My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization

4. Comparing Los Angeles

111 F O U R Comparing Los Angeles After my Orange County adventures, with a few exceptions, I stopped writing directlyabouttheSouthernCaliforniaregionandbegananew,morecomparativephaseofwriting ,lecturing,andlearningfromLosAngeles.Respondingto the growing global interest in Los Angeles, I literally and figuratively took LA on tour around the world, responding to invitations to apply what had been learned to other urban contexts. Looking back, during the 1990s I came close to launching a new career as a “city critic,” offering my (LA-based) views and impressions of other places very much like a movie reviewer or restaurant critic deals with films or food. Rather than learning more about Los Angeles itself, the emphasis shifted to building on and off the already established literature on LA, although the latter often informed the former in new and unexpected ways. The comparisons begin most notably with Amsterdam. T H E S T I M U L U S O F A L I T T L E C O N F U S I O N : C O M PA R I N G L O S A N G E L E S A N D A M S T E R DA M In 1990, I spent three months living in the extraordinarily well-preserved Centrum of Amsterdam, jam-packed with narrow Dutch houses aligned along multiple rings of canals extending outward onion-like to an encirclement of fast-growing outer cities. A cadre of urban geographers and sociologists from the Centrum voor Grootsedelijk Onderzoek (Center for Metropolitan Studies) had invited me to visit as Centrum Professor, strategically settled me in on a volatile and exciting street where the past and present of the squatter movement were visibly demanding attention, and asked me only to give a public lecture and write a formal paper looking at Amsterdam 112 • C O M P A R I N G L O S A N G E L E S from a Los Angeles perspective. The result was “The Stimulus of a Little Confusion: A Contemporary Comparison of Amsterdam and Los Angeles” (app. 1, source 4A), published first as the Text of a Special Lecture in 1991 and reprinted with revisions in Thirdspace (app. 1, source 6B).1 The title was taken from an essay by Henry James, collected in his “Transatlantic Sketches” (1875), in which he comments on experiencing the Netherlands for the first time. He wrote: “All these elements of the general spectacle in this entertaining country at least give one’s regular habits of thought the stimulus of a little confusion and make one feel that one is dealing with an original genius” (p. 384). So much in Amsterdam was strangely familiar, while deceptively appearing rather ordinary, especially to the outside English speaker. Yet I was bowled over during my stay by the extraordinary urban agglomeration that was the Centrum of Amsterdam and by the abiding Dutch genius for creating a socially and spatially just urbanism, so unlike what I had been experiencing in Los Angeles. In his exploration of Dutch culture and what he called its “embarrassment of riches,” the TV-savvy historian Simon Schama described the uncanny ability of the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, to turn “catastrophe into good fortune, infirmity into strength, water into dry land, mud into gold.”2 The vibrant Centrum was a slightly confusing yet stimulating assemblage of oxymorons and juxtapositions, a conglomeration of opposite forces that define the moral geography of Amsterdam. Filtering through the urban fabric was the imprint of highly regulated urban anarchism based on a slightly repressive form of tolerance and an odd combination of flexibility and rigidity . Feeling like I had entered some secret world, I discovered preserved in the Centrum, if not all of Amsterdam in 1990, a deep and enduring commitment to libertarian socialist values and participatory democracy (much of which, I understand, is being seriously undermined in the early twenty-first century). As I wrote at the time, “One senses that Amsterdam is not just preserving its own Golden Age but is actively keeping alive the very possibility of a socially just and humanely scaled urbanism . . . the most successful enactment of the anarcho-socialist-environmentalist intentions that inspired the urban social movements of the 1960s.” On Spuistraat My writing on Amsterdam was divided in two parts. The first, “On Spuistraat,” began with a description of the location of this border street in C O M P A R I N G...