Los Angeles as Postmodern Space
Los Angeles as Postmodern Space

Author: Markus Widmer

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-11

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 3640202724

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Essay from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1 (A), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Read the City - Read the Text, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Edward W. Soja called Los Angeles 'the quintessential postmodern metropolis'. This, however, shall not be the premise of my argument in this essay, because of the obvious danger of circularity. Yet I will use postmodern critics and compare my findings to postmodern models of culture, space and society. I will not discuss the term postmodernism itself, simply because the range of this essay does not allow my entering this ongoing debate. The term will be used as denoting both a period, beginning, for my purposes, in the 1960s, and a theory of cultural tendencies in contemporary life. For this essay, I will assume that postmodernism is a fact, a part of everyday reality, and that it differs substantially from modernism. The main body of this essay will consist of a discussion of the fundamental factors which define Los Angeles as postmodern space. I will focus on particularities that distinguish Los Angeles from other cities, most of all from those which have not yet crossed the threshold of postmodernity. Firstly, I will investigate the geographical instability of the city; the fact that it is threatened to be annihilated by natural forces such as earthquakes and the desert. Secondly, I will address the idea of the city as a desert, its horizontality, its vastness, its lack of centre. Thirdly, the structure on this flat surface will be addressed; the freeways as an arterial network, and the structure of segregating walls, both literal and metaphorical. Finally, I will conclude by investigating the parallels between the idea of instability that underlies all of the factors I discuss, and the notion of the unstable in postmodernism.

Postmodern Geographies
Postmodern Geographies

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780860919360

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Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.

Postmodern Cities and Spaces
Postmodern Cities and Spaces

Author: Sophie Watson

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1995-01

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9780631194033

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This sparkling collection takes a positive rather than a celebratory approach to the contemporary city. Its intention is to think up new strategies of inclusion which can be used to combat the strategies of inclusion deployed in existing sociospatial orders. A particular feature of the collection is its attempt to take in postcolonial situations in cities outside of the standard western examples.--Nigel Thrift, University of Bristol

Thirdspace
Thirdspace

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1996-11-06

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781557866752

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Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography. The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking. Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.

My Los Angeles
My Los Angeles

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0520281748

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At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, My Los Angeles provides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. Once the least dense American metropolis, Los Angeles is now the country’s densest urbanized area and one of the most culturally heterogeneous cities in the world. Soja takes us through this urban metamorphosis, analyzing urban restructuring, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, the globalization of capital and labor, and the formation of an information-intensive New Economy. By examining his own evolving interpretations of Los Angeles and the debates on the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies, Soja argues that a radical shift is taking place in the nature of the urbanization process, from the familiar metropolitan model to regional urbanization. By looking at such concepts as new regionalism, the spatial turn, the end of the metropolis era, the urbanization of suburbia, the global spread of industrial urbanism, and the transformative urban-industrialization of China, Soja offers a unique and remarkable perspective on critical urban and regional studies.

The Postmodern Chronotope
The Postmodern Chronotope

Author: Paul Smethurst

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9789042015135

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The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: - Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. - Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

Film Noir and Los Angeles
Film Noir and Los Angeles

Author: Sean W. Maher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1351396838

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This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city’s unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.

My Los Angeles
My Los Angeles

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0520281721

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At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, My Los Angeles provides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world. Once the least dense American metropolis, Los Angeles is now the countryÕs densest urbanized area and one of the most culturally heterogeneous cities in the world. Soja takes us through this urban metamorphosis, analyzing urban restructuring, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, the globalization of capital and labor, and the formation of an information-intensive New Economy. By examining his own evolving interpretations of Los Angeles and the debates on the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies, Soja argues that a radical shift is taking place in the nature of the urbanization process, from the familiar metropolitan model to regional urbanization. By looking at such concepts as new regionalism, the spatial turn, the end of the metropolis era, the urbanization of suburbia, the global spread of industrial urbanism, and the transformative urban-industrialization of China, Soja offers a unique and remarkable perspective on critical urban and regional studies.

Landscapes of a New Cultural Economy of Space
Landscapes of a New Cultural Economy of Space

Author: Theano S. Terkenli

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-03-09

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781402040955

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The purpose of the book is to tie together various perspectives, insights and constructions pertaining to contemporary landscapes and landscape representations from different theoretical and methodological positions as well as from diverse geographical and historical contexts in order to elucidate and illustrate processes of cultural transformation inscribed in space. The unifying theme, as well as the main goal and prospective contribution then, lies in the exploration of these developing forces and characteristics of the new cultural economy of space in the contemporary landscape(s). The primary objective of bringing together geographical perspectives from various subdisciplinary fields is to examine and discuss ways in which the complexities of this newly-emerging cultural economy of space are applied on various sorts of landscapes, i.e. urban and rural landscapes, landscapes of everyday life, landscapes of tourism and recreation, postcolonial and hybrid landscapes, landscapes of economic production, landscapes of the street and of public life, "national landscapes" and so on. The overarching question, thus, is: how do these processes work in different geographical contexts and contribute to place and landscape creation?

The Spaces of the Modern City
The Spaces of the Modern City

Author: Gyan Prakash

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2008-02-24

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780691133430

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It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.