Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures

Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures
Author: Raúl Homero Villa
Publisher: Special Issue of American Quar
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2005-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN:

This special issue of American Quarterly focuses on Los Angeles as an emblematic site through which the scholarship of American studies can be examined. As a city shaped by eighteenth-century European colonization, nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, and twentieth-century migration, Los Angeles has come to embody both the hopes and fears of Americans looking to the future. It is a city in which the local is deployed in complex practices of identity and community formation within the broader networks of globalization that continue to define and redefine what constitutes America. The articles in this volume address the complexities of the city's social geography across time, particularly since World War II. The collection reflects an exciting variety of cultural studies perspectives and reveals the synergistic possibilities of current Los Angeles studies and American studies in general. American Quarterly includes interdisciplinary scholarship that engages key issues in American studies. Publishing essays that examine American societies and cultures in global and local contexts, the journal contributes to the understanding of the United States, its diversity, and its impact on world politics and culture.

New York and Los Angeles

New York and Los Angeles
Author: David Halle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2003-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226313700

Capturing much of what is new and vibrant in urban studies today, "New York and Los Angeles" should prove to be valuable reading for scholars in that field, as well as in sociology, political science and government.

Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction

Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction
Author: Ignacio L—pez-Calvo
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2011-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816529261

Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio L—pez-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city. The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city. A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/oÐLatina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, L—pez-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectivesÑincluding urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studiesÑ contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.

Culture: urban future

Culture: urban future
Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-12-31
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 9231001701

Report presents a series of analyses and recommendations for fostering the role of culture for sustainable development. Drawing on a global survey implemented with nine regional partners and insights from scholars, NGOs and urban thinkers, the report offers a global overview of urban heritage safeguarding, conservation and management, as well as the promotion of cultural and creative industries, highlighting their role as resources for sustainable urban development. Report is intended as a policy framework document to support governments in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Urban Development and the New Urban Agenda.

City of Quartz

City of Quartz
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 482
Release: 1998
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 0712666230

Recounts the story of Los Angeles. He tells a tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States.

Anthropology of Los Angeles

Anthropology of Los Angeles
Author: Jenny Banh
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498528546

The Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban Setting questions the production and representations of L.A. by revealing the gray spaces between the real and imagined city. Contributors to this urban ethnography document hidden histories that connect daily actors within cultural systems to global social formations. This diverse collection is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, race studies, gender studies, food studies, Latin American studies, and Asian studies.

City of Quartz

City of Quartz
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2006-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1844675688

This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker) No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

Hold-Outs

Hold-Outs
Author: Bill Mohr
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609380738

This book examines the evolution of contemporary American poetry in Los Angeles, California.

T.C. Boyle's "The Tortilla Curtain": Urban Conditions, Racism, and Ecological Disaster in Fortress Los Angeles

T.C. Boyle's
Author: Laura Schomaker
Publisher: diplom.de
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2015-02-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3956846087

Los Angeles is famous for its sunny weather, for the Hollywood film studios and for being the residence of the rich and beautiful. And although - or, precisely because - all this is more illusion than reality, the city frequently serves as setting for various pieces of fiction. However, Los Angeles does not only play a huge role in the media, but since lately also in the realm of urban studies. Having long been a kind of ‘outsider’ in the field, it is now regarded as a prototypical example for urban development by the L.A. School. In this context, its image is less sunny and positive, but reveals a deep-rooted racism against Latin-American immigrants in combination with a fortress mentality on the part of its white population as well as a unique urban ecology, in which natural catastrophes seem to be regular occurrences. This paper intends to outline the significance of Los Angeles in urban studies and trace the thereby acquired findings in a fictional representation of the city: T.C. Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain. In the process, it is shown how urban conditions, racism and nature, especially in the form of ecological disasters, intersect and influence each other.

No More Play

No More Play
Author: Michael Maltzan
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: City planning
ISBN: 9783775728461

In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles from the early nineties to the current state of a modern metropolis and its relationship with its changing surroundings. In a series of conversations on real estate speculation and future urban development, issues such as identity, infrastructure, landscape, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce, and community are introduced to supplement traditional models of urban development. This is meant to facilitate defining how the "City of Angels" has to respond to turn of the tide in the identity of the metropolitan region, one that has recently become much more complex. Contributors to the volume are Iwan Baan, Catherine Opie, Sarah Whiting, Charles Waldheim, Matthew Coolidge, Geoff Manaugh, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, James Flanigan, Charles Jencks, and Qingyun Ma.