Postmodern UrbanismMichael Dear and Steven Flusty

Southern California Studies Center, University of Southern California

Theories of urban structure are a scarce commodity. Most twentieth-century analyses have beenpredicated on the Chicago School model of concentric zones, despite the obvious claims ofcompeting models. This paper examines the contemporary forms of Southern California urbanismas an initial step toward deriving a concept of “postmodern urbanism.” The Los Angeles modelconsists of several fundamental characteristics, including a global-local connection, a ubiquitoussocial polarization, and a reterritorialization of the urban process in which hinterland organizes thecenter (in direct contradiction to the Chicago model). The resultant urbanism is distinguished bya centerless urban form termed “keno capitalism,” which we advance as the basis for a researchagenda in comparative urban analysis. Key Words: postmodern, urbanism, urban structure, Chicago,Los Angeles.

Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he won-dered vaguely if there might have been a largersystem, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps thewhole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodalpoints, infofaults that might be followed down tosome other kind of truth, another mode of knowing,deep within the gray shoals of information. But onlyif there were someone there to pose the right ques-tion (William Gibson, 1996:39).

One of the most enervating aspects ofrecent debates on the postmodern con-dition is the notion that there has been

a radical break from past trends in political,economic, and sociocultural life. There is noclear consensus about the nature of this osten-sible break. Some analysts have declared thecurrent condition to be nothing more thanbusiness as usual, only faster—a “hypermod-ern” or “supermodern” phase of advanced capi-talism.1 Others have noted that the pace ofchange in all aspects of our global society issufficient for us to begin to speak of “revolu-tion.” In this essay, we are cognizant of aninvocation of Jacques Derrida, who invitedthose interested in assessing the extent andvolume of contemporary change to “rehearsethe break,” intimating that only by assuming aradical break had occurred would our capacityto recognize it be released. Similar advice wasoffered by C. Wright Mills in The SociologicalImagination (1959):

We are at the ending of what is called The ModernAge. Just as Antiquity was followed by several cen-turies of Oriental ascendancy, which Westernersprovincially called The Dark Ages, so now The

Modern Age is being succeded by a post-modernperiod (1959:165–66).

Mills believed that it was vital to conceptualizethe categories of change in order to “grasp theoutline of the new epoch we suppose ourselves tobe entering” (1959:166).

Have we arrived at a radical break in the waycities are developing? Is there something calleda postmodern urbanism, which presumes that wecan identify some form of template that definesits critical dimensions?2 This inquiry is based ona simple premise: that just as the central tenetsof modernist thought have been undermined,its core evacuated and replaced by a rush ofcompeting epistemologies, so too have the tra-ditional logics of earlier urbanisms evaporated,and in the absence of a single new imperative,multiple urban (ir)rationalities are competingto fill the void. It is the concretization andlocalization of these effects, global in scope butgenerated and manifested locally, that are cre-ating the geographies of postmodern society—anew time-space fabric.3 We begin this search byoutlining the fundamental precepts of the Chi-cago School, a classical modernist vision of theindustrial metropolis, and contrasting thesewith evidence of a nascent postmodern LosAngeles School.4 Next we examine a broadrange of contemporary Southern California ur-banisms, before going on to suggest a criticalreinterpretation of this evidence that encom-passes and defines the problematic of a post-modern urbanism. In conclusion, we offercomments intended to assist in formulating anagenda for comparative urban research.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1), 1998, pp. 50–72©1998 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

From Chicago to Los Angeles

It has been a traditional axiom of classical writingabout the city that urban structures are the domainof reason (Jonathan Raban 1974:157).

The Chicago School

General theories of urban structure are a scarcecommodity. One of the most persistent models ofurban structure is associated with a group ofsociologists who flourished in Chicago in the1920s and 1930s. According to Morris Janowitz,the “Chicago School” was motivated to regardthe city “as an object of detached sociologicalanalysis,” worthy of distinctive scientific atten-tion:

The city is not an artifact or a residual arrangement.On the contrary, the city embodies the real natureof human nature. It is an expression of mankind ingeneral and specifically of the social relations gen-erated by territoriality (Janowitz 1967:viii–ix).

The most enduring of the Chicago School modelswas the zonal or concentric ring theory, an accountof the evolution of differentiated urban socialareas by E.W. Burgess (1925). Based on assump-tions that included a uniform land surface, uni-versal access to a single-centered city, freecompetition for space, and the notion that devel-opment would take place outward from a centralcore, Burgess concluded that the city would tendto form a series of concentric zones. (These arethe same assumptions that were later to form thebasis of the land-rent models of Alonso, Muth, etal.) The main ecological metaphors invoked todescribe this dynamic were invasion, succession,and segregation, by which populations graduallyfiltered outwards from the center as their statusand level of assimilation progressed. The modelwas predicated on continuing high levels of inmi-gration to the city.

At the core of Burgess’s schema was the Cen-tral Business District (CBD), which was sur-rounded by a transitional zone, where olderprivate houses were being converted to officesand light industry or subdivided to form smallerdwelling units. This was the principal area towhich new immigrants were attracted, and itincluded areas of vice and generally unstable ormobile social groups. The transitional zone wassucceeded by a zone of working-men’s homes,which included some of the oldest residential

buildings in the city and stable social groups.Beyond this, newer and larger dwellings were tobe found, occupied by the middle classes. Finally,the commuters’ zone extended beyond the con-tinuous built-up area of the city where a consid-erable portion of the zone’s population wasemployed. Burgess’s model was a broad generali-zation, not intended to be taken too literally. Heexpected, for instance, that his schema wouldapply only in the absence of complicating factorssuch as local topography. He also anticipatedconsiderable variation within the different zones.

Other urbanists noted the tendency for citiesto grow in star-shaped rather than concentricform, along highways that radiate from a centerwith contrasting land uses in the interstices. Thisobservation gave rise to a sector theory of urbanstructure, advanced in the late 1930s by HomerHoyt (1933, 1939), who observed that once vari-ations arose in land uses near the city center, theytended to persist as the city grew. Distinctivesectors thus expanded out from the CBD, oftenorganized along major highways. Hoyt empha-sized that nonrational factors could alter urbanform, as when skillful promotion influenced thedirection of speculative development. He alsounderstood that the age of buildings could stillreflect a concentric ring structure, and that sec-tors may not be internally homogeneous at onespecific time.

The complexities of real-world urbanism werefurther taken up in the multiple nuclei theory ofC.D. Harris and E. Ullman (1945). They pro-posed that cities have a cellular structure in whichland uses develop around multiple growth-nucleiwithin the metropolis—a consequence of acces-sibility-induced variations in the land-rent sur-face and agglomeration (dis)economies. Harrisand Ullman (1945) also allow that real-worldurban structure is determined by broader socialand economic forces, the influence of history, andinternational influences. But whatever the pre-cise reasons for their origin, once nuclei havebeen established, general growth forces reinforcetheir preexisting patterns.

Much of the urban research agenda of thetwentieth century has been predicated on theprecepts of the concentric zone, sector, and mul-tiple nuclei theories of urban structure. Theirinfluences can be seen directly in factorial ecolo-gies of intraurban structure, land-rent models,studies of urban economies and diseconomies ofscale, and designs for ideal cities and neighbor-hoods. The specific and persistent popularity of

Postmodern Urbanism 51

the Chicago concentric ring model is harder toexplain, however, given the proliferation of evi-dence in support of alternative theories. The mostlikely reasons for its endurance are probably re-lated to a beguiling simplicity and the enormousvolume of publications produced by adherents ofthe Chicago School. Even as late as 1992, MikeDavis’s vision of an ecology of fear in Los Angelesmanaged to produce a sketch based on the now-familiar concentric rings (Davis 1992c).

A “Los Angeles School”?

During the 1980s, a group of loosely-associatedscholars, professionals, and advocates based inSouthern California began to examine the notionthat what was happening in the Los Angeles regionwas somehow symptomatic of a broader socio-geo-graphic transformation taking place within the U.S.as a whole. Their common but then unarticulatedproject was based on certain shared theoreticalassumptions, and on the view that L.A. was em-blematic of some more general urban dynamic. Oneof the earliest expressions of an emergent “L.A.School” was the appearance in 1986 of a specialissue of the journal Society and Space, which wasentirely devoted to understanding Los Angeles.5 Intheir prefatory remarks to that issue, Allen Scottand Edward Soja referred to Los Angeles as the“capital of the twentieth century,” deliberately in-voking Walter Benjamin’s reference to Paris as thecapital of the nineteenth. They predicted that thevolume of scholarly work on Los Angeles wouldquickly overtake that on Chicago.

