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Los Angeles School


The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement which emerged during the mid-1980s, loosely based at UCLA and the University of Southern California, which centers urban analysis on Los Angeles, California.

The first published identification of the Los Angeles (L.A.) School as such was by Mike Davis in his popular urban history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1990). According to Davis, the school emerged informally during the mid-1980s when an eclectic variety of neo-Marxist scholars began publishing a series of articles and books dealing exclusively with Los Angeles. During the school’s formation, Davis cautiously estimated that the school had about twenty members scattered throughout Southern California and beyond, with some members purportedly residing as far away as Frankfurt, Germany. Much of the work published by L.A. School members during the 1980s and early 1990s garnered considerable attention. However, while some members (e.g. Edward Soja and Mike Davis) became household names in urban theory, there was little consciousness of the school as its own entity, especially outside of Los Angeles. This changed in 1998, with the publication of an article by Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty, which explicitly argued for the existence of a distinct L.A. School of Urbanism, of which its various theories, concepts, and empirical works could be pooled together to constitute a radical new conception of ‘postmodern urbanism.’ After Dear and Flusty’s publication, Dear popularized the school through the production of a series of articles and books, including a full-length edited volume comparing the L.A. School to the Chicago School. Though much of the work of the L.A. School is still widely read in urban studies, the school’s membership has declined substantially in recent years. At a retirement party for Soja in 2008 at which many purported members were present, only Michael J. Dear appeared to be willing to envisage the school’s continued existence. This situation reflects the vital conceptual disagreements between members of the LA School, and especially between Dear and the other members.


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