Introduction—All the World is not Los Angeles, Nor Chicago: Paradigms, Schools, Archetypes, and the Urban Process

Abstract

The return of the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting to Chicago in 2006 after a decade visiting elsewhere did not in itself signify concern for the city’s historic role in shaping American geographers’ perceptions of urban structure and organization in contemporary life. There is a lot more to the discipline than curiosity about mere urban life. But when the Association does return to the place renowned for a longlived and widely recognized “model” of urban process, urban geographers cannot help but think of that connection. It was felt locally that the event could not pass without acknowledging Chicago’s singular role in that respect and confronting the serious challenge to its continuing relevance posed by the significant literature pointing to Los Angeles as a more appropriate model for understanding contemporary trends, at least among those who think it essential to acknowledge that we live in postmodern times. History takes a while to catch up with the claims of the avant garde. With respect to the frequency with which cities in the forefront of American cultural evolution have been visited by the AAG, Chicago has played host seven times (eight, if the 29th meeting in Evanston is allowed), beginning in 1907. There might have been a ninth occasion had the profession’s sentiment concerning events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention not diverted the 1969 meeting to the major “metropolis” of Ann Arbor, Michigan. By contrast, New York, first chosen in 1905, has played host just six times. Los Angeles was not admitted into this select league until 1981, and has been host only one other time since (in 2002). There is much ground still to be made up on that score. However, no matter how incidental these statistics are, they do reflect, however tangentially, the salience of Chicago in American life during the 20th century, even had Robert Park and Ernest Burgess not chosen to designate it an academic archetype. Meanwhile, a prodigious literature has been accumulating on the varied geographies of Los Angeles, and for the most part this literature has highlighted the departures that L.A. represents from the classical urban concepts associated with the Chicago model.