a theory of urban growth and change – often
Los Angeles School
Matthew B. Anderson
Eastern Washington University, USA
The Los Angeles School refers to a conceptual
approach to understanding contemporary pat-
terns of urbanization based on Los Angeles. The
Los Angeles School emerged during the 1980s
when a loosely formed group of predominantly
Marxist urban scholars – geographers, planners,
and urban historians – from the University
of Southern California and the University of
California, Los Angeles, turned to Los Angeles
as, then, a comparatively understudied site for
empirical and theoretical urban analysis (Davis
1990). While there has never been an official
list of members, prominent commentators have
been Michael Dear, Edward Soja, Mike Davis,
Allen Scott, and Michael Storper. The work
of these scholars is wide-ranging and presents
numerous influences, objects of inquiry, and
conceptual disagreements. Yet, the creation of
the Los Angeles School was based on an under-
standing that Anglo cities were developing in
new ways (post-1970), which rendered the
classic modernist theories of the city increasingly
obsolete (Dear 2000). The biggest critique was
levied against the centralized, concentric-ring
model associated with the widely known and
influential Chicago School.
Based on dense empirical work on Chicago,
the paradigmatic modernist city, the Chicago
School was formed by sociologists at the Uni-
versity of Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s.
Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth
were its leaders. The Chicago School presented
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0012
referred to as “urban ecology” – based on a cen-
tral core surrounded by rings of distinctive zones.
The concentric-ring diagram and model of
1920s Chicago is perhaps the best-known visual
feature associated with this school of thought.
Los Angeles, conversely, was observed as a
city void of a central core or of concentric
rings even remotely reminiscent of the Chicago
model. This observation led to the claim that the
Chicago School was ill equipped to understand
emerging trends and patterns of development
that marked the post-Fordist, or what some Los
Angeles School scholars called the “postmodern”
metropolis. As most forcefully argued by Dear
(2000), the polycentric, decentralized, and dis-
orderly character of Los Angeles reflected what
was unfolding across urban America and beyond,
which formed the basis for claiming Los Angeles
as the new prototypical urbanized landscape.
Bluntly summed up by Joel Garreau in Edge
City: Life on the New Frontier (1991, 3), “every
American city that is growing, is growing in the
fashion of Los Angeles.” As echoed particularly
by Dear and Soja, Los Angeles epitomized
what was happening across Sun Belt metropoli-
tan regions and represented a new historical
layer of development unfolding in many older,
postindustrial cities, including Chicago.
The first explicit mention of a Los Angeles
School is often attributed to Mike Davis in
his landmark text, City of Quartz (1990). But
it was not until Dear and Flusty’s (1998) arti-
cle “Postmodern Urbanism,” published in the
Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
that the existence of the Los Angeles School
gained widespread attention. On the basis of
the dramatic departure of Los Angeles from the
LOS ANGELES SCHOOL
Chicago School model, Dear and Flusty argued
that Los Angeles represented a “radical break”
from modernist urban forms and that new epis-
temologies were needed to make sense of these
changes. Modern industrial cities were suppos-
edly being overwritten by a new hyperdifferenti-
ated, “kaleidoscope” layer of development. And,
to adequately understand this transformation,
a new lexicon and taxonomy of postmodern
urbanisms based on southern California was
presented. For example, concepts such as “keno
capitalism” were used to capture the perceivable
lack of order or single driving force underpinning
this emergent urban form. Dear subsequently
became the primary spokesperson and most
ardent promoter of the Los Angeles School.
This embrace of the postmodern movement,
however, also marked a conceptual division
within the Los Angeles School. Dear and Soja,
notably influenced by Henri Lefebvre, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson,
were among the earliest scholars to incorporate
postmodern insights into human geography
(Dear 2000; Soja 1989; 1996). But Dear and
Soja were somewhat at odds in their approach
to this incorporation. Soja’s postmodernism was
based more on invigorating the role of space and
spatiality in critical social theory, long subsumed
beneath the dominance of time and temporality.
Dear, in contrast, embraced a notably deeper,
more epistemological basis for his postmod-
ernism, criticizing Soja for still adopting a classic
Marxist (and therefore) modernist metanarrative
to structure his analyses and interpretations
(Dear 2000).
But there were also more fundamental divi-
sions within the group, with Davis rejecting
postmodernism and Scott and Storper avoiding it
altogether. Scott and Storper, for instance, rather
than directly engaging with postmodernism,
have tended to situate their work in industrial
location patterns, flexible specialization, and the
2
“regionalization” of contemporary metropolitan
areas within the broad transition from Fordist to
post-Fordist modes of production observed in
advanced economies since the 1970s (e.g., see
Storper 1997; Scott 1998).
Numerous criticisms have been levied against
the Los Angeles School, notably the claims of this
city as paradigmatic and that this new postmod-
ern urbanism represented a radical break with the
past (e.g., see Harvey 1989). This debate is now
extensive, with the entire inaugural issue of City
& Community (2002) covering the topic. A cen-
tral criticism is that the Chicago School’s domi-
nance was overstated, notably by Dear, to bolster
the relevance of the Los Angeles School, as, by
this time, the Chicago School was already con-
sidered by some as a relic of the past. Although
Dear continues to advocate for the Los Angeles
School (e.g., see Dear and Dahmann 2008), these
debates have notably subsided. But, regardless of
where one stands, the Los Angeles School stimu-
lated significant and important critical debate in
urban studies at the time, with many insights now
generally accepted, such as the increasing poly-
centric patterning of metropolitan regions and
obsolescence of the urban/suburb dichotomy.
SEE ALSO: Chicago School; Critical spatial
thinking; Cultural turn; Edge city; Modernity;
Postmodernity; Urban geography
References
Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz. London: Verso.
Dear, Michael. 2000. The Postmodern Urban Condition.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Dear, Michael, and Nicholas Dahmann. 2008.
“Urban Politics and the Los Angeles School of
Urbanism.” Urban Affairs Review, 44(2): 266–279.
DOI:10.1177/1078-0874083.20240.

Dear, Michael, and Steven Flusty. 1998. “Postmod-
ern Urbanism.” Annals of the Association of Ameri-
can Geographers, 88(1): 50–72. DOI:10.1111/1467-
8306.00084.
Garreau, Joel. 1991. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.
New York: Doubleday.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Scott, Allen. 1998. Regions and the World Economy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LOS ANGELES SCHOOL
Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London:
Verso.
Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles
and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Black-
well.
Storper, Michael. 1997. The Regional World: Territo-
rial Development in a Global Economy. New York:
Guilford Press.