The burgeoning outlines of an L.A. School weregiven crude form by a series of meetings and publi-cations that occurred during the late 1980s, and by1990, in his penetrating critique of Southern Cali-fornia urbanism (City of Quartz), Mike Davis wasable to make specific reference to the School’sexpanding consciousness. He commented that itspractitioners were undecided whether to modelthemselves after the Chicago School (named prin-cipally for the city that was its object of inquiry), orthe Frankfurt School (a philosophical alliancenamed only coincidentally after its place of opera-tions). Then, in 1993, Marco Cenzatti published ashort pamphlet that was the first publication toexplicitlyexamine the focus andpotentialofanL.A.School. Responding to Davis, he underscored thatthe School’s practitioners combine precepts of boththe Chicago and Frankfurt Schools. Just as theChicago School emerged at a time when that city

was reaching new national prominence, Los An-geles has begun to make its impression on theminds of urbanists. Their theoretical inquiriesfocus not only on the specific city, but also onmore general questions concerning urban proc-esses. Cenzatti claims that one concern commonto all adherents of the L.A. School is a focus onrestructuring, which includes deindustrialization andreindustrialization, the birth of the informationeconomy, the decline of nation-states, the emer-gence of newnationalisms, andthe riseof thePacificRim.Suchproliferating logicsoften involvemultipletheoretical frameworks that overlap and coexist intheir explanations of the burgeoning global/localorder—a heterodoxy consistent with the project ofpostmodernism.

Los Angeles is undoubtedly a special place.6But adherents of the Los Angeles School rarelyassert that the city is unique, nor necessarily aharbinger of the future, even though both view-points are at some level demonstrably true.7 In-stead, at a minimum they assert that SouthernCalifornia is a suggestive prototype—a polyglot,polycentric, polycultural pastiche that is some-how engaged in the rewriting of the Americansocial contract (Dear et al. 1996; Scott and Soja1996; Steinberg et al. 1992). The peculiar condi-tions that have led now to the emergence of anetwork of Los Angeles-based scholars may becoincidental: (a) that an especially powerful in-tersection of empirical and theoretical researchprojects have come together in this particularplace at this particular time; (b) that these trendsare occurring in what has historically been themost understudied major city in the U.S.; (c) thatthese projects have attracted the attention of anassemblage of increasingly self-conscious scholarsand practitioners; and (d) that the world is facingthe prospect of a Pacific century, in which South-ern California is likely to become a global capital.The vitality of the Los Angeles School derivesprincipally from the intersection of these events,and the promise they hold for a re-creation ofurban theory. The validity and potential of theschool will only be decided after extensive com-parative analysis based in other metropolitan ar-eas of the world.

Ways of Seeing: SouthernCalifornian Urbanisms

This latest mutation in space—postmodern hyper-space—has finally succeeded in transcending the

52 Dear and Flusty

capacities of the human body to locate itself, toorganize its immediate surroundings perceptually,and cognitively to map its position in a mappableexternal world (Fredric Jameson 1991:44).

Taking Los Angeles Seriously

Most world cities have an instantly identifiablesignature: think of the boulevards of Paris, theskyscrapers of New York, or the churches ofRome. But Los Angeles appears to be a citywithout a common narrative, except perhaps thefreeways or a more generic iconography of thebizarre. Twenty-five years ago, Rayner Banham(1973) provided an enduring map of the LosAngeles landscape. To this day, it remains power-ful, evocative, and instantly recognizable. Heidentified four basic ecologies: surfurbia (thebeach cities: “The beaches are what other me-tropolises should envy in Los Angeles. . . . LosAngeles is the greatest City-on-the-shore in theworld,” p. 37); the foothills (the privileged enclavesof Beverly Hills, Bel Air, etc., where the financialand topographical contours correspond almostexactly); the plains of Id (the central flatlands: “Anendless plain endlessly gridded with endlessstreets, peppered endlessly with ticky-tackyhouses clustered in indistinguishable neighbor-hoods, slashed across by endless freeways thathave destroyed any community spirit that mayhave once existed, and so on . . . endlessly,” p. 161);and autopia (“[The] freeway system in its totality isnow a single comprehensible place, a coherent stateof mind, a complete way of life,” p. 213).

For Douglas Suisman (1989), it is not thefreeways but the boulevards that determine thecity’s overall physical structure. A boulevard is asurface street that: “(1) makes arterial connec-tions on a metropolitan scale; (2) provides aframework for civic and commercial destination;and (3) acts as a filter to adjacent residentialneighborhoods.” Suisman argues that boulevardsdo more than establish an organizational pattern;they constitute “the irreducible armature of thecity’s public space,” and are charged with socialand political significance that cannot be ignored.Usually sited along the edges of former ranchos,these vertebral connectors today form an integrallink among the region’s municipalities (Suisman1989:6–7).

For Ed Soja (1989), Los Angeles is a decen-tered, decentralized metropolis powered by theinsistent fragmentation of post-Fordism, that is,an increasingly flexible, disorganized regime of

capitalist accumulation. Accompanying this shiftis a postmodern consciousness, a cultural andideological reconfiguration altering how we expe-rience social being. The center holds, however,because it functions as the urban panopticon, thestrategic surveillance point for the state’s exerciseof social control. Out from the center extends amelange of “wedges” and “citadels,” interspersedbetween corridors formed by the boulevards. Theconsequent urban structure is a complicatedquilt, fragmented, yet bound to an underlyingeconomic rationality: “With exquisite irony, con-temporary Los Angeles has come to resemblemore than ever before a gigantic agglomerationof theme parks, a lifespace composed of Disney-worlds” (Soja 1989:246).

These three sketches provide differing insightsinto L.A.’s landscapes. Banham considers thecity’s overall torso and identifies three basic com-ponents (surfurbia, plains, and foothills), as wellas connecting arteries (freeways). Suisman shiftsour gaze away from principal arteries to the veinsthat channel everyday life (the boulevards). Sojaconsiders the body-in-context, articulating thelinks between political economy and postmodernculture to explain fragmentation and social dif-ferentiation in Los Angeles. All three writersmaintain a studied detachment from the city, asthough a voyeuristic, top-down perspective isneeded to discover the rationality inherent in thecityscape. Yet a postmodern sensibility would re-linquish the modernism inherent in such de-tached representations of the urban text. Whatwould a postmodernism from below reveal?

One of the most prescient visions anticipatinga postmodern cognitive mapping of the urban isJonathan Raban’s Soft City (1974), a reading ofLondon’s cityscapes. Raban divides the city intohard and soft elements. The former refers to thematerial fabric of the built environment—thestreets and buildings that frame the lives of citydwellers. The latter, by contrast, is an individual-ized interpretation of the city, a perceptual orien-tation created in the mind of every urbanite.8 Therelationship between the two is complex and evenindeterminate. The newcomer to a city first con-fronts the hard city, but soon:

the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity.For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, toconsolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too.Decide who you are, and the city will again assumea fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and yourown identity will be revealed (p. 11).

Postmodern Urbanism 53

Raban makes no claims to a postmodern con-sciousness, yet his invocation of the relationshipbetween the cognitive and the real leads to in-sights that are unmistakably postmodern in theirsensitivities.

Ted Relph (1987) was one of the first geogra-phers to catalogue the built forms that comprisethe places of postmodernity. He describes post-modern urbanism as a self-conscious and selec-tive revival of elements of older styles, though hecautions that postmodernism is not simply a stylebut also a frame of mind (p. 213). He observeshow the confluence of many trends—gentrifica-tion, heritage conservation, architectural fash-ion, urban des ign, and part ic ipatoryplanning—caused the collapse of the modernistvision of a future city filled with skyscrapers andother austere icons of scientific rationalism. Thenew urbanism is principally distinguishable fromthe old by its eclecticism. Relph’s periodization oftwentieth-century urbanism involves a premod-ern transitional period (up to 1940); an era ofmodernist cityscapes (after 1945); and a period ofpostmodern townscapes (since 1970). The dis-tinction between cityscape and townscape is cru-cial to his diagnosis. Modernist cityscapes, heclaims, are characterized by five elements (Relph1987:242–50):(1) megastructural bigness (few street entrances

to buildings, little architectural detailing,etc.),

(2) straight-space / prairie space (city-centercanyons, endless suburban vistas),

(3) rational order and flexibility (the landscapesof total order, verging on boredom),

(4) hardness and opacity (including freewaysand the displacement of nature),

(5) discontinuous serial vision (deriving fromthe dominance of the automobile).

