The Paradigmatic City: Postindustrial Illusion and the Los Angeles School

In the 1980s a group of geographers known informally as the Los Angeles School proclaimed Los Angeles as the paradigmatic metropolis of the late-twentieth century. The postmodern/flexible specialization model Los Angeles School adherents developed to explain Los Angeles and validate its paradigmatic status is critiqued theoretically and empirically. The unfortunate timing of their claims of Los Angeles' suzerainty over the Pacific Rim is discussed, and the development and status of its propulsive industrial sectors, such as armaments, aerospace, entertainment, finance, and real estate, are examined. The armaments industry receives special attention because of its critical role in postwar Los Angeles' growth and subsequent decline and because the Los Angeles School devoted considerable research and even praise to this particular type of government "warfare" spending as a key constituent of the area's technopole. The entertainment industry is not sufficient to extract Los Angeles from its continuing crisis. At the moment, Los Angeles lacks any credible plan for overcoming the contemporary malaise. The difficulties in the Los Angeles School's analysis are held to stem from their theoretical synthesis of postmodernism and flexible specialization, a natural but unfortunate Ptolemaic perspective expressed in the belief that one's particular locale is paradigmatic and a lack of recognition of the malignant aspects of defense-spurred economic development.     

Labor resistance and municipal power: Scalar mismatch in the Los Angeles Green New Deal

In 2019, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced the Los Angeles Green New Deal (LAGND), an ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by 2045. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the electricity provider for the city and the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States—began a consultation process with local stakeholders and energy system modelers to determine possible scenarios to accomplish this goal. While the LAGND was lauded by environmentalists and progressives both within Los Angeles and beyond, it has been heavily opposed by the IBEW 18, the union that represents nearly all employees at LADWP. IBEW 18 has staged protests, created political advocacy organizations, and funded anti-decarbonization political candidates. This paper draws on 20 semi-structured interviews and other secondary materials to understand the union's oppositionand to demonstrate some of the unique challenges that municipal-scale Green New Deal (GND) plans face. We argue that the tensions between the mayor's office and unionized utility workers can be explained, at least in part, by three instances of scalar misalignment—or mismatch—that arise from trying to undertake a GND plan at the city level. These include mismatch between: (1) the scales of political activism and engagement between the mayor and the union, (2) the aims of the GND narrative and the limits imposed by the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles, and (3) the current and future geographies of the electric power system and related infrastructure and its path dependencies.     

Mode Choice in a Hub-and-Spoke Network: A Zero-One Linear Programming Approach

While research has tackled the hub-and-spoke network design problem, that research has overlooked the air-truck modal integration issue which is a common feature of real express delivery systems. This paper devises integer linear programs to represent the mode and route assignment aspects of the operational problem. The model is solved under four different levels of delivery schedule, and the results show that as the promised delivery schedule is relaxed, not only does the use of truck routes become more desirable, but also interesting adjustments in mode and hub assignment occur. Consider the case of hubs in Los Angeles and Dayton. As the time constraints are relaxed, cities such as Minneapolis and New Orleans originally linked by air to Los Angeles, switch to Dayton because cheaper truck routes become feasible.     

FRAGMENTS OF POSTWAR LOS ANGELES: THE BLACK DAHLIA IN FACT AND FICTION*

The gruesome murder of Elizabeth Short, a sex worker nicknamed the “Black Dahlia,” created a real-life film noir tale in postwar Los Angeles. In the unsuccessful search for her killer, the tabloid press and psychiatric “experts” indicted all forms of the open sexual expression brought on by the war as complicit. The problematic connection made at the time between the sexually dangerous woman and the corruptions of postwar Los Angeles has been reinforced in the numerous fictional retellings of the case written in the past fifteen years.     

Measuring culture change

Clyde M. Woods and Theodore D. Graves. The Process of Medical Change in a Highland Guatemalan Town. Los Angeles: Latin American Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973. vii + 61 pp. Figures, tables, bibliography, and index. $2.95 (paper).     

When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Doug Mercer, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Paul Routledge, Global Social Movements     

«Nature's workshop» industry and urban expansion in Southern California, 1900–1950

Scholars and pundits have cast Los Angeles as a prototype for the twentieth century North American metropolis. Most accounts focus primarily, if not exclusively, on residential development and rely on stock suburban theses for their interpretation. Regional expansion has been presented as a new landscape order where precise location is a secondary concern, development proceeds without planning, and the result is a homogeneous sprawl. Studies of manufacturing and industrial location in southern California often share these conventions. An historical investigation reveals that industry and industrial location have been key determinants of urban form, and that industrial, commercial, and residential development have been co-ordinated, complementary, and highly planned. These coincident enterprises recast the region during the first half of the twentieth century. There were three interrelated but qualitatively distinct types of industrial zones in Los Angeles during this period: a mixed-use, home-market district adjacent to the central business district; an industry-only, mass-production, branch-plant zone in Vernon and the eastside; and a series of oil, film, and aircraft satellites on the urban periphery. This finding challenges the received wisdom regarding industrial geography, a progressive narrative of technological innovation and production regimes that chronicle ascension, transformation, and succession.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster Mike Davis
Geopolitics: re-visioning world politics John Agnew
Environment and society in Eastern Europe Andrew Tickle and Ian Welsh     

