From Chicago to LA: Making Sense of Urban Theory

From Chicago to LA: Making Sense of Urban Theory

The city is the nucleus of a wider zone of activity from which it draws its resources and over which it exerts its influence.

The Los Angeles Schools
Dear and Flusty believe that despite the city’s contempt for its own history it does possess a rich intellectual, cultural, and artistic heritage. They talk about how the “ultimate irony is that in the L.A. architectural culture, where heterogeneity is valued over conformity, and creativity over propriety, the periphery is often the center.”(6) Thus, to talk about the different schools that discuss the trends of thought found about L.A. they define school by the following:

1. engaged on a common project
2. geographically proximate
3. self-consciously collaborative
4. externally recognized

L.A. is thus recognized as a great exception to usual schools of thought about cities, as Dear and Flusty mention McWilliams emphasis on L.A.’s “uniqueness with the assertion that the area reverses almost any proposition about the settlement of western America”(8). The essence of Los Angeles was revealed more clearly in its deviations from that its similarities to the great American metropolis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They note that every American city that is growing, like the edge city, is growing in the nature of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles school recognizes L. A. as being an “aberrant curiosity distinct from other forms of urbanism”(14). L.A. is the exploration of new realities and for resistance to old hegemonies.” The L.A. school “has largely shown itself to be less about looking to Los Angeles for models of the urban and more about looking for contemporary expressions of the urban in Los Angeles”(14). Dear and Flusty underscore that in their book they are less trying to see how L.A. is unique, but more so trying to map the intellectual terrain surrounding a perspective on twenty-first century cities.