Conversely, postmodern townscapes are more de-tailed, handcrafted, and intricate. They celebratedifference, polyculturalism, variety, and stylish-ness (pp. 252–58). Their elements are:(6) quaintspace (a deliberate cuteness),(7) textured facades (for pedestrians, rich in de-

tail, often with an “aged” appearance),

(8) stylishness (appealing to the fashionable,chic, and affluent),

(9) reconnection with the local (involving delib-erate historical/geographical reconstruc-tion), and

(10)pedestrian-automobile split (to redress themodernist bias toward the car).

Raban’s emphasis on the cognitive and Relph’son the concrete underscore the importance ofboth dimensions in understanding sociospatialurban process. The pallette of urbanisms thatarises from merging the two is thick and multidi-mensional. We turn now to the task of construct-ing that palette (what we earlier described as atemplate) by examining empirical evidence ofrecent urban developments in Southern Califor-nia (Table 1). In this review, we take our lead fromwhat exists, rather than what we consider to be acomprehensive urban research agenda.9 Fromthis, we move quickly to a synthesis that is pre-figurative of a protopostmodern urbanism, whichwe hope will serve as an invitation to a morebroadly based comparative analysis.

Edge Cities

Joel Garreau noted the central significance ofLos Angeles in understanding contemporarymetropolitan growth in the U.S. He asserts(1991:3) that: “Every single American city that isgrowing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles,”and refers to L.A. as the “great-granddaddy” ofedge cities (he claims there are twenty-six of themwithin a five-county area in Southern California).For Garreau, edge cities represent the crucible ofAmerica’s urban future. The classic location forcontemporary edge cities is at the intersection ofan urban beltway and a hub-and-spoke lateralroad. The central conditions that have propelledsuch development are the dominance of the auto-mobile and the associated need for parking, thecommunications revolution, and the entry ofwomen in large numbers into the labor market.Although Garreau agrees with Robert Fishmanthat “[a]ll new city forms appear in their early

Table 1. A Taxonomy of Southern California Urbanisms

Edge Cities Interdictory SpacePrivatopia Historical Geographies of Restructuring

Cultures of Heteropolis Fordist/PostFordist Regimes of Accumulation/RegulationCity as Theme Park Globalization

Fortified City Politics of Nature

54 Dear and Flusty

stages to be chaotic” (1991:9), he is able to iden-tify three basic types of edge city. These are:uptowns (peripheral pre-automobile settlementsthat have subsequently been absorbed by urbansprawl); boomers (the classic edge cities, locatedat freeway intersections); and greenfields (the cur-rent state-of-the-art, “occurring at the intersec-tion of several thousand acres of farmland andone developer’s monumental ego” [p. 116]).

One essential feature of the edge city is thatpolitics is not yet established there. Into the po-litical vacuum moves a “shadow government”—aprivatized protogovernment that is essentially aplutocratic alternative to normal politics.Shadow governments can tax, legislate for, andpolice their communities, but they are rarely ac-countable, are responsive primarily to wealth (asopposed to numbers of voters), and subject to fewconstitutional constraints (Garreau 1991:187).Jennifer Wolch (1990) has described the rise ofthe shadow state as part of a society-wide trendtoward privatization. In edge cities, “community”is scarce, occurring not through propinquity butvia telephone, fax, and private mail service. Thewalls that typically surround such neighborhoodsare social boundaries, but they act as community“recognizers,” not community “organizers” (pp.275–81). In the edge-city era, Garreau notes, theterm “master-planned” community is little morethan a marketing device (p. 301). Other studiesof suburbanization in L.A., most notably by Hise(1997) and Waldie (1996), provide a basis forcomparing past practices of planned communitymarketing in Southern California.

Privatopia

Privatopia, perhaps the quintessential edge-city residential form, is a private housing devel-opment based in common-interest developments(CIDs) and administered by homeowners’ asso-ciations. There were fewer than 500 such associa-tions in 1964; by 1992, there were 150,000associations privately governing approximately32 million Americans. In 1990, the 11.6 millionCID units constituted more than 11 percent ofthe nation’s housing stock (McKenzie 1994:11).Sustained by an expanding catalogue of cove-nants, conditions, and restrictions (or CC&Rs,the proscriptive constitutions formalizing CIDbehavioral and aesthetic norms), privatopia hasbeen fueled by a large dose of privatization, andpromoted by an ideology of “hostile privatism”

(McKenzie 1994:19). It has provoked a culture ofnonparticipation.

McKenzie warns that far from being a benignor inconsequential trend, CIDs already define anew norm for the mass production of housing inthe U.S. Equally important, their organizationsare now allied through something called theCommunity Associations Institute, “whose pur-poses include the standardizing and professional-izing of CID governance” (1994:184). McKenzienotes how this “secession of the successful” (thephrase is Robert Reich’s) has altered concepts ofcitizenship, in which “one’s duties consist of sat-isfying one’s obligations to private property”(1994:196). In her futuristic novel of L.A. warsbetween walled-community dwellers and thosebeyond the walls (Parable of the Sower, 1993),Octavia Butler has envisioned a dystopian priva-topian future. It includes a balkanized nation ofdefended neighborhoods at odds with one an-other, where entire communities are wiped out fora handful of fresh lemons or a few cups of potablewater; where torture and murder of one’s enemiesis common; and where company-town slavery isattractive to those who are fortunate enough tosell their services to the hyperdefended enclavesof the very rich.

Cultures of Heteropolis

One of the most prominent sociocultural ten-dencies in contemporary Southern California isthe rise of minority populations (Ong et al. 1994;Roseman et al. 1996; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr1996). Provoked to comprehend the causes andimplications of the 1992 civil disturbances in LosAngeles, Charles Jencks (1993:32) zeroes in onthe city’s diversity as the key to L.A.’s emergenturbanism: “Los Angeles is a combination of en-claves with high identity, and multienclaves withmixed identity, and, taken as a whole, it is perhapsthe most heterogeneous city in the world.” Suchethnic pluralism has given rise to what Jenckscalls a hetero-architecture, which has demon-strated that: “there is a great virtue, and pleasure,to be had in mixing categories, transgressingboundaries, inverting customs and adopting themarginal usage” (1993:123). The vigor andimagination underlying these intense cultural dy-namics is everywhere evident in the region, fromthe diversity of ethnic adaptations (Park 1996)through the concentration of cultural producersin the region (Molotch 1996), to the hybrid com-

Postmodern Urbanism 55

plexities of emerging cultural forms (Boyd 1996,1997).

The consequent built environment is charac-terized by transience, energy, and unplanned vul-garity, in which Hollywood is never far away.Jencks views this improvisational quality as ahopeful sign: “The main point of hetero-architec-ture is to accept the different voices that create acity, suppress none of them, and make from theirinteraction some kind of greater dialogue”(1993:75). This is especially important in a citywhere minoritization, “the typical postmodernphenomenon where most of the population formsthe ‘other,’ ” is the order of the day, and wheremost city dwellers feel distanced from the powerstrucure (Jencks 1993:84). Despite Jencks’s opti-mism, other analysts have observed that the sameSouthern California heteropolis has to contendwith more than its share of socioeconomic polari-zation, racism, inequality, homelessness, and so-cial unrest (Anderson 1996; Baldassare 1994;Bullard et al. 1994; Gooding-Williams 1993;Rocco 1996; Wolch and Dear 1993). Yet thesecharacteristics are part of a sociocultural dynamicthat is also provoking the search for innovativesolutions in labor and community organizing(e.g., Pulido 1996), as well as in interethnic rela-tions (e.g., Abelmann and Lie 1995; Martinez1992; Yoon 1997).

City as Theme Park

California in general, and Los Angeles in par-ticular, have often been promoted as places wherethe American (suburban) Dream is most easilyrealized. Its oft-noted qualities of optimism andtolerance coupled with a balmy climate havegiven rise to an architecture and society fosteredby a spirit of experimentation, risk taking, andhope. Architectural dreamscapes are readily con-vertible into marketable commodities, i.e., sale-able prepackaged landscapes engineered to satisfyfantasies of suburban living.10 Many writers haveused the “theme park” metaphor to describe theemergence of such variegated cityscapes. For in-stance, Michael Sorkin, in a collection of essaysappropriately entitled Variations on a Theme Park(1992), describes theme parks as places of simu-lation without end, characterized by aspatialityplus technological and physical surveillance andcontrol. The precedents for this model can betraced back to the World’s Fairs, but Sorkin insiststhat something “wholly new” is now emerging.

