Los Angeles

As Janet Abu-Lughod (1999) has stated, it is now clear, “even if there had been any prior doubt, that Los Angeles's claim to be a global city—in terms of both economy and demography—has been fully established” (p. 398).

Although globalization usually conjures up images of placelessness, flows, disjuncture, and dissolution, Los Angeles has become, since the 1980s, a place where “the world becomes a city” and a visible symbol of the reemergent importance of local-to-global connectivity. Nowhere was this claim better expressed than in Edward Soja's (1989) famous passage that extolled the diversity of the Los Angeles region as emblematic of a new form of universal urbanism:

Los Angeles figures as the ultimate classroom for students of cities today. Driven by, and co-producing, dynamic processes of globalization, neoliberalization, immigration, and regionalization, Los Angeles has given rise to a multifaceted, contested but widely acclaimed school of urbanism and to arguably the most important urban monograph of the late 20th century, Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1990).

Los Angeles is a city of 4 million in a county of 10 million and an urban region of 18 million in southern California. Given its often inward-looking and conservative traditions, based on the rooted economies of land, oil, and agriculture, Los Angeles may seem an unlikely symbol of the global age. Although its spatial form and eccentric culture are often cited as evidence for the city's unique character in recent decades, Los Angeles rather typified a sequence of different urban models. In the early part of the 20th century, the city was a midwestern outpost, White, nonindustrial, and small-townish despite its Mexican heritage and gigantic size; after World War II, it was in many ways the oil-rich poster child of the consumerist American way of life. During that time, a wide swathe of industrial factories—autos, aerospace, consumer durables—started to be rolled out along the region's freeways. Industrial and residential suburbs dotted a continuously urbanizing landscape spreading evenly between the mountains and deserts of the Inland Empire to the surf of the Pacific Ocean, from the vast suburbs of the San Fernando Valley to the citrus groves turned high-tech corridor in Orange County. Although Los Angeles became known for its freewheeling lifestyle and easygoing, capitalist joie de vivre, it was perhaps more of a product of the federal government than any other American city. The planned and richly financed expansion of the war economy that made its home in Los Angeles complemented the ideology of unrestrained freedom and personal achievement. It was the ultimate Fordist-industrial metropolis. Eventually, Los Angeles—with its colorful palette of urban contradictions—was a prime model for the emergent global city network that scholars saw emerge in the 1980s.

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