7

CHAPTER ONE

Restructuring Los Angeles: 1965-1996

L.A. AS POSTMODERN
 8

Contemporary Los Angeles is a city that displays, produces and performs a variety of

spatialisations. It is a city-space that is at once everywhere and a space where everything is

included or rather, ‘comes together’ (Soja, 1989) in the city of Los Angeles. These are

assumptions that have pervaded within discourses and debates concerned with the concept of a

postmodern urban theory. Postmodernism can be characterised by advanced capitalist culture’s

preoccupation with surfaces, fragmentation, pastiche, an emphasis on signs, and a presumption

‘to see the truth when there is no truth to be found’ (Webster,1995: 191). Within the city,

postmodernism can be seen to be characterised by redevelopment, mass inequality, cultural

diversity, electronic communication networks, and particularly post-Fordist restructuring. As a

financial and nationally influential city, L.A. is predominantly a twentieth century space.

During the late nineteenth century, it was a space that was developed at the end of the

American frontier, a place where citizens and immigrants could position themselves in their

quest for a prosperous life. It is not a place that carries the same cultural and historical

baggage that New York does; rather it is a city that can be termed the twentieth century

American city. I say this because it has developed during times of both Fordism and flexible

accumulation, enabling it to emerge as a city that possibly embraces the heterogeneity of

everyday life, and as Mike Davis comments ‘because the Downtown skycity is so recent…it

figures prominently as a representation of the early twenty-first century urbanism that is now

emerging’ (Davis, 1987: 66).

It is essentially since the early 1970s that the city space of L.A. has achieved its prolific status

of being a major financial centre within the United States and throughout the global economy.

As more financial capital was channelled into the centre of this city, its geographic space

continually attracted and agglomerated a wide and heterogeneous population. It is this mixing

and amalgamation of cultures and races that has helped provide L.A. with the title of being the

postmodern city. This however is not exclusive to L.A., for it can be seen to be true of many

major world cities. According to Charles Jencks, what makes L.A. different and unique is its
 9

fondness for minority groups where ‘No single ethnic group, nor way of life, nor industrial

sector dominates the scene’(Jencks, 1993: 7), it is a city space made up of a majority of

minorities, rather than controlled by one single majority. At this juncture Jencks’ statement may

appear to be true. Yet as one examines more closely the operations of social and public space in

the city of L.A., one realises that this utopian vision of a diverse yet contained society is in

potential danger of becoming a myth. This is so because within Los Angeles’ social

infrastructure, the hierarchical position of the white American male remains dominant and

generally fixed.

It is this supposed transgression by a hegemonic group - the white American male - that has

positioned L.A. as a city worthy of critical thought and comment. Much attention has been

placed upon L.A. as being the spatial epitome of postmodernism, yet this has mainly come

from analysis and criticism of Disneyland. I mention this much-discussed theme park because it

bears all the traces of postmodernism’s preoccupation with the late capitalist cultural dominant,

and is a display of Los Angeles’ excessive space. It is a place of extreme consumption, a space

that is not real but hyperreal, one that creates history of the past and a vision of a future, and a

site that has come to represent a mythical America. Many theorists such as Eco (1986),

Baudrillard (1988) and Gottdiener (1995) have examined this fantasy land with such vigour

and celebration as being an emblem of a so-called postmodern space, yet have failed to

describe the spaces that are outside of this nodality.

Disneyland is a created space that represents an imagined space of America’s history. It is

awash with signs that signify capitalist consumerism, the ‘American Dream’ and a fragmented

yet coherent narrative of the nation’s past. What is interesting about this recreational space and

place of commodification, is that it corresponds to the redevelopment of Downtown L.A. and to

the mass restructuring of spatial mobility and operations in L.A.. This is achieved through its

implosion of the public and the private, and the space of business and of the home.
 10

Disneyland is a place of exclusion that disguises itself as being a public space. Not so much a

free and open public space, but rather one where any individual is welcome to enter the park as

long as they have the economic resources with which to pay the entrance fee and to purchase

souvenirs from the excessive displays of consumerism. Downtown L.A. mimics this method of

exclusion because it is an area that has come to represent multinational wealth, contrasted with

extreme poverty and homelessness. These polarities form the basis of what I wish to examine.

They have primarily arisen during times of economic restructuring and periods of mass

immigration. During the 1980s, Los Angeles experienced an influx of approximately one

million immigrants (Jencks, 1993: 92) - a transformation of the ethnic geography of the city

similar to New York and Chicago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The

polarities of wealth and poverty illustrate that what is imagined to be a space of the upper

classes, is in fact a divided place that operates according to income and to respectability.

Before examining this social and spatial restructuring, it is worthwhile to examine Edward

Soja’s proposal for a re-examination of one’s understanding of the fragmented spatial matrix

that constitutes the space of contemporary L.A.. I choose Soja because he has come to be one

of the most influential critics of the historical restructuring of L.A.’s topography, and because

his relatively spatial autonomous approach encompasses many key theorists such as Henri

Lefebvre and Michel Foucault.