This is because “the 800 telephone number andthe piece of plastic have made time and spaceobsolete,” and these instruments of “artificial ad-jacency” have eviscerated the traditional politicsof propinquity (Sorkin 1992:xi). Sorkin observesthat the social order has always been legible inurban form; for example, traditional cities haveadjudicated conflicts via the relations of publicplaces such as the agora or piazza. In today’s“recombinant city,” however, he contends thatconventional legibilities have been obscuredand/or deliberately mutilated. The phone andmodem have rendered the street irrelevant, andthe new city threatens an “unimagined sameness”characterized by the loosening of ties to any spe-cific space, rising levels of surveillance, manipu-lation and segregation, and the city as a themepark. Of this last, Disneyland is the arche-type—described by Sorkin as a place of “Taylor-ized fun,” the “Holy See of Creative Geography”(1992:227) What is missing in this new cyber-netic suburbia is not a particular building or place,but the spaces between, that is, the connectionsthat make sense of forms (xii). What is missing,then, is connectivity and community.

In extremis, California dreamscapes becomesimulacra. Ed Soja (1992:111), in a catalogue ofSouthern California’s urban eccentricities, iden-tified Orange County as a massive simulation ofwhat a city should be. He describes OrangeCounty as: “a structural fake, an enormous adver-tisement, yet functionally the finest multipurposefacility of its kind in the country.” Calling thisassemblage “exopolis,” or the city without, Sojaasserts that “something new is being born here”based on the hyperrealities of more con-ventionaltheme parks such as Disneyland (1992:101). Theexopolis is a simulacrum, an exact copy of anoriginal that never existed, within which imageand reality are spectacularly confused. In this“politically-numbed” society, conventional poli-tics is dysfunctional. Orange County has becomea “scamscape,” notable principally as home ofmassive mail-fraud operations, savings and loanfailures, and county-government bankruptcy(1992:120).

Fortified City

The downside of the Southern Californiandream has, of course, been the subject of count-less dystopian visions in histories, movies, andnovels.11 In one powerful account, Mike Davis

56 Dear and Flusty

noted how Southern Californians’ obsession withsecurity has transformed the region into a fortress.This shift is accurately manifested in the physicalform of the city, which is divided into fortifiedcells of affluence and places of terror where policebattle the criminalized poor. These urban phe-nomena, according to Davis, have placed LosAngeles “on the hard edge of postmodernity”(Davis 1992a:155). The dynamics of fortificationinvolve the omnipresent application of high-techpolicing methods to the “high-rent security ofgated residential developments” and “panopticonmalls.” It extends to “space policing,” including aproposed satellite observation capacity thatwould create an invisible Haussmannization ofLos Angeles. In the consequent “carceral city,”the working poor and destitute are spatially se-questered on the “mean streets,” and excludedfrom the affluent “forbidden cities” through “se-curity by design.”

Interdictory Space

Elaborating upon Davis’s fortress urbanism,Steven Flusty observed how various types of for-tification have extended a canopy of suppressionand surveillance across the entire city. His taxon-omy of interdictory spaces (1994:16–17) identi-fies how spaces are designed to exclude by acombination of their function and cognitive sen-sibilities. Some spaces are passively aggressive:space concealed by intervening objects or gradechanges is “stealthy”; space that may be reachedonly by means of interrupted or obfuscated ap-proaches is “slippery.” Other spatial configura-tions are more assertively confrontational:deliberately obstructed “crusty” space sur-rounded by walls and checkpoints; inhospitable“prickly” spaces featuring unsittable benches inareas devoid of shade; or “jittery” space ostenta-tiously saturated with surveillance devices. Flustynotes how combinations of interdictory spaces arebeing introduced “into every facet of the urbanenvironment, generating distinctly unfriendlymutant typologies” (1994:21–33). Some are in-dicative of the pervasive infiltration of fear intothe home, including the bunker-style “block-home,” affluent palisaded “luxury laager” com-munities, or low-income residential areasconverted into “pocket ghettos” by military-styleoccupation. Other typological forms betray a fearof the public realm, as with the fortification ofcommercial facilities into “strongpoints of sale,”

or the self-contained “world citadel” clusters ofdefensible office towers.

One consequence of the sociospatial differen-tiation described by Davis and Flusty is an acutefragmentation of the urban landscape. Commen-tators who remark upon the strict division ofresidential neighborhoods along race and classlines miss the fact that L.A.’s microgeography isincredibly volatile and varied. In many neighbor-hoods, simply turning a street corner will lead thepedestrian/driver into totally different social andphysical configurations. One very important fea-ture of local neighborhood dynamics in the forti-fied culture of Southern Californian cities is, ofcourse, the presence of street gangs (Klein 1995;Vigil 1988).

Historical Geographies of Restructuring

Historical geographies of Southern Californiaare relatively rare, especially when compared withthe number of published accounts of Chicago andNew York. For reasons that are unclear, Los An-geles remains, in our judgment, the least studiedmajor city in the U.S. Until Mike Davis’s City ofQuartz (1990) brought the urban record up to thepresent, students of Southern California tendedto rely principally on Carey McWilliams’s (1973)seminal general history and Fogelson’s The Frag-mented Metropolis (1967), an urban history of L.A.up to 1930. Other chronicles of the urban evolu-tion of Southern California have focused ontransportation (Bottles 1987; Wachs 1996), theMexican/Chicano experience (del Castillo 1979),real estate development and planning (Erie forth-coming; Hise 1997; Weiss 1987), and oil (Tygiel1994). The political geography of the region isonly now being written (Fulton 1997; Sonenshein1993), but several more broadly-based treatmentsof Californian politics exist, including excellentstudies on art, poetry and politics (Cándida Smith1995), railways (Deverell 1994), and the rise ofsuburbia (Fishman 1987).

In his history of Los Angeles between 1965 and1992, Soja (1996a) attempts to link the emergentpatterns of urban form with underlying socialprocesses. He identified six kinds of restructuring,which together define the region’s contemporaryurban process. In addition to Exopolis (notedabove), Soja lists: Flexcities, associated with thetransition to post-Fordism, especially deindustri-alization and the rise of the information economy;and Cosmopolis, referring to the globalization of

Postmodern Urbanism 57

Los Angeles both in terms of its emergent world-city status and its internal multicultural diversifi-cation. According to Soja, peripheralization,post-Fordism, and globalization together definethe experience of urban restructuring in Los An-geles. Three specific geographies are consequentupon these dynamics: Splintered Labyrinth, whichdescribes the extreme forms of social, economic,and political polarization characteristic of thepostmodern city; Carceral City, referring to thenew “incendiary urban geography” brought aboutby the amalgam of violence and police surveil-lance; and Simcities, the term Soja uses to describethe new ways of seeing the city that are emergingfrom the study of Los Angeles—a kind of episte-mological restructuring that foregrounds a post-modern perspective.

Fordist versus Post-Fordist Regimes ofAccumulation and Regulation

Many observers agree that one of the most im-portant underlying shifts in the contemporary po-litical economy is from a Fordist to a post-Fordistindustrial organization. In a series of importantbooks, Allen Scott and Michael Storper have por-trayed the burgeoning urbanism of Southern Cali-fornia as a consequence of this deep-seatedstructural change in the capitalist political economy(Scott 1988a, 1988b, 1993; Storper and Walker1989). For instance, Scott’s basic argument is thatthere have been two major phases of urbanizationin the U.S. The first related to an era of Fordist massproduction, during which the paradigmatic cities ofindustrial capitalism (Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh,etc.) coalesced around industries that were them-selves based upon ideas of mass production. Thesecond phase is associated with the decline of theFordist era and the rise of a post-Fordist “flexibleproduction.” This is a form of industrial activitybased on small-size, small-batch units of (typicallysubcontracted) production that are neverthelessintegrated into clusters of economic activity. Suchclusters have been observed in two manifestations:labor-intensive craft forms (in Los Angeles, typicallygarments and jewelry), and high technology (espe-cially the defense and aerospace industries). Ac-cording to Scott, these so-called “technopoles”until recentlyconstitutedtheprincipal geographicalloci of contemporary (sub)urbanization in SouthernCalifornia (a development prefigured in Fishman’sdescription of the “technoburb”; see Fishman 1987;Castells and Hall 1994).

