The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York

6. From the Chicago to the L.A. School: Whither the Local State?

Over the past two decades, Los Angeles has gone from an understudied metropolis to a critically acclaimed new paradigm for urban development around the world. One important factor accounting for L.A.’s recent prominence is the emergence of the L.A. School of Urbanism, composed of a core group of “Marxist geographers” and postmodernist scholars, and a larger interdisciplinary community of academics working in research centers across Southern California.1 The L.A. School is known for its focus on the urban periphery; eclectic theories about the “social construction of urban space”; and lingering pessimism about the future of urban life. But the L.A. School is perhaps best known for offering Los Angeles as a new paradigm of urban growth challenging the iconic concentric circles model developed in the 1920s by the Chicago School of Sociology. This essay critically reexamines the L.A. School growth paradigm. We argue that the L.A. School, like the Chicago School before it, offers an inadequate account of political institutions and the local state as forces shaping urban and metropolitan growth. Many of the L.A. School’s adherents perpetuate a Chinatown myth of the local state. As depicted in the famed 1974 noir movie about an L.A. developer-led water grab from unsuspecting farmers, political actors are seen as having neither the will nor the capacity to pursue policies independent of the desires of powerful private actors. The Chinatown myth implies that urban democracy has failed, a belief that partly explains the L.A. School’s pessimism. It also understates the importance of local politics and public entrepreneurship to understanding Los Angeles’s precocious rise as a regional imperium and global city. From the Chicago to the L.A. School Whither the Local State? n Steven P. Erie and Scott A. MacKenzie 6 105 From the Chicago to the L.A. School Our argument is organized in five parts. First, we consider Los Angeles historiography and offer explanations for early scholarly neglect versus current prominence. Second, we revisit the research program of the Chicago School of Sociology, contrasting it with work being done contemporaneously by political scientists in Chicago. Third, we critically reevaluate the L.A. School’s growth paradigm and its adequacy as an account of L.A.’s rise as a regional imperium and global city. Fourth, we offer an alternative account of L.A.’s improbable yet rapid twentieth-century growth, focusing on public entrepreneurship and local state capacity and relative autonomy. Finally, based on the L.A. case, we suggest that any new urban growth paradigm needs to bring the local state back in. From Backwater to Bellwether Compared to the steady stream of books and articles produced on Chicago and New York, scholarship on Los Angeles lagged for much of the twentieth century. Only in the 1990s did interest in L.A. and the broader Southern California region approach the level of attention devoted to older industrial cities and regions. There are many reasons for this scholarly disparity. L.A. developed later than most major American cities, with its early population heavily native-born rather than immigrant. Until the 1980s and 1990s, there were few research centers dedicated to studying Los Angeles. Moreover, L.A. was considered an anomaly with respect to leading analytic frameworks, such as the machine-reform dialectic, driving much of the discourse in urban politics. Only recently have scholars come to see Los Angeles as a place where “everything comes together.”2 Los Angeles’s emergence as a global city has been comparatively recent. In 1900, New York’s population approached 3.5 million residents, twice the size of Chicago (1.7 million). L.A., meanwhile, had barely cracked the 100,000 mark. Until 1920, San Francisco, not Los Angeles, was the largest city on the West Coast. In the early twentieth century, L.A. grew prodigiously . Its 1930 population of 1.2 million outstripped Boston and St. Louis. By this time, however, New York had 6.9 million residents and Chicago 3.3 million. Until the 1980s, the population of L.A. remained stubbornly 106 Steven P. Erie and Scott A. MacKenzie homogenous; less than 15 percent were foreign-born, and less than 20 percent were nonwhite. H. L. Mencken once derisively called Los Angeles “double Dubuque” because of its large midwestern population. New York was the nation’s prime international gateway, with close to 30 percent of...