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"Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation
The concept of the metropolitan area, as best exemplified by Los Angeles, has highlighted two contradictory characteristics of the current urban scene: the dispersion of political power among a number of centers, and the presence of issues and problems whose impact transcends the jurisdiction of any one local government. In this book the author have focused their attention of the process by which organized groups have sought to identify public issues and to reach decision on them within one of the most rapidly developing and most complex metropolitan areas of the United States: Los Angeles. Beginning with a discussion of the setting and framework of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the authors attempt to clarify the nature of the legal, political, social, and economic forces tha have shaped the present system. The second part of this work is concerned with the contenders for leadership within the area: the central city, the urban county, and the suburbs. On the basis of the collected information, the authors next pose the hypothesis that democratic ideology and group interests have combined to produce competing power centers from which groups operate while at the same time lacking sufficient resources to dominate decision making. In the final section of a number of possible alternatives that might produce decision on area-wide issues are examined, and suggestions for bringing together the various political groupings are given. Research for this work was carried out under a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
Founded in 1957, the Southern California suburb prophetically named City of Industry today represents, in the words of Victor Valle, "The gritty crossroads of the global trade revolution that is transforming Southern California factories into warehouses, and adjacent working class communities into economic and environmental sacrifice zones choking on cheap goods and carcinogenic diesel exhaust." City of Industry is a stunning exposé on the construction of corporate capitalist spaces. Valle investigated an untapped archive of Industry's built landscape, media coverage, and public records, including sealed FBI reports, to uncover a cascading series of scandals. A kaleidoscopic view of the corruption that resulted when local land owners, media barons, and railroads converged to build the city, this suspenseful narrative explores how new governmental technologies and engineering feats propelled the rationality of privatization using their property-owning servants as tools. Valle's tale of corporate greed begins with the city's founder James M. Stafford and ends with present day corporate heir, Edward Roski Jr., the nation's biggest industrial developerùco-owner of the L.A. Staples Arena and possible future owner of California's next NFL franchise. Not to be forgotten in Valle's captivating story are Latino working class communities living within Los Angeles's distribution corridors, who suffer wealth disparities and exposure to air pollution as a result of diesel-burning trucks, trains, and container ships that bring global trade to their very doorsteps. They are among the many victims of City of Industry.
Los Angeles came of age in the 1920s. The great boom of that decade gave shape to the L.A. of today: its vast suburban sprawl and reliance on the automobile, its prominence as a financial and industrial center, and the rise of Hollywood as the film capital of the world. This collection of original essays explores the making of the Los Angeles metropolis during this remarkable decade. The authors examine the city's racial, political, cultural, and industrial dynamics, making this volume an essential guide to understanding the rise of Los Angeles as one of the most important cities in the world. These essays showcase the work of a new generation of scholars who are turning their attention to the history of the City of Angels to create a richer, more detailed picture of our urban past. The essays provide a fascinating look at life in the new suburbs, in the oil fields, in the movie studios, at church, and at the polling place as they reconceptualize the origins of contemporary urban problems and promise in Los Angeles and beyond. Adding to its interest, the volume is illustrated with period photography, much of which has not been published before.
The concept of the metropolitan area, as best exemplified by Los Angeles, has highlighted two contradictory characteristics of the current urban scene: the dispersion of political power among a number of centers, and the presence of issues and problems whose impact transcends the jurisdiction of any one local government. In this book the author have focused their attention of the process by which organized groups have sought to identify public issues and to reach decision on them within one of the most rapidly developing and most complex metropolitan areas of the United States: Los Angeles. Beginning with a discussion of the setting and framework of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the authors attempt to clarify the nature of the legal, political, social, and economic forces tha have shaped the present system. The second part of this work is concerned with the contenders for leadership within the area: the central city, the urban county, and the suburbs. On the basis of the collected information, the authors next pose the hypothesis that democratic ideology and group interests have combined to produce competing power centers from which groups operate while at the same time lacking sufficient resources to dominate decision making. In the final section of a number of possible alternatives that might produce decision on area-wide issues are examined, and suggestions for bringing together the various political groupings are given. Research for this work was carried out under a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.
A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles. Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.
An fascinating history of flood control efforts in Los Angeles from the 1870s to the present, showing how engineering has continually failed to contain nature. This book teaches us to think of cities as ecosystems.