Post-Fordist regimes of accumulation are asso-ciated with analogous regimes of regulation, orsocial control. Perhaps the most prominent mani-festation of changes in the regime of regulationhas been the retreat from the welfare state. Therise of neoconservatism and the privatizationethos have coincided with a period of economicrecession and retrenchment which has led manyto the brink of poverty just at the time when thesocial welfare “safety net” is being withdrawn. InLos Angeles, as in many other cities, an acutesocioeconomic polarization has resulted. In 1984,the city was dubbed the “homeless capital” of theU.S. because of the concentration of homelesspeople there (see Wolch 1990; Wolch and Dear1993; Wolch and Sommer 1997).

Globalization

Needless to say, any consideration of thechanging nature of industrial production sooneror later must encompass the globalization ques-tion (cf. Knox and Taylor 1995). In his referenceto the global context of L.A.’s localisms, MikeDavis (1992b) claims that if L.A. is in any senseparadigmatic, it is because the city condenses theintended and unintended spatial consequences ofpost-Fordism. He insists that there is no simplemaster-logic of restructuring, focusing instead ontwo key localized macro-processes: the overaccu-mulation in Southern California of bank andreal-estate capital, principally from the EastAsian trade surplus, and the reflux of low-wagemanufacturing and labor-intensive service indus-tries, following upon immigration from Mexicoand Central America. For instance, Davis noteshow the City of Los Angeles used tax dollarsgleaned from international capital investments tosubsidize its downtown (Bunker Hill) urban re-newal, a process he refers to as “municipalizedland speculation” (1992b:26). Through suchconnections, what happens today in Asia andCentral America will tomorrow have an effect inLos Angeles. This global/local dialectic has al-ready become an important (if somewhat impre-cise) leitmotif of contemporary urban theory.

Politics of Nature

The natural environment of Southern Califor-nia has been under constant assault since the firstcolonial settlements. Human habitation on a

58 Dear and Flusty

metropolitan scale has only been possible througha widespread manipulation of nature, especiallythe control of water resources in the AmericanWest (M. L. Davis 1993; Gottleib and FitzSim-mons 1991; and Reisner 1993). On one hand,Southern Californians tend to hold a grudgingrespect for nature, living as they do adjacent toone of the earth’s major geological hazards and ina desert environment that is prone to flood, land-slide, and fire (see, for instance, McPhee 1989;Darlington 1996). On the other hand, its inhabi-tants have been energetically, ceaselessly, andsometimes carelessly unrolling the carpet of ur-banization over the natural landscape for morethan a century. This uninhibited occupation hasengendered its own range of environmental prob-lems, most notoriously air pollution, but it alsobrings forth habitat loss and dangerous encoun-ters between humans and other animals.

The force of nature in Southern California hasspawned a literature that attempts to incorporateenvironmental issues into the urban problematic.The politics of environmental regulation havelong been studied in many places, including LosAngeles (e.g., FitzSimmons and Gottleib 1996).The particular combination of circumstances inSouthern California has stimulated an especiallypolitical view of nature, however, focusing both

on its emasculation through human intervention(Davis 1996) and on its potential for politicalmobilization by grass-roots movements (Pulido1996). In addition, Wolch’s Southern California-based research has led her to outline an alterna-tive vision of biogeography’s problematic (Wolch1996).

Synthesis: Protopostmodern Urbanism

If these observers of the Southern Californiascene could talk with each other to resolve theirdifferences and reconcile their terminologies,how might they synthesize their visions? At therisk of misrepresenting their work, we suggest aschematic that is powerful, yet inevitably incom-plete (Figure 1). It suggests a “protopostmodern”urban process, driven by a global restructuringthat is permeated and balkanized by a series ofinterdictory networks; whose populations are so-cially and culturally heterogeneous, but politi-cally and economically polarized; whose residentsare educated and persuaded to the consumptionof dreamscapes even as the poorest are consignedto carceral cities; whose built environment, re-flective of these processes, consists of edge cities,privatopias, and the like; and whose natural en-

Figure 1. A concept of protopostmodern urbanism.

Postmodern Urbanism 59

vironment, also reflective of these processes, isbeing erased to the point of unlivability while, at thesame time, providing a focus for political action.

Postmodern Urbanism

The only theory worth having is that which you haveto fight off, not that which you speak with profoundfluency (Stuart Hall 1992:280).

Recognizing that we may have caused someoffense by characterizing others’ work in this way,let us move swiftly to reconstruct their evidenceinto a postmodern urban problematic (Table 2).We anchor this problematic in the straightfor-ward need to account for the evolution of societyover time and space. Such evolution occurs as acombination of deep-time (long-term) and pre-sent-time (short-term) processes, and it developsover several different scales of human activity(which we may represent summarily as micro-,meso-, and macroscales) (Dear 1988). The struc-turing of the time-space fabric is the result of theinteraction among ecologically situated humanagents in relations of production, consumption,and coercion. We do not intend any primacy inthis ordering of categories, but instead emphasizetheir interdependencies—all are essential in ex-plaining postmodern human geographies.

Our promiscuous use of neologisms in whatfollows is quite deliberate.12 This technique hasbeen used historically to good effect in many

instances and disciplines (e.g., Knox and Taylor1995). Neologisms have been used here in cir-cumstances when there were no existing termsto describe adequately the conditions we soughtto identify, when neologisms served as metaphorsto suggest new insights, when a single term moreconveniently substituted for a complex phrase orstring of ideas, and when neologistic noveltyaided our avowed efforts to rehearse the break.The juxtaposing of postmodern and more tradi-tional categories of modernist urbanism is also anessential piece of our analytical strategy. Thatthere is an overlap between modernist and post-modern categories should surprise no one; we are,inevitably, building on existing urbanisms andepistemologies. The consequent neologistic pas-tiche may be properly regarded as a tactic ofpostmodern analysis; others could regard thisstrategy as analogous to hypothesis-generation,or as the practice of dialectics.

Urban Pattern and Process

We begin with the assumption that urbanismis made possible by the exercise of instrumentalcontrol over both human and nonhuman ecolo-gies (Figure 2). The very occupation and utiliza-tion of space, as well as the production anddistribution of commodities, depends upon ananthropocentric reconfiguration of natural pro-cesses and their products. As the scope and scaleof, and dependency upon, globally integrated

Table 2. Elements of a Postmodern Urbanism

GLOBAL LATIFUNDIA

HOLSTEINIZATION

PRAEDATORIANISM

FLEXISM

NEW WORLD BIPOLAR DISORDERCybergeoisieProtosurps

MEMETIC CONTAGION

KENO CAPITALISM

CITISTATCommudities

CyburbiaCitidel

In-BeyondCyberia

POLLYANNARCHY

DISINFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

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60 Dear and Flusty

consumption increases, institutional action con-verts complex ecologies into monocultured fac-tors of production by simplifying nature into aglobal latifundia. This process includes both ho-mogenizing interventions, as in California agri-culture’s reliance upon vast expanses of singlecrops, and forceful interdiction to sustain thatintervention against natural feedbacks, as in theaerial spraying of pesticides to eradicate fruit fliesattracted to these vast expanses of single crops.Being part of nature, humanity is subjected toanalogous dynamics. Holsteinization is the processof monoculturing people as consumers so as tofacilitate the harvesting of desires, including thedecomposition of communities into isolated fam-ily units and individuals in order to supplantsocial networks of mutual support with con-sumersheds of dependent customers. Resistanceis discouraged by means of praedatorianism, i.e.,the forceful interdiction by a praedatorian guardwith varying degrees of legitimacy.

The global latifundia, holsteinization, andpraedatorianism are, in one form or another, asold as the global political economy, but the over-arching dynamic signaling a break with previous

manifestations is flexism, a pattern of econo-cul-tural production and consumption characterizedby near-instantaneous delivery and rapid redi-rectability of resource flows. Flexism’s fluidity re-sults from cheaper and faster systems oftransportation and telecommunications, globali-zation of capital markets, and concomitant flex-ibly specialized, just-in-time production processesenabling short product- and production-cycles.These result in highly mobile capital and com-modity flows, able to outmaneuver geographicallyfixed labor markets, communities, and boundednation states. Globalization and rapidity permitcapital to evade long-term commitment to place-based socioeconomies, thus enabling a crucialsocial dynamic of flexism: whereas, underFordism, exploitation is exercised through thealienation of labor in the place of production,flexism may require little or no labor at all from agiven locale. Simultaneously, local down-wagingand capital concentration operate synergisticallyto supplant locally owned enterprises with na-tional and supranational chains, thereby transfer-ring consumer capital and inventory selectionever farther away from direct local control.

Figure 2. Elements of a postmodern urbanism - 1.

