The New Urban Studies

Los Angeles scholars use their region and their ideas to end the dominance of the 'Chicago School'

By D.W. MILLER

Scholars who puzzle over this city for a living can choose among an infinite number of vantage points. Michael J. Dear prefers 75 miles out or 2,000 feet up.

A professor of geography at the University of Southern California, Mr. Dear believes that the region's spatial arrangements reveal something of its social ones. So he periodically drives out to the city's desert periphery or

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maps its ever-changing topography in a rented helicopter. Among the lessons he has learned: Los Angeles owes little to conventional ideas about urbanism.

In the past, that very quality led urban scholars to overlook Los Angeles. It never seemed representative of anyplace but itself. It's sprawling and decentralized. Its political sphere is split into dozens of jurisdictions. It bears little resemblance to the tidy scheme with which social scientists of the celebrated "Chicago School" characterized urban growth: a commercial core anchoring concentric rings of industry and settlement.

Mr. Dear and a growing number of his colleagues argue that the California city is now less an exception than an archetype. In fact, they say, the future of urbanism looks a lot like Los Angeles.

That Los Angeles is important is hardly disputed. Its booming metropolitan population ranks sixth among the world's "megacities," just ahead of Mexico City. It has become the United States' busiest trading port and its main gateway to the Pacific Rim. But these scholars also call it a place where many urban trends -- including economic restructuring, increasingly ineffective political institutions, and the growing effects of globalization -- are revealing themselves early and in exaggerated form.

"We're predicting that other cities will undergo changes and restructuring like Los Angeles," says Edward W. Soja, a professor of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It is extraordinarily indicative of trends occurring all over the world." In other words, Los Angeles is connected to booming cities like Phoenix and Houston by more than just the black asphalt and yellow lines of Interstate 10.

"When you consider what cities are going to be, and how policies are going to develop," says Mr. Dear, "all our old rules tend to be turned upside down." In Los Angeles, as Mr. Dear puts it, "the central core no longer organizes the hinterland." With multiple clusters of economic activity, an urban area has fewer constraints on how it uses space.

At the San Gorgonia Pass, about 75 miles from downtown Los Angeles and only 15 miles shy of Palm Springs, lies Banning, a dusty burg of 23,000 or 24,252, depending on which sign you believe. Trailer parks abut the main drag there. Decades ago, it was a useful stop for the trains that chuffed up the steep pass before heading on to the coast. Now engineers just toot their whistles on the way through.

"There's nothing that warrants its existence, but it's a population center in the track of development," he says, standing on a hill that overlooks Banning. Squinting into the August sun, he points to small oases of tree-shaded subdivisions that dot the landscape on the outskirts of town, seemingly at random. When he first noticed that Banning was growing its own suburbs, he says, he realized that a town's growth could be disconnected from its intrinsic qualities. A brand-new high school of pale pink stucco stands south of the tracks. "It's in Banning, but it has nothing to do with Banning," he says. If you don't mind the two-hour commute into the heart of Los Angeles, you can have a California suburban lifestyle here on the cheap.

"My concern is that this kind of development is very wasteful of land, very expensive to service," he says, his clipped accent betraying an English education and a Welsh boyhood. "But you can't stop Los Angeles from growing. One of the next stops is Las Vegas. How far can Southern California go? It's an infinite development."

Of course, not all of the metropolis's borders are so indeterminate. Along the coast north of Los Angeles County lies Ventura County, a relatively bucolic settlement of 700,000. "The people here act like they're not part of Los Angeles, but they are," says William B. Fulton, a journalist and slow-growth advocate whom Mr. Dear regards as an authority on Ventura.

From 2,000 feet above the border between Ventura and Los Angeles Counties, Mr. Fulton notes the many new, gated communities. One small collection of homes in Ventura County is separated from its school district by a mountain ridge, but its students would rather endure a long, roundabout commute than attend L.A. County schools nearby. You might expect the view from a helicopter to give you a sense of L.A.'s wholeness. Instead you sense a region in fragments.

Ventura is where "sprawl has hit the wall, as long as you don't develop farmland or endangered-species habitat," says Mr. Fulton. The Santa Clara, perhaps the last unchanneled river in the region, snakes among citrus and avocado groves. The farming town of Fillmore might have become a congested bedroom suburb for Santa Clarita, to the east, except that Highway 126 remains a winding, undivided route that residents hope will deter commuters.

As Los Angeles looks for room to expand, outlying communities muster no coordinated response. Environmental activists in Ventura hope to deter further development by buying up land to conserve -- an expensive strategy that relies on continued prosperity -- and by pushing through zoning laws that can be changed only by a countywide referendum. By contrast, Riverside County, southeast of Los Angeles, lacks such grassroots activity; growth opponents have relied mainly on federal environmental laws to beat back sprawl. Both places are united only by the desire to avoid the fate of San Fernando Valley, the city's densely settled hinterland, where little open space is visible from the air. Still, Mr. Fulton says, "the economic pressure to develop is enormous."

