My Los Angeles

At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, My Los Angeles provides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. Once the least dense American metropolis, Los Angeles is now the country’s densest urbanized area and one of the most culturally heterogeneous cities in the world. Soja takes us through this urban metamorphosis, analyzing urban restructuring, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, the globalization of capital and labor, and the formation of an information-intensive New Economy. By examining his own evolving interpretations of Los Angeles and the debates on the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies, Soja argues that a radical shift is taking place in the nature of the urbanization process, from the familiar metropolitan model to regional urbanization. By looking at such concepts as new regionalism, the spatial turn, the end of the metropolis era, the urbanization of suburbia, the global spread of industrial urbanism, and the transformative urban-industrialization of China, Soja offers a unique and remarkable perspective on critical urban and regional studies.

Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions and the co-editor of The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century among other books.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 • When It First Came Together in Los Angeles
2 • Taking Los Angeles Apart
3 • Inside Exopolis: Views of Orange County
4 • Comparing Los Angeles
5 • On the Postmetropolitan Transition
6 • A Look Beyond Los Angeles
7 • Regional Urbanization and the End of the Metropolis Era
8 • Seeking Spatial Justice in Los Angeles
9 • Occupy Los Angeles: A Very Contemporary Conclusion

Appendix 1: Source Texts by the Author
Appendix 2: Complementary Video Sources
Index