Postmodern Urbanism 61

From these exchange asymmetries emerges anew world bi-polar disorder. This is a globally bi-furcated social order, many times more compli-cated than conventional class structures, inwhich those overseeing the global latifundia en-joy concentrated power. Those who are depend-ent upon their command-and-control decisionsfind themselves in progressively weaker positions,pitted against each other globally, and forced toaccept shrinking compensation for their efforts(assuming that compensation is offered in the firstplace). Of the two groups, the cybergeoisie residein the “big house” of the global latifundia, provid-ing indispensable, presently unautomatable com-mand-and- control functions. They arepredominantly stockholders, the core employeesof thinned-down corporations, and write-your-own-ticket freelancers (e.g., CEOs, subcontractentrepreneurs, and celebrities). They may alsoshelter members of marginal creative professions,who comprise a kind of paracybergeoisie. Thecybergoisie enjoy perceived socioeconomic secu-rity and comparatively long-term horizons in de-cision making; consequently their anxieties tendtoward unforeseen social disruptions such as mar-ket fluctuations and crime. Commanding, con-trolling, and prodigiously enjoying the fruits of ashared global exchange of goods and information,the cybergoisie exercise global coordination func-tions that predispose them to a similar ideologyand, thus, they are relatively heavily holsteinized.

Protosurps, on the other hand, are the share-croppers of the global latifundia. They are in-creasingly marginalized “surplus” labor providingjust-in-time services when called upon by flexistproduction processes, but otherwise alienatedfrom global systems of production (though not ofconsumption). Protosurps include temporary orday laborers, fire-at-will service workers, a bur-geoning class of intra- and international itinerantlaborers specializing in pursuing the migrations offluid investment. True surpdom is a state of super-fluity beyond peonage—a vagrancy that is in-creasingly criminalized through antihomelessordinances, welfare-state erosion, and wide-spread community intolerance (of, for instance,all forms of panhandling). Protosurps are calledupon to provide as yet unautomated service func-tions designed to be performed by anyone. Sub-jected to high degrees of uncertainty by theomnipresent threat of instant unemployment,protosurps are prone to clustering into affinitygroups for support in the face of adversity. Theseaffinity groups, however, are not exclusive, over-

lapping in both membership and space, resultingin a class of marginalized indigenous populationsand peripheral immigrants who are relatively lessholsteinized.

The sociocultural collisions and intermeshingsof protosurp affinity groups, generated by flexist-induced immigration and severe social differen-t ia t ion, serves to produce wi ld memeticcontagion.13 This is a process by which culturalelements of one individual or group exert cross-over influences upon the culture of another, pre-viously unexposed individual/group. Memeticcontagion is evidenced in Los Angeles by suchhybridized agents and intercultural conflicts asMexican and Central American practitioners ofAfro -Caribbean rel ig ion (McGuire andScrymgeour forthcoming), blue-bandanna’dThai Crips, or the adjustments prompted by poorAfrican-Americans’ offense at Korean mer-chants’ disinclination to smile casually. Memeticcontagion should not be taken for a mere epiphe-nomenon of an underlying political economicorder, generating colorfully chaotic ornamenta-tions for a flexist regime. Rather, it entails theassemblage of novel ways of seeing and being,from whence new identities, cultures, and politi-cal alignments emerge. These new social configu-rations, in turn, may act to force change inexisting institutions and structures, and to spawncognitive conceptions that are incommensurablewith, though not necessarily any less valid than,existing models. The inevitable tensions betweenthe anarchic diversification born of memetic con-tagion and the manipulations of the holsteiniza-tion process may yet prove to be the centralcultural contradiction of flexism.

With the flexist imposition of global impera-tives on local economies and cultures, the spatiallogic of Fordism has given way to a new, moredissonant international geographical order. In theabsence of conventional communication andtransportation imperatives mandating propin-quity, the once-standard Chicago School logichas given way to a seemingly haphazard juxtapo-sition of land uses scattered over the landscape.Worldwide, agricultural lands sprout monocul-tures of exportable strawberry or broccoli in lieuof diverse staple crops grown for local consump-tion. Sitting amid these fields, identical assemblylines produce the same brand of automobile, sup-plied with parts and managed from distant conti-nents. Expensive condominiums appear amongsquatter slums, indistinguishable in form and oc-cupancy from (and often in direct communica-

62 Dear and Flusty

tion with) luxury housing built atop homelessencampments elsewhere in the world. Yet what inclose-up appears to be a fragmentary, collagedpolyculture is, from a longer perspective, a geo-graphically disjointed but hyperspatially inte-grated monoculture, that is, shuffled sames setamid adaptive and persistent local variations.The result is a landscape not unlike that formedby a keno gamecard. The card itself appears as anumbered grid, with some squares being markedduring the course of the game and others not,according to some random draw. The processgoverning this marking ultimately determineswhich player will achieve a jackpot-winning pat-tern; it is, however, determined by a rationalizedset of procedures beyond the territory of the carditself. Similarly, the apparently random develop-ment and redevelopment of urban land may beregarded as the outcome of exogenous invest-ment processes inherent to flexism, thus creatingthe landscapes of keno capitalism.

Keno capitalism’s contingent mosaic of vari-egated monocultures renders discussion of “thecity” increasingly reductionist. More holistically,the dispersed net of megalopoles may be viewedas a single integrated urban system, or Citistat(Figure 3). Citistat, the collective world city, hasemerged from competing urban webs of colonialand postcolonial eras to become a geographicallydiffuse hub of an omnipresent periphery, drawinglabor and materials from readily substitutable lo-cations throughout that periphery. Citistat is bothgeographically corporeal, in the sense that urbanplaces exist, and yet ageographically ethereal inthe sense that communication systems create avirtual space, permitting coordination acrossphysical space. Both realms reinforce each an-other while (re)producing the new world bipolardisorder.

Materially, Citistat consists of commudities(centers of command and control), and the in-be-yond (internal peripheries simultaneously under-going but resisting instrumentalization in myriadways). Virtually, Citistat consists of cyburbia, thecollection of state-of-the-art data-transmission,premium pay-per-use, and interactive servicesgenerally reliant upon costly and technologicallycomplex interfaces; and cyberia, an electronicoutland of rudimentary communications includ-ing basic phone service and telegraphy, inter-woven with and preceptorally conditioned by thedisinformation superhighway (DSH).

Commudities are commodified communitiescreated expressly to satisfy (and profit from) the

habitat preferences of the well-recompensed cy-bergeoisie. They commonly consist of carefullymanicured residential and commercial ecologiesmanaged through privatopian self-administra-tion, and maintained against internal and exter-nal outlaws by a repertoire of interdictoryprohibitions. Increasingly, these prepackaged en-vironments jockey with one another for clienteleon the basis of recreational, cultural, security, andeducational amenities. Commonly located on dif-ficult-to-access sites like hilltops or urban edges,far from restless populations undergoing conver-sion to protosurpdom, individual commuditiesare increasingly teleintegrated to form cyburbia(Dewey 1994), the interactive tollways compris-ing the high-rent district of Citistat’s hyperspatialelectronic shadow. (This process may soon find ageographical analog in the conversion of automo-tive freeways linking commudities via exclusivetollways.) Teleintegration is already complete(and de rigeur) for the citidels, which are commer-cial commudities consisting of highrise corporatetowers from which the control and coordinationof production and distribution in the global lati-fundia is exercised.

Citistat’s internal periphery and repository ofcheap on-call labor lies at the in-beyond, com-prised of a shifting matrix of protosurp affinityclusters. The in-beyond may be envisioned as apatchwork quilt of variously defined interestgroups (with differing levels of economic, cul-tural, and street influence), none of which pos-sesses the wherewithal to achieve hegemonicstatus or to secede. Secession may occur locallyto some degree, as in the cases of the publiclysubsidized reconfiguration of L.A.’s Little Tokyo,and the consolidation of Koreatown through theimport, adjacent extraction, and community re-circulation of capital. The piecemeal diversity ofthe in-beyond makes it a hotbed of wild memeticcontagion. The global connectivity of the in-be-yond is considerably less glamorous than that ofthe cybergeoisie’s commudities, but it is no lessextensive. Intermittent phone contact and wire-service remittances occur throughout cyberia(Rushkoff 1995; also see Knox and Taylor 1995).The pot-holed public streets of Citistat’s virtualtwin are augmented by extensive networks ofsnail mail, personal migration, and the hand-to-hand passage of mediated communications (e.g.,cassette tapes). Such contacts occasionally dif-fuse into commudities, as with the conversion ofcybergeosie youth to wannabe gangstas.

