Disney, Dodgers, and the Urban Design of Los Angeles

Eric Avila. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xx + 308 pp. Figures, notes, and bibliography. $39.95.

In a fascinating study of the confluence of popular culture and urban policy and politics, Eric Avila illuminates the complex and often subtle interplay of conflict and consensus that helped shape the Los Angeles landscape and mindset of the twentieth century. Tracing the evolution of the spatial and racial divides of the city back to the Progressive Era, he argues that the period from 1940 to 1970 marked a watershed in Los Angeles history in which the heterosocial vision of New Deal liberalism was replaced by the homogeneous and privatized perspective of New Right conservatism. Such popular culture institutions as film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and freeways—all of which came of age after the proliferation of the automobile—reflected and reinforced a racial and spatial order of "chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs" in which a "privatized, consumer-oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness, and suburban home ownership" dominated urban policy making (pp. 4, 7).

In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila adds the insight of cultural studies to our understanding of the history of the American city. He defines cultural history in its most simplistic manner—it is the amalgamation of the "stories that people tell about themselves and their world" (p. xiii). This broad definition allows historians to explore all levels of culture from art, literature and theater, to film, amusement parks, and baseball parks. Yet because twentieth century Americans were a predominantly urban people, culture, especially popular culture, studied outside of its urban context is limited in what it can tell us about ourselves. By exploring cultural forms in the context of space and time, Avila argues that culture encompasses "a struggle over the very identity of the city and its constituent social groups" (p. xiii). In the context of postwar suburbanization, popular culture in Los Angeles both reflected and enhanced a particular way of seeing the city that legitimized the political and economic domination of white, middle-class America.

Like many a scholar before him, Avila grapples with the issue of Southern California exceptionalism. To bolster his argument of exceptionalism, Avila suggests that Los Angeles did not experience the same patterns of urbanization as nineteenth-century cities on the East coast and in the Midwest. Traditional nineteenth-century cities expanded with the streetcars in a manner that promoted a centralized city in which a public culture embraced a heterogeneous population. The "new mass culture" of the nineteenth-century city, amusement park, theater, and ballpark all relied on the streetcar to deliver customers, and the streetcar created heterosocial space, albeit space in which public was defined as white. The loss of the streetcar and the love affair with the automobile undermined the popularity of these cultural institutions and the ability of heterosocial space to mediate conflict.

Although founded in the nineteenth century, and building an extensive streetcar system, Los Angeles never truly embraced the ideology of the centralized city. Furthermore, the city's true boom time was not the 1880s or 1920s, but rather the postwar period of suburban growth. The key values of the ensuing suburban culture were containment, predictability, and order. The political culture that arose alongside suburban popular culture stressed the primacy of the private individual to the exclusion of the needs of the group. Indeed, Avila argues that the national political battles over law and order and taxation in the 1970s and 1980s were foreshadowed by the cultural choices of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Film noir, urban renewal projects like Dodger Stadium, and choices over transportation modes all expressed a distancing of Southern Californians from the inclusiveness of New Deal liberalism and growing support for the privatized vision of New Right conservatism. This is seen perhaps most clearly...