For the first time, Anton Wagner’s groundbreaking 1935 book that launched the study of Los Angeles as an urban metropolis is available in English. No book on the emergence of Los Angeles, today a metropolis of more than four million people, has been more influential or elusive than this volume by Anton Wagner. Originally published in German in 1935 as Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, it is one of the earliest geographical investigations of a city understood as a series of layered landscapes. Wagner demonstrated that despite its geographical disadvantages, Los Angeles grew rapidly into a dominant urban region, bolstered by agriculture, real estate development, transportation infrastructure, tourism, the oil and automobile industries, and the film business. Although widely reviewed upon its initial publication, his book was largely forgotten until reintroduced by architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1971 classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. This definitive translation is annotated by Edward Dimendberg and preceded by his substantial introduction, which traces Wagner's biography and intellectual formation in 1930s Germany and contextualizes his work among that of other geographers. It is an essential work for students, scholars, and curious readers interested in urban geography and the rise of Los Angeles as a global metropolis. “This fine new translation by Timothy Grundy of Anton Wagner's Los Angeles with Edward Dimendberg's lucidly probing introduction constitutes a major contribution to urban history and our understanding of one of the world's most enigmatic and significant cities.” —Thomas S. Hines, Research Professor of History and Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA “Edward Dimendberg has done a remarkable job bringing Anton Wagner's classic study of Los Angeles to a wider readership. This landmark publication will enable many strands of urban scholarship to enter into dialogue for the first time.” —Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge, and author of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022) “Anton Wagner was a prescient and troubling historical figure. Nearly a century ago, with his camera in hand, he walked Los Angeles in fervent exploration of metropolitan growth. This beautiful and expert book takes Wagner every bit as seriously as he took Los Angeles.” —William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West "Anton Wagner’s geographic and ethnographic history of the urbanization of Los Angeles has long been unavailable to English-speaking readers. This early study, accompanied by Edward Dimendberg’s comprehensive introduction, will be of interest to all who, like Reyner Banham, admire its impressive scholarship and firsthand account of a city and ecology already in the throes of dynamic transformation." —Joan Ockman, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History, Yale School of Architecture "Encompassing copious photographs, insightful commentary, and thorough reconstruction of Wagner’s life and times, this new translation of Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles provides the missing link in scholarship about the metropolis during the early twentieth century. Its continuing relevance and controversial edge will appeal to urban researchers and college students beyond Southern California." —Michael Dear, Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley "Scholars of Los Angeles, or any city, must rejoice at this first proper English-language publication of Wagner's brilliant, if problematic, urban studies masterpiece. The edition is made accessible and relevant by Edward Dimendberg's indispensable prefatory material and contextualization." —Roger Keil, Professor of Environmental and Urban Change, York University “Finally translating this fascinating book into English fills an important gap in our historical knowledge of Los Angeles and its interpretation. Edward Dimendberg's invaluable introduction situates Anton Wagner in a comprehensive intellectual context. Of more than merely historical interest, this in-depth picture of Los Angeles in 1933 is essential reading for anyone interested in cities.” —Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley “This key text from 1935 for understanding Los Angeles urbanism is finally available in an excellent English translation by Timothy Grundy. Revelatory introductory essays by Anthony Vidler and Edward Dimendberg explain how German geographer (and later Nazi Party member) Anton Wagner was able to map and conceptualize the radical originality of this archetypal American metropolis in ways that deeply influenced Reyner Banham and so many subsequent writers on the city.” —Robert Fishman, Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan "Expertly annotated by Edward Dimendberg, Anton Wagner’s book on the growth of Los Angeles, which first appeared in German in 1935, is a landmark study in the history of urbanization. At the same time, it can be read as an example of transnational and comparative history, in which an observer from one country commented on developments in another. This volume will interest historians of the modern city, both in America and in Germany." —Andrew Lees, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University “Blending his wide knowledge and his acute wit, Edward Dimendberg has meticulously reconstructed the genesis of a forgotten doctoral thesis, which had remained unread for more than eighty years, despite its acknowledgement by Reyner Banham. This pioneering scholarly study of the Southern Californian metropolis is now available for the first time in English, inscribed with subtlety in both its German and its American contexts on the basis of thorough investigations.” —Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University "This is the odyssey of a book written and published in 1930s Nazi Germany, forgotten after the war, and rediscovered by Reyner Banham in the ‘70s. Los Angeles is a seminal text of modern architectural history and confronts readers in the present with the paradox of an unknown classic.“ —Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey “Finally, a translation of Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles, with extensive notes and a superb and deeply researched introduction by Edward Dimendberg, has arrived. It turns out that it was worth the wait. This volume is not only an important historic document, but a still-unrivaled portrait of a great city.” —Robert Bruegmann, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture, and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Sprawl: A Compact History "Scholars of Los Angeles can rejoice that Anton Wagner’s legendary study of early 1930s Los Angeles is at last available in a masterful translation, with a luminous introduction by Edward Dimendberg that captures Wagner’s analytical brilliance as well as his troubling politics and racial views. An essential addition to any library of Southern California." —Louis S. Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, University of California, Davis “Anton Wagner’s study provides an invaluable and frequently perceptive window into the evolution of Los Angeles during the early twentieth century, showing how human agency transformed regional resources into a booming major city. The translation is immensely enhanced by Edward Dimendberg’s skillful provision of context, including fascinating intellectual history.” —Stephen Bell, Professor of Geography and History, UCLA "Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California has always had an elusive presence in the conversation about the explosive growth of the Southern California metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century: an arcane text known to exist, but only accessible to very few. This expert first translation in English almost ninety years after it originally appeared in German is prefaced by a complex and engaging introduction by Edward Dimendberg that situates the original study in a multidisciplinary conversation. It elucidates the many ways this landmark essay on Los Angeles’s urban geography was not only filtered into subsequent scholarship on the city—Reyner Banham’s iconic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in particular—but also how it resonates with contemporary debates about cities as complex social organisms. This book will be essential reading not only for historians of Los Angeles but for those interested in the theorization of the modern metropolis more broadly. That the volume editor addresses Wagner’s problematic views on race and territorial conquest front and center, within their historic context, only adds to the significance of this undertaking." —Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Los Angeles region is increasingly being held up as a prototype for the collective urban future of the United States. Yet it is probably the least understood, most under-studied major city in the US. Very few people beyond the boundaries of Southern California have an accurate appreciation of what the region is, who lives there, and what it does. This groundbreaking collection of essays brings together well-respected contributors to dispel the myths about Southern California and to begin the process of `rethinking' Los Angeles.