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Postmodern Urbanism 63

Political relations in Citistat tend toward poly-anarchy, a politics of grudging tolerance of differ-ence that emerges from interactions andaccommodations within the in-beyond and be-tween commudities, and less frequently, betweenin-beyond and commudity. Its more pervasiveform is pollyannarchy, an exaggerated, manufac-tured optimism that promotes a self-congratula-tory awareness and respect for difference and theasymmetries of power. Pollyannarchy is thus apathological form of polyanarchy, disempoweringthose who would challenge the controlling bene-ficiaries of the new world bipolar disorder. Polly-annarchy is evident in the continuing spectacleof electoral politics, or in the citywide unity cam-paign run by corporate sponsors following the1992 uprising in Los Angeles.

Wired throughout the body of the Citistat isthe disinformation superhighway (or DSH), a massinfo-tain-mercial media owned by roughly twodozen cybergeoisie institutions. The DSH dis-seminates holsteinizing ideologies and incentives,creates wants and dreams, and inflates the sym-

bolic value of commodities. At the same time, itserves as the highly filtered sensory organ throughwhich commudities and the in-beyond perceivethe world outside their unmediated daily experi-ences. The DSH is Citistat’s “consent factory”(Chomsky and Herman 1988), engineering me-metic contagion to encourage participation in aglobal latifundia that is represented as both inevi-table and desirable. But since the DSH is a broad-band distributor of information designedprimarily to attract and deliver consumers toadvertisers, the ultimate reception of messagescarried by the DSH is difficult to target andpredetermine. Thus the DSH also serves inadver-tently as a vector for memetic contagion, e.g., theconversion of cybergeoisie youth to wannabegangstas via the dissemination of hip-hop cultureover commudity boundaries. The DSH serves asa network of preceptoral control, and is thusdistinct from the coercive mechanisms of thepraedatorian guard. Overlap between the two isincreasingly common, however, as in the case oftelevised disinfotainment programs like Amer-

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Figure 3. Elements of a postmodern urbanism - 2.

64 Dear and Flusty

ica’s Most Wanted, in which crimes are dramati-cally reenacted and viewers invited to call in andbetray alleged perpetrators.

As the cybergeoisie increasingly withdraw fromthe Fordist redistributive triad of big government,big business, and big labor to establish their ownmicronations, the social support functions of thestate disintegrate, along with the survivability ofless affluent citizens. The global migrations ofwork to the lowest-wage locations of the in-be-yond, and of consumer capital to the citidels,result in power asymmetries that become so pro-nounced that even the DSH is at times incapableof obscuring them, leaving protosurps increas-ingly disinclined to adhere to the remnants of atattered social contract. This instability in turncreates the potential for violence, pitting Citistatand cybergeoisie against the protosurp in-beyond,and leading inevitably to a demand for the sup-pression of protosurp intractibility. The praeda-torian guard thus emerges as the principalremaining vestige of the police powers of thestate. This increasingly privatized public/privatepartnership of mercenary sentries, police expedi-tionary forces, and their technological extensions(e.g., video cameras, helicopters, criminologicaldata uplinks, etc.) watches over the commuditiesand minimizes disruptiveness by acting as a forceof occupation within the in-beyond. The praeda-torian guard achieves control through coercion,even at the international level where asymmetri-cal trade relations are reinforced by the militaryand its clientele. It may only be a matter of timebefore the local and national praedatorians areadministratively and functionally merged, as ex-emplified by proposals to deploy military units forpolicing inner-city streets or the U.S.-Mexicoborder.

An Alternative Model of Urban Structure

We have begun the process of interrogatingprior models of urban structure with an alter-native model based upon the recent experi-ences of Los Angeles. We do not pretend tohave completed this project, nor claim that theSouthern Californian experience is necessarilytypical of other metropolitan regions in the U.S.or the world. Still less would we advocate re-placing the old models with a new hegemony.But discourse has to start somewhere, and bynow it is clear that the most influential ofexisting urban models is no longer tenable as a

guide to contemporary urbanism. In this firstsense, our investigation has uncovered an episte-mological radical break with past practices,which in itself is sufficient justification forsomething called a Los Angeles School. Theconcentric ring structure of the Chicago Schoolwas essentially a concept of the city as an or-ganic accretion around a central, organizingcore. Instead, we have identified a postmodernurban process in which the urban peripheryorganizes the center within the context of aglobalizing capitalism.

The postmodern urban process remains reso-lutely capitalist, but the nature of that enter-prise is changing in very significant ways,especially through (for instance) the telecom-munications revolution, the changing nature ofwork, and globalization. Thus, in this secondsense also, we understand that a radical break isoccurring, this time in the conditions of ourmaterial world. Contemporary urbanism is aconsequence of how local and interlocal flowsof material and information (including sym-bols) intersect in a rapidly converging globallyintegrated economy driven by the imperativesof flexism. Landscapes and peoples are homoge-nized to facilitate large-scale production andconsumption. Highly mobile capital and com-modity flows outmaneuver geographically fixedlabor markets, communities, and nation-states,and cause a globally bifurcated polarization.The beneficiaries of this system are the cyber-goisie, even as the numbers of permanentlymarginalized protosurps grow. In the newglobal order, socioeconomic polarization andmassive, sudden population migrations spawncultural hybrids through the process of me-metic contagion. Cities no longer develop asconcentrated loci of population and economicactivity, but as fragmented parcels within Citi-stat, the collective world city. Materially, theCitistat consists of commudities (commodifiedcommunities) and the in-beyond (the perma-nently marginalized). Virtually, the Citistat iscomposed of cyburbia (those hooked into theelectronic world) and cyberia (those who arenot). Social order is maintained by the ideologi-cal apparatus of the DSH, the Citistat’s consentfactory, and by the praedatorian guard, theprivatized vestiges of the nation-state’s policepowers.

Keno capitalism is the synoptic term that wehave adopted to describe the spatial manifesta-tions of the postmodern urban condition (Figure

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Postmodern Urbanism 65

4). Urbanization is occurring on a quasi-randomfield of opportunities. Capital touches down as ifby chance on a parcel of land, ignoring the oppor-tunities on intervening lots, thus sparking thedevelopment process. The relationship betweendevelopment of one parcel and nondevelopmentof another is a disjointed, seemingly unrelatedaffair. While not truly a random process, it isevident that the traditional, center-driven ag-glomeration economies that have guided urbandevelopment in the past no longer apply. Con-ventional city form, Chicago-style, is sacrificed infavor of a noncontiguous collage of parcelized,consumption-oriented landscapes devoid of con-ventional centers yet wired into electronic pro-pinquity and nominal ly uni f ied by themythologies of the disinformation superhighway.Los Angeles may be a mature form of this post-modern metropolis; Las Vegas comes to mind asa youthful example. The consequent urban aggre-gate is characterized by acute fragmentation andspecialization—a partitioned gaming board sub-ject to perverse laws and peculiarly discrete, dis-jointed urban outcomes. Given the pervasivepresence of crime, corruption, and violence in the

global city (not to mention geopolitical transi-tions, as nation-states give way to micro-nation-alisms and transnational mafias), the city asgaming board seems an especially appropriatetwenty-first century successor to the concentri-cally ringed city of the early twentieth.

Conclusion: Invitation to aPostmodern Urbanism

Tell me, they’ll say to me. So we will understand andbe able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’sonly things you don’t understand that you can re-solve. There will be no resolution. (Peter Hoeg,1993:453).

Our notion of keno capitalism is necessarilypartial and positional, not a metanarrative butmore a micronarrative awaiting dialogical en-gagement with alternative conceptions of theurban, both from within Los Angeles and else-where. Although it is impossible for us to beginan exercise in comparative urban analysis at thispoint, we conclude with some general observa-

Figure 4. Keno Capitalism: a model of postmodern urban structure.

66 Dear and Flusty

tions about a research agenda. Our knowledge ofthe literature suggests at least four broad themesthat overlap with the substance of this essay.

(1) World City: In its contemporary manifesta-tion, the emphasis on a system of world cities canbe traced back to Peter Hall’s The World Cities(1966). The concept was updated by Friedmannand Wolff (1982) to emphasize the emergence ofa relatively few centers of command and controlin a globalizing economy. Extensions and apprais-als of the concept have been offered in, for exam-ple, Knox and Taylor (1995) and special issues ofUrban Geography (1996) and the Annals of theAmerican Academy of Political and Social Science(“Globalization and the Changing U.S. City”1997). A significant emphasis in the more recentwork has been on the global-local connection,and on the implications of the sheer size of theemergent megacities (Dogan and Kasarda 1988;Sudjic 1992).

