City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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to mobilize an unusual degree of attention from Los Angeles’s usually divided elites (including, for the first time, representatives of Asian capital). The resulting report, L.A. 2000: A City for the Future (1988), has become the manifesto of a ‘new regionalism’, aiming to forge a unity of vision between mega-developers and the haute intelligentsia.156
Interestingly, the report’s epilogue (by historian Kevin Starr) reminds readers that the last ‘coherent’ Los Angeles, that of the 1920s, found ‘community on a civic level’ because it ‘had a dominant establishment and a dominant population’.157 The report clearly implies that because of the decline of the Anglo herrenvolk – i.e., the absence of a dominant culture group in an increasingly poly-ethnic, poly-centered metropolis – a ‘dominant establishment’ is more essential than ever. While explicitly warning of the ‘Blade Runner scenario’ – ‘the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglottism ominous with unresolved hostilities’ – the report opts for the utopia of the ‘Crossroads City’: ‘an extraordinary city of cities, a congregation of liveable communities’.158 Although it repeatedly points out the total failure to create a social infrastructure to integrate new immigrants or old poor, the social justice dimension of the report consists basically of low-cost, cosmetic programs with an occasional, half-hearted allusion to the daunting scale of effort required. The central thrust of the report is an emphasis on ‘growth management’ to be implemented through rationalized regional government agencies supported by state environmental planning and a regional ‘goals consensus’. Symptomatically, the Southern California economy is depicted as a happy black box generating endless growth. There is no consideration whatsoever of possible contradictions within this perpetual motion machine.
This optimistic, technocratic vision of Los Angeles entering the new millennium received unusual intellectual reinforcement eighteen months later with the publication of Kevin Starr’s whiggish history of the city’s Promethean past: Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (1990). Elaborating the themes of his epilogue to L.A. 2000, Starr claims that Los Angeles was conjured out of the desert as a willed act of imagination by a visionary pantheon of artists, architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Although particular settings (for instance, Santa Barbara in the 1920s, the utopian beginnings of Los Angeles architecture, and so on) are brilliantly evoked, Los Angeles in the Open Shop era is depicted without a noir cloud on the horizon. There is no hint of class or racial violence, nor, for that matter, of any historical causality other than seminal individuals attempting to materialize their dreams. It is an account that begs comparison to the hagiographic ‘brag books’ – so common in the early twentieth century – that depicted local history as the heroic activity of the ‘leading men of business and industry’. But Starr’s evident concern is less to praise the forefathers than to encourage his contemporaries in the conceit that they too are fountain-heads of the ‘Southern California dream’. Material Dreams, by convincing us that its heroes ‘designed’ the city’s past, offers a hubristic coda for today’s mercenary intellectuals to claim that they are designing its future.159
EPILOGUE: GRAMSCI VS BLADE RUNNER
Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark – of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance. Grahame Clarke160
If one were to attempt to distinguish the new Boosterism from the old, it might be said that while the Mission Revivalism of Lummis’s generation relied upon a fictional past, the World City hoopla of today thrives upon a fictional future. If the imaginary idyll of padres and their happy neophytes erased a history of expropriation and racial violence, then the singing tomorrows of L.A. 2000 and the Central City Association are a preemptive repression of the Blade Runner scenario that too many Angelenos fear is already inevitable. As Adamic and McWilliams in the 1930s and 1940s debunked the white supremacist pseudo-history of the Boosters, so today’s oppositional intellectuals must contest the mythology of managed and eternal growth. As always, that contestation will be primarily a guerrilla war across a diversity of terrains, from UCLA to the streets of Compton.
One brave beginning has been made at UCLA – an institution otherwise more attuned these days to Paris than to Pasadena or Pacoima. The self-proclaimed ‘L.A. School’ is an emerging current of neo-Marxist researchers (mostly planners and geographers) sharing a common interest in the contradictory ramifications of urban ‘restructuring’ and the possible emergence of a new ‘regime of flexible accumulation’. Their image of Los Angeles as prism of different spatialities is brilliantly encapsulated by Edward Soja in an essay – ‘It All Comes Together in Los Angeles’, that has become the latter-day counterpart of Adamic’s famous ‘Los Angeles! There She Blows!’
One can find in Los Angeles not only the high technology industrial complexes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the far-reaching industrial decline and bankrupt urban neighborhoods of rustbelt Detroit or Cleveland. There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a Lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a São Paulo and a Singapore. There may be no other comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite assemblage and articulation of urban restructuring processes. Los Angeles seems to be conjugating the recent history of capitalist urbanization in virtually all its inflectional forms.161
During the 1980s the ‘L.A. School’ (based in the UCLA planning and geography faculties, but including contributors from other campuses) developed an ambitious matrix of criss-crossing approaches and case-studies. Monographs focused on the dialectics of de- and re-industrialization, the peripheralization of labor and the internationalization of capital, housing and homelessness, the environmental consequences of untrammeled development, and the discourse of growth. Although its members remain undecided whether they should model themselves after the ‘Chicago School’ (named principally after its object of research), or the ‘Frankfurt School’ (a philosophical current named after its base), the ‘L.A. School’ is, in fact, a little bit of both. While surveying Los Angeles in a systematic way, the UCLA researchers are most interested in exploiting the metropolis, à la Adorno and Horkheimer, as a ‘laboratory of the future’. They have made clear that they see themselves excavating the outlines of a paradigmatic postfordism, an emergent twenty-first century urbanism.162 Their belief in the region as a crystal ball is redoubled by Fredric Jameson’s famous evocation (in his ‘Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’) of Bunker Hill as a ‘concrete totalization’ of postmodernity.163
POLYETHNIC L.A.
Corner, Vermont and Olympic
By exposing the darkest facets of the ‘world city’ (Los Angeles’s ‘new Dickensian hell’ of underclass poverty in the words of UCLA geographer Alan Scott) the ‘L.A. School’ ridicules the utopias of L.A. 2000. Yet, by hyping Los Angeles as the paradigm of the future (even in a dystopian vein), they tend to collapse history into teleology and glamorize the very reality they would deconstruct. Soja and Jameson, particularly, in the very eloquence of their different ‘postmodern mappings’ of Los Angeles, become celebrants of the myth. The city is a place where everything is possible, nothing is safe and durable enough to believe in, where constant synchronicity prevails, and the automatic ingenuity of capital ceaselessly throws up new forms and spectacles – a rhetoric, in other words, that recalls the hyperbole of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.
The difficulties of breaking completely free of Los Angeles’s ideological conceits are equally illustrated across town in the ghettoes of Watts and Compton, with the emergence of ‘gangster rap’. George Lipsitz, in his engaging ‘Cruising Around the Hegemonic Bloc’ (1986),164 has argued that Los Angeles’s spectrum of ethnic rock musicians, muralists, breakdancers, and rappers constitute a kind of ‘organic intelligentsia’ fomenting a cultural strategy for a ‘historical bloc of oppositional groups’. Seemingly confirming this thesis, NWA (Niggers With Attitude) and their lead rapper Eazy-E have sowed consternation in law-and-order circles with the phenomenal popularity of their 1989