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One brave beginning has been made at UCLA - an institution otherwise more attuned these days to Paris than to Pasadena or Pacoima. The selfproclaimed L.A. School is an emerging current of neo-Marxist researchers (mostly planners and geographers) sharing a common interest in the contradictory ramifications of urban restructuring and the possible emer gence of a new regime of flexible accumulation*. Their image of Los Angeles as prism of different spatialities is brilliantly encapsulated by Edward Soja in an essay - i t All Comes Together in Los Angeles, that has become the latterday counterpart of Adamics famous Los Angeles! There She Blows! One can find in Los Angeles not only the high technology industrial complexes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the farreaching industrial decline and bankrupt urban neighborhoods of rustbelt Detroit or Cleveland. There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a Lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a Sao Paulo and a Singapore. There may be no other comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite assemblage and articulation of urban restructuring processes. Los Angeles seems to be conjugating the recent history of capitalist urbanization in virtually all its inflectional forms.1 6 1 During the 1980s the L.A. School (based in the UCLA planning and geography faculties, but including contributors from other campuses) deve loped an ambitious matrix of criss-crossing approaches and case-studies. Monographs focused on the dialectics of de- and re-industrialization, the peripheralization of labor and the internationalization of capital, housing and homelessness, the environmental consequences of untrammeled development, and the discourse of growth. Although its members remain undecided whether they should model themselves after the Chicago School (named principally after its object of research), or the Frankfurt School (a philosophical current named after its base), the L.A. School is, in fact, a little bit of both. While surveying Los Angeles in a systematic way, the UCLA researchers are most interested in exploiting the metropolis, a la Adorno and Horkheimer, as a laboratory of the future. They have made clear that they see themselves excavating the outlines of a paradigmatic postfordism, an emergent twenty-first century urbanism.162 Their belief in the region as a crystal ball is redoubled by Fredric Jamesons famous evocation (in his Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) of Bunker Hill as a concrete totalization of postmodernity.16 3

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