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219 E I G H T Seeking Spatial Justice in Los Angeles Accompanying the rise of Los Angeles as the densest urbanized area in the country, its move from WASPish homogeneity to perhaps the most culturally heterogeneous city in the world, and its shift from exemplary model of the modern metropolis to forerunner of regional urbanization has been the transformation of Los Angeles from a notoriously antilabor environment to the leading edge of the American labor movement. Just as much a part of urban restructuring, postmodern urbanism, the postmetropolitan transition , and the unfolding force of regional urbanization has been a reverberating political activism that has shaped the flow of research on LA and, at the same time, been shaped by it. It is no coincidence that LA in 1992 had what were almost surely the highest levels of economic inequality and social polarization in the United States, which at the time had the widest income gap of any industrialized country. It is perhaps not surprising that the city region with the worst inequalities generated the most vigorous social movements against inequality and injustice . Coalition building in Los Angeles was also distinguished by its awareness of the politics of space and place and, as I argued In Seeking Spatial Justice (app. 1, source 8A), by its critical spatial consciousness—its ability to translate spatial theory into active political practice.1 The justice movement in Los Angeles took a spatial turn earlier than other city regions, taking the lead in such “spatial struggles” as those involving the “right to the city” and the fight again racism and other forms of discrimination based on residence, the focus of the environmental justice movement. In Seeking Spatial Justice and this chapter, justice is seen as fundamentally spatial or geographical. In this sense, spatial justice is not an alternative to social justice but a formative aspect of it—that is, social justice or injustice is 220 • S E E K I N G S P A T I A L J U S T I C E I N L O S A N G E L E S expressed in specific geographies, while at the same time it is itself shaped by the geographies in which it is embedded. In this way, the social and the spatial are seen as mutually formative, which is a key component of the new spatial consciousness and what I described earlier as the socio-spatial dialectic. The search for increasing spatial justice can take many forms. A primary goal is fair geographical distribution of society’s resources, especially with regard to level of need. The carless poor, for example, have greater need for public transit than the rich. Other priorities include establishing fair political representation as shaped by electoral districting, maintaining the openness of public space, resisting purposeful territorial segregation (as in apartheid) or colonial domination, breaking through spatial barriers based on gender, race, or sexual preference, and on a larger scale, reducing regional and international inequalities in income and well-being. Although one can find something spatial about the efforts of every social movement, not all, in my view at least, represent struggles for specifically spatial justice. O R I G I N S A N D D E V E L O P M E N T O F T H E J U S T I C E M OV E M E N T I N L O S A N G E L E S As discussed in the first chapter, the starting point for both the academic and activist streams of development in LA is the same. It all began with a call by one of the earliest labor-community alliances, the Coalition to Stop Plant Closings (CSPC). Although not particularly successful in its aims to curb the deindustrialization process and resist the tactics of highly mobile capital, the CSPC triggered both a remarkable expansion of academic research on urban restructuring as well as the emergence of some of the most successful alliances of labor union locals, community-based organizations, and supportive university activists found anywhere in the country. The resurgence of labor-community coalition building has its roots in the early development of community unionism, inspired in large part by the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) campaigns to achieve justice for immigrant workers in California in the 1960s and 1970s. UFW activities tied the labor movement more closely to the wider immigrant, mainly Latino/a community as a whole and, more directly, to...

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