Despite its reputation for sprawl, Los Angeles is actually very densely populated. Fourteen million people live in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles County and the four surrounding counties. Over the past century, the area has grown by an average of about 500 newcomers every single day. By 2020, according to estimates, the region will add six million more people -- as some scholars put it, "another two or three Chicagos." The great question is, how will the region accommodate those new multitudes in an area that is environmentally delicate, socially unstable, economically unpredictable, and politically fragmented?

In a sense, Mr. Dear and his colleagues are trying to exorcise a social-science phantom: the Chicago School of urban scholarship, which dominated urban studies for most of the 20th century and still influences thinking about the nature of cities. In the 1920's and 30's, sociologists at the University of Chicago drew upon their city's experience to conceive a "human ecology" of urbanism. They drew stylized diagrams to explain how industry and housing organically accrete in distinct zones around a downtown nucleus. Using terms like "invasion," "succession," and "segregation," they described a process by which waves of immigrants occupied the inner neighborhoods and lower rungs of the economic scale, eventually to move out and up. That way of thinking has persisted, scholars say, because its simplicity and orderliness are very appealing.

Mr. Dear has become something of an impresario for the "L.A. School," a group of urban scholars united mainly by a belief that the city has emerged as an early-warning system for the effects of global capitalism. As director of U.S.C.'s Southern California Studies Center, he is organizing a conference in January on lessons from the Los Angeles experience. And he is editing a book of essays, From Chicago to L.A. (forthcoming from Sage Publications next year), that offers the region as a 21st-century analog to the old urban paradigm. That volume will pick up the thread of another collection, edited by Mr. Soja and Allen J. Scott, a professor of geography and public policy at U.C.L.A., called The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1996). Its title echoes The City, the classic 1925 work of urban sociology by three University of Chicago scholars.

The experience of Los Angeles, says U.C.L.A.'s Mr. Soja, refutes a number of assumptions about cities. Its suburban areas, like Orange County, are becoming so densely settled that they could be said to be urbanizing. Financial and social elites are withdrawing from civic leadership. "People think that most countries and cities and societies are moving away from industrialization," he says. "The notion of a postindustrial society is just wrong."

For example, the rise and decline of manufacturing jobs in American cities has taken a surprising twist in Los Angeles. The Chicago model of urban development assumed a growing industrial base. But in the 1960's and 70's, the traditional assembly-line factories that employed so many urban workers succumbed to cheaper labor overseas.

In the 1980's, the Pentagon's military buildup buoyed L.A.'s aerospace and defense companies and insulated the region from the industrial decline. After the cold war ended, however, cutbacks in defense spending hit Southern California particularly hard and deepened the recession of the early 1990's.

But a strange thing happened in Los Angeles: As the recession faded, it became clear that manufacturing was booming. While cities across the Rust Belt continued "deindustrializing," as economists put it, Los Angeles was "reindustrializing."

"A new model of capitalism was coming into being," says Mr. Scott. On the one hand, the region had developed "technopoles" -- widely dispersed centers of small, nimble companies in high-tech industries like medical equipment, biotechnology, environmental control devices, and communications.

But at the same time, it has also developed thriving craft businesses that make apparel, jewelry, and furniture. Those low-wage industries can compete with factories in the developing world because they count on a constant flow of immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and Central America, many of them undocumented.

Although this "flexible capitalism" helped the region recover much earlier than anyone had predicted, says Mr. Scott, it also widened the income gap between the city's haves and have-nots. The thriving high-wage, high-tech sector swelled the ranks of affluent professionals, engineers, and managers. But fewer well-paid blue-collar jobs remained to lift low-skilled workers into the middle class. It is futile, he says, to keep cutting costs by squeezing wages. In the long run, such companies can compete only by improving quality. But that would mean investing in workers.

As a result, says Mr. Scott, Los Angeles has become the leading example of the "hourglass economy": growing bulges at the high and low ends of the income scale, with fewer middling jobs that offer upward mobility to less-educated workers. The city's problem in other words, is not a large unemployed underclass, but a large group of working poor.

While wages for low-skilled jobs stagnate, the population keeps on growing. That combination has had a ripple effect on housing. As land and housing become scarcer, poorer residents, particularly immigrants, are doubling up wherever they can. Overcrowding is on the rise. It's a surprising development in the city that invented sprawl.

Another consequence is a rise in homelessness. Jennifer Wolch, a professor of geography at the University of Southern California, calls Los Angeles the "homeless capital of the country." By the 1980's, in older parts of the metropolis, there was little land left for new low-income housing projects. Most jurisdictions in the area have minimal services for homeless people or find a way to nudge the them into neighboring towns; most don't even bother to issue a statement of policy for the homeless, as state law requires.

L.A. scholars frequently urge policymakers across the region to respond to social problems in concert. The region, however, is unusually ill-equipped for such cooperation. Los Angeles County alone comprises 89 separate municipalities, of which a half-dozen have incorporated just in the past six years. Activists in the city's vast San Fernando Valley have agitated for years to secede from Los Angeles. Independent enclaves of affluent white residents have proliferated.