Book Reviews

Tolley, R. and Turton, B. (1995), Transport Systems, Policy and Planning. A Geographical Approach
Soja, E.W. (1996), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places
Cole, J. (1996), Geography of the World's Major Regions
Roberts, B.K. (1966), Landscapes of Settlement, Prehistory to the Present
Greed, Clara H. (1994), Women and Planning—Creating Gendered Realities
Auty, R.M. (1995), Patterns of Development. Resources, policy and economic growth     

Voices From This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts

Nestled between the Sierra Nevada and the White-Inyo mountainranges in eastern California, the Owens Valley is geographicallyisolated and spatially bound. Yet this secluded sliver of Californiapossesses a history that blatantly transcends the local. Asa major site of the well-known water wars, the Owens Valleybecame a significant, albeit controversial source of water,enabled Los Angeles’ burgeoning development in the earlytwentieth century. Conceived of in 1904 and completed by 1913,the Los Angeles aqueduct literally bound the Owens Valley tothe demands of the growing metropolis. Several decades later,in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the agriculturallyand economically floundering Owens Valley was chosen as     

TV News Hyper-coverage and the Representation of Place: Observations on the O.J. Simpson Case

From June 1994 until October 1995, the television news industry constructed and sustained a window of saturating hyper-coverage surrounding the O.J. Simpson double-murder case. Coverage of the Simpson case provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the contemporary media practice of hyper-coverage and its possible effects on the frequency and manner in which places are reported and hence represented in television news broadcasts. Drawing from published critiques and statistics of the Simpson coverage and a preliminary content analysis of ABC World News Tonight broadcasts, this theoretical paper offers three observations: (1) the Simpson hyper-coverage altered the frequency, prominence, and metaphorical context of news about Los Angeles; (2) the Simpson hyper-coverage reduced the frequency of non-Los Angeles domestic news coverage and eclipsed the prominence of international news locations; and (3) the Simpson hyper-coverage led to the Simpsonization of domestic news (i.e. television journalists using the events in Los Angeles as a central metaphor around which to contextualize the presentation of other national news events and locations). Exploration into the Simpson media event provides insight into contemporary television journalistic conventions and how these news organization practices shape the representation of places in American popular culture.     

LOS ANGELES AFTER THE STORM: THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER

This article weighs recent scientific evidence that the urbanization of Southern California has taken place during one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity in the last 3500 years. Official disaster and resource planning, moreover, has been based on record-keeping shorter than the temporal wavelengths of the most important landscape processes. Indeed, the “biblical” flood, fire, and earthquake disasters of the last three years may only be a prelude to seismic and climatic events of far greater magnitude. What will be the future of the Los Angeles area if Congress refuses to continue federal disaster subsidies?     

A world geography of global media cities

This is an empirical study that analyses the geography of 33 global media firms through their locations in 284 cities across the world. The analyses are set within the world cities literature and a methodology is used that searches out city networks from data on firms to define ‘global media cities’. Resulting definitions of network connectivities allow comparisons to be made with more familiar world city network results on global service centres. The relative importance of media industries in European cities is highlighted. The main analysis uses a principal components model to discover global media fields centred upon specific articulator cities, notably New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Berlin, London and Paris. It is concluded that there is a geographical logic to the growth of large media companies.     

Sunshine and the Open Shop: Ford and Darwin in 1920s Los Angeles

By 1910, Los Angeles was already notorious as national capital of the open shop. During World War I, the Chamber of Commerce launched an ambitious campaign to attract eastern investment to new manufacturing districts southeast of downtown. With the arrival of hundreds of branch plants in the 1920s, Los Angeles' business leaders—quoting Ford and vulgarizing Darwin—embraced a sweeping vision of Urban Eugenics based on scientific factory planning, proprietary industrial suburbs, mass-produced bungalows, and a racially selected workforce. Even Mother Nature was a scab.     

Antinomial Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. By Beatrice Hanssen (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 218 pp. $35.00 cloth.     

Ethnicity,political development and modernization in Africa

Nelson Kasfir. The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. xvi + 323 pp. Tables, bibliography, and index. $23.50.     

Manners of the market place

William G. Davis. Social Relations in a Philippine Market: Self‐interest and Subjectivity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. xiii + 315 pp. Appendixes, bibliography and index. $12.50.