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.     

Materializing Inequality: The Archaeology of Tourism Laborers in Turn-of-the-Century Los Angeles

This article traces the historical marginalization of tourism workers in Southern California, a region made popular in the late 1800s for its numerous leisurely activities. Workers employed in Southern California’s hotel industry continue to face discrimination, low wages, and dangerous and environmentally hazardous work conditions, policies that originated during the development of the region’s tourism industry. Using California’s most popular tourist site from 1893 to 1936, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, as a case study, this article examines the historical spatial, ideological, and legal factors that have contributed to the contemporary stratification of Los Angeles’ hotel laborers. It concludes with an emphasis on how archaeological and archival research can be used to help modern day tourism laborers gain the attention and benefits they so direly deserve.     

Los Angeles Pentecostals: The Dislocation of a People and the Birth of a Movement

By examining the geographical, economic, religious, and social changes experienced by those who became Pentecostals, and by comparing the religious and cultural backgrounds of native and migrant Angelinos in the 1920s and 1930s with the Pentecostal message, this article demonstrates that several factors contributed to the receptivity of those who lived in the Los Angeles region. First, a deep sense of dislocation predisposed a number of white Angelinos to religious realignment. Next, African Americans were just emerging from one of the most trying times in their long history of suffering, and that suffering had led to millennial expectations that the Pentecostal movement seemed to presage. Then, the Pentecostal message influenced the direction of that realignment by appealing both to those expectations and to other specific cultural characteristics common to many Angelinos. Finally, the article shows that the Pentecostal experience provided a sense of empowerment that some in the movement found transformative.     

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.     

Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79

In Los Angeles, Hollywood in particular, straight‐themed pornography and gay male nightlife became more visible and, moral reformers believed, of grave public concern between the early 1960s and the early 1970s. As a result, defining the limits of sexual freedom became a problem for urban public officials, who resolved the dilemma by casting heterosexual sex entertainment as disruptive of neighbourhood quality of life, making it a question of property values and crime, and reframing gay nightlife as an issue of privacy and the right of public assembly. The article considers battles over commercial pornography and battles over gay male rights and culture. As the civil rights and black power movements commanded, then lost, the attention of liberals, sexual libertarians and a mobilised gay rights movement forced urban politicians to reconsider the place of sex and sexual identity in public life. A new generation of urban liberals faced a difficult challenge: to respond to their constituents' libertarian views of sex and sexuality while not appearing to endorse civic disorder and economic decline. They had to defend both privacy rights and property rights.     

被遗忘的工人郊区化——以洛杉矶大都市区为例(1920-1940)

美国郊区史研究的主流观点认为,中产阶级白人是郊区最早的居民,也是数量上占绝对优势的群体,甚至郊区就是中产阶级白人居住区的同义语。这种观点不仅在美国,而且在我国学术界也有很大影响。然而,根据近年的研究,许多大都市区也有数量可观的工人郊区,这一点洛杉矶最为典型。1920—1940年间,工人郊区曾是这里最主要的郊区模式,工人是此时洛杉矶郊区化的主要参与者,其动力是郊区的工业化进程、廉价住房市场和交通技术的进步。通过对人口统计数据中居民的职业、受教育情况、族裔、住房等信息的分析,可以揭示这种异于传统的郊区化模式。研究此前被认为不存在或被忽略的工人郊区的历史,有助于更全面地理解郊区化进程,丰富对大都市区发展历史的认识,也部分说明了环境不公正形成的历史原因。     

Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz

This paper explores the relationship between place and processes of innovation in popular music, focusing on the example of the bebop style of jazz. Bebop emerged during the 1940s both as a reaction against older jazz styles and as an expression of artistic innovation within a community of younger jazz musicians. The process of its creation and early development was situated in a set of "nested'' locales centered in New York City. This analysis examines the diverse nature of these locales and the distinctive ways in which they fostered interactions among bebop's creators and their various audiences. The analysis reveals that different locales played dissimilar roles during specific stages in bebop's emergence, as it evolved into an increasingly coherent form of cultural expression. Most importantly, certain jazz clubs in Harlem provided a setting for the early experimentation that culminated in the bebop style, but the style's subsequent formalization and popularization depended on its exposure in jazz clubs in midtown Manhattan, at first along 52nd Street and later on nearby sections of Broadway. These findings confirm the importance of place in understanding the dynamic nature of popular music and the processes of innovation integral to it.