My Los Angeles

At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, this book provides an understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. "Soja is a legendary figure; a lodestar for an entire generation of urbanists and planners. No one else has puzzled out Los Angeles with so much clarity, patience and optimistic passion. Throw away your Thomas Brothers, this is the road atlas you really need." —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz "Ed Soja has long been one of the most creative, perceptive and prolific analysts of the contemporary urban condition. In his latest book, Soja synthesizes over three decades of research and reflection on Los Angeles, an urban region which he presents as a powerful lens into the large-scale economic, political and cultural forces that are shaping the production of space under early twenty-first century capitalism. In so doing, Soja opens up new horizons for urban theorists, planners, designers and activists concerned to understand and to shape the future geographies of our hyperurbanizing planet." —Neil Brenner, author of New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood Fighting the distorted imagery attached to Los Angeles, Edward Soja uses LA to rekindle our urban imagination about major issues affecting the world today. Here is a Los Angeles worthy to be learned from, an exemplary city region consisting of a network of at least forty cities with populations greater than 100,000. This polycentric regional city, once the least dense American metropolis, is now the country's densest urbanized area. Traditionally seen as one of the most business-centered environments, Los Angeles has become a major focus for the American labor movement and generator of some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. A model in the past of unrooted "placeless" urbanism, it has become a hive of neighborhood organizations practicing sophisticated forms of location-based politics. Once the most WASP metropolis in the country, LA is now among the most culturally heterogeneous cities the world has ever seen. Soja takes us through his evolving interpretations of this urban metamorphosis, combining varying doses of radical political economy, critical postmodernism, comparative urban studies, and the new regionalism. He reaches the confident conclusion that over the past thirty years Los Angeles has been experiencing a profound deconstruction and reconstitution, a breakdown of the familiar model of metropolitan growth and the formation of a new mode of regional urbanization that is spreading to many other megacity regions in the world. Soja's highly personal and assertively spatial look at Los Angeles inspires, informs, challenges, and entertains.