Remapping Los Angeles, or, Taking the Risk of Class in Postmodern Urban Theory
Enid Arvidson
Economic Geography, 1999, vol. 75, issue 2, 134-156
Abstract:
Los Angeles is an oft-cited example where recent political, economic, technological, and demographic changes are all seen as leading to urban restructuring, including restructuring of class relations. Shaped like an hourglass—with well-paid white professionals and producer service workers at the top, low-paid non-union immigrants and consumer service workers at the bottom, and a squeezed middle—the new class structure is manifest in the city as spatial polarization, a central feature of postmodern urbanism. With this restructuring has come a decline of class-based politics. Progressive political response ranges from a normative reassertion of class-based politics to their abandonment in favor of “new” post-class identities and struggles. This paper presents a middle ground between reassertion versus abandonment of class-based politics based on a threefold rethinking of the concept of class in this literature. An alternative “mapping” is presented, using U.S. census data for Los Angeles, siting a variety of class relations (capitalist, independent, feudal, communal) as spatially ubiquitous rather than polarized across the landscape. Each of these relations is understood as one in the contradictory ensemble of class and nonclass positions people occupy, complexly conditioning their identities and struggles. The paper concludes with a discussion of class relations and struggles in two seemingly polarized urban places, Malibu and Fontana, highlighting some political implications of this alternative mapping.
Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1944-8287.1999.tb00120.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:75:y:1999:i:2:p:134-156
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recg20
DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.1999.tb00120.x
Access Statistics for this article
Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy
More articles in Economic Geography from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().