The Postmodern City from an Early Modern Perspective

Abstract

A STRIKING FEATURE OF The City: Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Centuiy, edited by Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, is a lack of representations or pictorial depictions that might capture the city as a geographical space. There are, to be sure, iconic images: the dust jacket shows the view of the freeway as seen from the interior of a police cruiser; one chapter includes reproductions of L.A.-inspired advertisements evoking not so much the city as a lifestyle of fun, freedom, and sex; another presents a sampling of postmodern architecture, which, predictably, crops up in this cityscape more than elsewhere.1 (The best-known icon, the sign Hollywood, was undoubtedly too much of a cliche to be included in the book.) But these images merely evoke the southern California metropolis through association; they do not depict it. Can anyone conjure up a single view of Angeles as readily as the Manhattan skyline, Chicago's Loop, or the San Francisco Bay come to the mind's eye? Indeed, the pure phenomenology of Angeles emerges as one of the fundamental assumptions of this collection: the city is not so much a space as an experience, and the quintessential postmodern one at that. There is, as was once famously said of Oakland, no there there. Even the many maps in the book are alarmingly imprecise. One contributor suggests a simmering, spread-out pizza with all the extras as an appropriate metaphor for the city (to be placed next to New York as a melting or boiling pot);2 while another posits the metropolitan territory as engulfing virtually all of southern California, from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.3 A rush to proclaim the sheer novelty of Angeles marks this book, which might serve as a point of entry for a historical assessment of its overall approach. Los Angeles is the first consequential American city to separate itself decisively from European models and to reveal the impulse to privatization embedded in the origins of the American Revolution, asserts Richard S. Weinstein.4 And much of The City builds on this assertion. Whether this statement correctly characterizes the American Revolution I shall leave to others to decide (but surely the very concept