My Los Angeles From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization [Hardcover]

At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging,My Los Angelesprovides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. Once the least dense American metropolis, Los Angeles is now the countrys densest urbanized area and one of the most culturally heterogeneous cities in the world. Soja takes us through this urban metamorphosis, analyzing urban restructuring, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, the globalization of capital and labor, and the formation of an information-intensive New Economy. By examining his own evolving interpretations of Los Angeles and the debates on the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies, Soja argues that a radical shift is taking place in the nature of the urbanization process, from the familiar metropolitan model to regional urbanization. By looking at such concepts as new regionalism, the spatial turn, the end of the metropolis era, the urbanization of suburbia, the global spread of industrial urbanism, and the transformative urban-industrialization of China, Soja offers a unique and remarkable perspective on critical urban and regional studies.

Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author ofPostmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regionsand the co-editor ofThe City: Los Angelesand Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Centuryamong other books.

Soja is a legendary figure; a lodestar for an entire generation of urbanists and planners. No one else has puzzled out Los Angeles with so much clarity, patience and optimistic passion. Throw away your Thomas Brothers, this is the road atlas you really need. Mike Davis, author ofCity of Quartz

Ed Soja has long been one of the most creative, perceptive and prolific analysts of the contemporary urban condition.? In his l“­