In policy terms, all this means that lauded solutions for urban problems won't suit Los Angeles or similar cities. For example, a common proposal for bolstering the tax base of central cities is regional revenue-sharing. Older, inner suburbs are now feeling the effects of decline, the theory goes, giving them reason to make common cause across political boundaries. But because of the region's political fragmentation and traditions of autonomy, says Mr. Dear, "that would never work in Los Angeles."

The weakness of formal political institutions here, members of the L.A. School believe, may nevertheless be energizing unions and inspiring new kinds of social activism. A lobbying effort on behalf of bus riders, most of whom are low-income, recently blocked efforts to shift public funds from busing to the city's new rail system. A national campaign by janitors for a "living wage" has been most successful here. And Los Angeles has lately been fertile ground for unions organizing service workers, like those in hotels, who are predominantly minorities and women.

L.A. School scholars still face a lot of skepticism about their arguments. Joel Kotkin, a senior research fellow at Pepperdine University's Institute for Public Policy, thinks the L.A. School's interpretations of the city are too dark. "To be in the L.A. School," he says, "you have to hate L.A." In his view, the L.A. School is so pessimistic because its real target is global capitalism.

He aims his critique in particular at Mike Davis, a Marxist scholar and urban planner who once taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Mr. Davis made his name with a popular social history, City of Quartz (Random House, 1990), which offered a dystopian but compelling vision of extreme inequality, class conflict, and social unrest. Southern California's severe recession and the Rodney King riots seemed to vindicate his pessimism.

Mr. Davis, who moved to Hawaii and joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, never quite embraced the L.A. School mantle. These days, it's difficult to find any other scholar harboring such a grim view of Los Angeles. Although U.C.L.A.'s Mr. Scott acknowledges that "our political commitments have been on the left," the scholars of the L.A. School have moderated their fears since the region emerged from its severe recession of the early 1990's. But they still regard the riot of April 1992, sparked by the verdict in the King trial, as a harbinger of further social unrest.

Robert A. Beauregard, a professor of management and urban policy at New School University, cautions against expecting pat solutions from the scholarship of the L.A. School. "These are not people grounded in the policy world," he says.

To that charge, Mr. Dear pleads guilty: "Everything I've said is a hypothesis. All these explanations have a temporary legitimacy." He is a leading proponent of the fledgling notion that urbanism has now gone postmodern, and that Los Angeles is a leading example. By postmodern, he means that cities are developing in a way that is no longer rational or manageable according to the old logic of urban development. But he's not predicting chaos. As he sees it, Los Angeles is responding with "new forms of urbanism."

For example, even as competition for housing and employment creates friction among ethnic groups, postmodern urbanists are encouraged by evidence of a growing ethnic "hybridity" in L.A. neighborhoods. Gift shops in Chinatown sell statues of fake jade, made in China, depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe. In botanicas, corner drugstores that cater to Latinos, medicinal artifacts of santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion, have become popular with rural immigrants from southern Mexico. Cut off from their home villages, the spiritual locus of their medicinal rituals, the immigrants make do.

Historians and comparative scholars say they aren't convinced that Los Angeles is a special case. "Queens is every bit as diverse as any section of Los Angeles," says Philip J. Ethington, an urban historian at the University of Southern California. In journal articles, he has chided L.A. Schoolers for bolstering their case with unsupported statements that the region is the "biggest," the "most," the "earliest." And he decries his colleagues'"noisy books," in which "arguments about Los Angeles as a unique case are based more on assertion than on research."

The real problem, he thinks, is that the old scholarly models of urbanism never worked. The Chicago School was inspired in part by the political agenda of the Progressive movement to improve social conditions in the cities. But, he says, "we continue to suffer the same crises and catastrophes" -- juvenile crime, poverty, intergroup tensions, political corruption. "You can't blame people for trying to come up with paradigms that are more effective. It's not that we now have a new condition that needs a new theory. I think we have an old condition that needs a new theory."

Thanks in part to the outpouring of recent scholarship on Los Angeles, the city is now included alongside New York and Chicago in debates about the future of urban areas. But the campaign to bestow the status of 21st-century paradigm upon Los Angeles has its risks.

For one thing, it may encourage scholars elsewhere to take the research less seriously. "Ideally, those of us in New York would get together and say, 'No, it's the New York School,' because then we could have a debate," says Mr. Beauregard. "People are somewhat amused by this."

More important, scholars who insist on engaging in a round of Spot the Paradigm may find that colleagues in the field want to beat them at their own game. "Los Angeles, that quintessential late-industrial city, epitomizes urban growth and development of twentieth-century America, an era that has drawn to a close," writes Jan Nijman, a scholar of geography and regional studies, in a recent issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

But academics overlook another American city, he argues, that is just as "amorphous, diverse, disjointed, eclectic, and polarized" as L.A. -- that is, just as postmodern. Like Los Angeles, its crime rates are high, and its political and grassroots institutions are weak. But as a metropolis one-fifth the size of L.A., he writes, the transitions in its urban landscapes are "faster, more frequent, and more punctuated." Yes, the nation's first global city is ... Miami.

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