary) (Johannesburg, 1992). See also the recent symposium on Durban Urbanization, July 1998, organized by the urban historian William Freund, and the recent international conference on "Urban Futures" in Johannesburg, July 2000, co-organized by city officials and the University of Witwatersrand.
³⁵ Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998). See also Loïc Wacquant, "Los Angeles, capitale du futur: Un laboratoire de la polarisation," Le monde diplomatique (April 1998): 28.

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