(2) Dual City: One of the most persistentthemes in contemporary urban analysis is socialpolarization, i.e., the increasing gap between richand poor; between the powerful and powerless;between different ethnic, racial, and religiousgroupings; and between genders (O’Loughlin andFriedrichs 1996; Mollenkopf and Castells 1991).Too few analyses have traced how this broad classof polarizations is translated into the spatial struc-ture of cities (e.g., Ley 1996; Sassen 1991, 1994).

(3) Altered spaces: Another prevalent condi-tion of contemporary urban existence is fragmen-tation, both in material and cognitive life. It hasbeen noted by observers who place themselvesboth within and beyond the postmodern ethos(see, for instance, Watson and Gibson 1995, andthe essays in the City journal [“It All ComesTogether in Los Angeles” 1996]). Their concernsoften focus on the collapse of conventional com-munities and the rise of new cultural categoriesand spaces, including especially cultural hybrids(Canclini 1996; Olalquiaga 1992; Morley andRobins 1995; Zukin 1994).

(4) Cybercity: No one can ignore the chal-lenges of the information age, which promises tounseat many of our cherished notions about so-ciospatial structuring. Castells (1996, 1997) hasundertaken an ambitious three-volume accountof this social revolution, but as yet relatively fewpeople (beyond science-fiction authors such asWilliam Gibson and Neal Stephenson) have ex-plored what this revolution portends for cities.One pioneering exception is William J. Mitchell’sCity of Bits (1995).

Each of these themes (globalization, polariza-tion, fragmentation and cultural hybrids, and cy-bercities) holds a place in our postmodernurbanism. But (as we hope is by now clear) noneof them individually provide a sufficient explana-tion for the urban outcomes we are currentlyobserving. A proper accounting of contemporarypattern and process will require a much morestrenuous effort directed toward comparative ur-ban analysis. Unfortunately, the empirical, meth-odological, and theoretical bases for such analysisare weak. We lack, for instance, adequate infor-mation on a full sample of national and interna-tional cities, although valuable current synthesesare available in Urban Geography (1996) and theAnnals of the American Academy of Political andSocial Sciences (“Globalization and the U.S. City”1997). There are a number of explicit compara-tive studies, but these tend to focus on alreadywell-documented centers such as London, Tokyo,and New York City (e.g., Fainstein 1994; Sassen1991). In contrast, the vibrancy and potential ofimportant centers such as Miami still remaincloseted (Nijman 1996, 1997; Portes and Stepick1993). Our methodological and theoretical appa-ratuses for cross-cultural urban analyses are alsounderdeveloped. Castells (1996, 1997) offers aninsightful engagement with global urban condi-tions, and the theoretical insights of Ellin (1996),King (1996), and Soja (1996b) on a putativepostmodern urbanism are much needed excur-sions into a neglected field.14 In addition,Chauncy Harris’s (1997) recent reworking of hismultiple nuclei model into what he terms a pe-ripheral model of urban areas reveals an acutesensitivity to the contemporary urban condition,but engages theoretical precepts quite differentfrom ours. Finally, work on cities of the develop-ing, postcolonial, and non-Western worlds re-mains sparse and unsustained, as well as beingstubbornly immune from the broader lessons ofWestern-based theory—even though the empiri-cal parallels between, for example, Seabrook’s(1996) subtitle, “Scenes from a DevelopingWorld” and our construction of postmodern ur-banism are striking.

We intend this essay as an invitation to exam-ine the concept of a postmodern urbanism. Werecognize that we have only begun to sketch itspotential, that its validity will only be properlyassessed if researchers elsewhere in the world arewilling to examine its precepts. We urge others toshare in this enterprise because, even though our

Postmodern Urbanism 67

vision is tentative, we are convinced that we haveglimpsed a new way of understanding cities.15

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented ata “Theory, Culture & Society” conference in Berlin,the University of Turku on behalf of the Finnish Acad-emy of Science, the Howell Lecture in the School ofArchitecture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, theSchool of Architecture, Building and Planning, Uni-versity of Melbourne, the annual meetings of the As-sociation of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and theAssociation of American Geographers, and the Centerfor Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stan-ford University. We are grateful to Scott Lash and MikeFeatherstone, Harri Anderson and Jouni Häkli, RossKing and Ruth Fincher, Sharon Lord Gaber, and RobertHarris for invitations to present papers on these occa-sions. Thanks also to the many conference participantswho provided constructive criticism. Kim Dovey, RuthFincher, Robert Harris, John Kaliski, Carol Levy, JohnLevy, Claudio Minca, Jan Nijman, Kevin Robins, Mi-chael Webber, and Jennifer Wolch were supportive ofthe enterprise and offered helpful comments, as did anumber of anonymous referees. Deanna Knicker-bocker and Dallas Dishman prepared the figures. Noneof these people should be blamed for anything in thisessay. This paper was first written while Dear was afellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behav-ioral Sciences at Stanford. The support of the Centerand the National Science Foundation SES-9022192 isgratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. See, for example, Pred (1995) and Augé (1995).2. Some elements of this discussion may be found in

Watson and Gibson (1995), Ellin (1996), andKnox and Taylor (1995).

3. The theoretical bases for this argument are exam-ined more fully in Dear (1988, 1991). For specificconsiderations of the rhetoric of city planning inthe new urbanism, see Dear (1989).

4. This should not be confused with the L.A. Schoolof architecture, discussed by Charles Jencks(1993).

5. The term “school” is problematic, but wehere follow Jennifer Pratt and use the term torefer to “a collection of individuals workingin the same environment who at the time andthrough their own retrospective construc-tions of their identity and the impartations ofintellectual historians are defined as repre-senting a distinct approach to a scholarlyendeavor” (1995:2).

6. For example, Longstreth (1997) examines the roleof Los Angeles in the invention of the regionalshopping mall. See also Hayden (1994).

7. The claims of a “Los Angeles School” may havealready been overtaken by a burgeoning “OrangeCounty School.” According to Mark Gottdienerand George Kephart in Postsuburban California, itis Orange County that is the paradigmatic windowon late-twentieth-century urbanism:

We have focussed on what we consider to be anew form of settlement space—the fully urban-ized, multinucleated, and independent county .. . formally separated from but adjacent to largewell-known metropolitan regions. . . . As a newform of settlement space, they are the first suchoccurrence in five thousand years of urban his-tory (1991:51).

Postsuburban districts, they further state, “possessrelatively large populations; they are polynu-cleated, with no single center that dominatesdevelopment as it does in the traditional urbanmodel; and they possess relatively robust employ-ment bases and also serve as residential areas,especially for the white middle class” (p. 51). Suchdistricts appear to be identifiable by four charac-teristics: “postsuburban spatial organization, in-formation capitalism, consumerism, andcosmopolitanism” (1991:4).

8. Raban’s view finds echoes in the seminal work ofde Certeau (1984).

9. It is worth emphasizing that in the overview, wefocus solely on the concatenation of urbanevents that are occurring in contemporarySouthern California. This is not to suggest thatsuch trends are absent in other cities, nor thata larger literature on these topics and cities ismissing. A complete review of these otherplaces and literatures is simply beyond thescope of this paper.

10. Such sentiments find echoes in Neil Smith’sassessment of the new urban frontier, whereexpansion is powered by two industries: real-estate developers (who package and definevalue), and the manufacturers of culture (whodefine taste and consumption preferences)(Smith 1992:75).

11. The list of L.A. novels and movies is endless.Typical of the dystopian cinematic vision are“Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott 1986) and “China-town” (Roman Polanski 1974); and of silly opti-mism, “L.A. Story” (Mick Jackson 1991).

12. One critic accused us (quite cleverly) of “neolo-gorrhea.”

13. This term is a combination of Rene Girard’s “mi-metic contagion” and animal ethologist RichardDawkin’s hypothesis that cultural informationsare gene-type units, or “memes,” transmitted vi-rus-like from head to head. We here employ theterm “hybridized” in recognition of the recencyand novelty of the combination, not to assert

68 Dear and Flusty

some prior purity to the component elementsforming the hybrid.

14. The collection of essays assembled in Benko andStrohmayer (1997) is an excellent overview of therelationship between space and postmodernism,including the urban question. Kevin Robins’svaluable work on media, visual cultures, and rep-resentational issues also deserves a wide audience(e.g., Robins 1996; Morley and Robins 1995).

15. A much fuller treatment of this assertion is to befound in Dear (forthcoming).

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