My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization

5. On the Postmetropolitan Transition

140 F I V E On the Postmetropolitan Transition As practically everything described as “postmodern” in the 1990s became almost unavoidably embroiled in seemingly impossible-to-resolve conflicts of interpretation and emphasis, I stopped trying to defend and clarify my particular take on critical postmodernism (an oxymoron to many) and shifted to interpreting more directly the dramatic transformation of the modern metropolis that I saw so vividly unfolding in Los Angeles.1 Unable to be more specific in “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis” (app. 1, source 5D), I called the emergent new form the “postmetropolis” and accordingly redefined what was happening after 1965 and especially after 1980 as the “postmetropolitan transition,” an ongoing process that emphasized a movement away from the established form of the modern metropolis but without a confident identification of what the end state of this transition might turn out to be. Focusing on the postmetropolitan transition led me to recompose the extensive literature that had accumulated around economic restructuring and contemporary urbanization processes more generally into six “discourses ,” defined as distinctive clusters of interrelated writings on specific thematic aspects of urban change. My definition of discourse was simple and straightforward, without the theoretical complexity of “discourse analysis” as it appeared in the writings of philosophers and critical social scientists. The six discourses represented different ways of conceptualizing and interpreting urban restructuring and the postmetropolitan transition. The literature surveyed went well beyond the Los Angeles case to illustrate more general processes that were affecting urban areas everywhere. In most cases, the references selected for emphasis were decidedly spatial in their perspective and purview. One could say, only somewhat facetiously, that if there indeed was an LA School, the six discourses identified would represent something O N T H E P O S T M E T R O P O L I T A N T R A N S I T I O N • 141 like its specialized component departments, each studying different facets of the same processes. The 1992 Justice Riots, as they came to be called, building on earlier events at Tiananmen Square and the Cold War–ending fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, added a new twist to my treatment of the postmetropolitan transition. Perhaps, I thought, we were seeing the slowing down of crisis-generated restructuring and the beginning of a new postmetropolitan era of crises arising not out of the conditions underlying the urban unrest of the 1960s but from the new social and spatial orders of postmetropolitan urbanism created by neoliberal globalization and urban economic restructuring. In other words, the postmetropolitan transition was leading to a shift from crisisgenerated restructuring to restructuring-generated crises.2 With this possibility in mind, we look next at the major research clusters that have evolved around understanding the postmetropolitan transition. P O S T M E T R O P O L I TA N D I S C O U R S E S A N D T H E N E W R E G I O N A L I S M The six discourses or research clusters can be broken down into three pairs. The first two discourses focus on the most convincing arguments that have developed about the causes of restructuring and the postmetropolitan transition ; the second pair depict the major spatial and social consequences of the causal forces; while the third pair represent hard and soft reactions to these consequential effects and help to explain why the volatile postmetropolis has not exploded more often, given the negative consequences of restructuring. As a shorthand indicator, I give particular names to the urban expressions of these discourses, but I feel no particular attachment to their use. The following are chapter titles from Postmetropolis (app. 1, sources 5D and 6C). 1. The Postfordist Industrial Metropolis: Restructuring the Geopolitical Economy of Urbanism 2. Cosmopolis: The Globalization of Cityspace 3. Exopolis: The Restructuring of Urban Form 4. Fractal City: Metropolarities and the Restructured Social Mosaic 5. The Carceral Archipelago: Governing Space in the Postmetropolis 6. Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary 142 • O N T H E P O S T M E T R O P O L I T A N T R A N S I T I O N The most voraciously absorptive of the two causal or explanatory discourses on urban change focuses on the globalization of capital, labor, and culture. By the 1990s, almost everything...