SOJA’S LOS ANGELES

Soja argues, in his influential yet flawed (for he does not pay enough attention to L.A.’s racial

and ethnic heterogeneity) book Postmodern Geographies, that within capitalism, organised

space is constructed and represented by a ‘class-to-space homology’ (Soja, 1989: 80), where

the social and the spatial are inseparable. He asserts that both co-ordinates continually define

the core and the periphery of socio-spatial relations. He describes this organised space as being
 11

a socially produced area, what he terms a spatiality: that is, a ‘product of social translation,

transformation, and experience’ (Soja, 1989: 80). Through Soja, it could be understood that

space is a social product, a product where a dialectic becomes apparent. This is between the

social and the spatial, where the capitalist method of spatial production is reproduced to

portray a contradictory ‘fragmented, homogenised, and hierarchically structured space’ (Soja,

1989: 92). Characteristic of a postmodern vocabulary, this suggests that within this dialectical

framework, the state is able to control the operative and performative aspects of urban social

space. Further, this spatiality performs a paradoxical manoeuvre, for it is able to determine the

economic and cultural modes of the capitalist state.

The spatial hegemonic position that the advanced capitalist state depends upon for economic

and social success can be developed further when examining how this method of spatialization

uses finance capital to construct and reconstruct urban space. The increasingly dominant global

financial system generally positions capital within the core of the state and the individual city.

In the US this core is essentially positioned within the major economic cities, such as L.A.,

because of its accessibility within the global economy, rather than Mid-West towns. It is

through this positioning and restructuring of the central nodality, that the state is able to

produce social and spatial control. The dialectic of state and capital encourages the city to

create further uneven development. This spatial division is achieved from the agglomeration of

industrial capital and the power of state ideology and is worth explaining this in greater detail.

As more capital is channelled into the centre through marketing, commercial productivity, and

multinational finances, this in turn alters patterns of consumption within this dominant space.

Consumption is determined by what the powerful business enterprises view to be desirable

products and favoured business transactions. What were once luxury items now become

essentials. Due to the increasing demand for these goods, and of the expanding finance capital,

the social divisions between the various classes and marginal groups continually widen. This is

a result of the uneven distribution of income, the increase in mundane and low wage jobs
 12

(especially for immigrants working in the sweatshops of L.A.), and the media-induced display

of what is deemed to be essential and vital to a better lifestyle. This process can be taken a step

further, for it in turn transforms space through dramatic suburbanisation, which has the

potential to transform architecture and thus creates further fragmentation between the social

groups that form the topography of L.A.. All of these determinants are created directly and

indirectly by the uneven distribution of capital, where the periphery increasingly becomes the

centre.

Lifestyles and patterns of consumption within L.A., help to accentuate its individuality. Houses

represent economic success and wealth, not only internally but also externally. Throughout the

prosperous hills near Hollywood and especially in Bunker Hill, individuals erect fortresses and

enclaves that signify ‘respectability’ and an upper class status. In the ghettos of Skid Row and

Watts, one may have luxury/essential goods within the home, yet the external architectural

structure remains constant throughout the district and generally signifies poverty and a working

class position.

I believe that Soja views capitalism as being dependent upon these polarities and dichotomies,

mattering not whether it is on a global or regional scale, nor whether it is ethnically produced.

This mode of production is however vulnerable to change and crisis. In time, the periphery can

become a part of the core, creating confusion about what are the limits of these polarities. An

example of this is the technopoles situated in Orange County and around the area of Los

Angeles International Airport (LAX). The economic productivity within these areas allow

industry to become a central part of the financial make-up of Downtown and central Los

Angeles. This is a further illustration of the way capital is likely to fluctuate within the

capitalist socio-spatial dialectic, and the manner it is reviewed or understood by the ethnically

diverse groups. The periphery-core is able to become a part of L.A. city’s spatial realm at

every level (socially, economically, culturally and geographically), continually causing a

juxtaposition of postmodern fragmentation and modernist homogeneity. Yet there are further
 13

determinants of this restructuring process of city space when one examines Downtown Los

Angeles and its peripheral and adjoining districts.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF DOWNTOWN

Downtown L.A. was witness to massive restructuring during the 1960s, the Reagan years of

the 1980s, and the Clinton administration of the 1990s. An important aspect of this

restructuring is the much discussed Watts rebellion of 19651 . This historical event was a vocal

and physical African-American uprising in response to the City Council’s restructuring and

urban renewal process of Downtown. What occurred during this period was a ‘de-

ghettoisation’ of this space. Having established a sense of ‘community’2 within Downtown and

its peripheral areas through collective factory employment and a coherent sense of place,

African-Americans (and some Caucasian groups) became displaced because of high

unemployment rates and poverty. According to Lash and Urry, ‘Watts was just too

uncomfortably close to downtown LA…Renewal initially cleared most of the poor out of the

Bunker Hill area close to the downtown Central Business District’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 167).

This is the crux of the regenerative process. For Los Angeles to establish itself as an

international economic centre, it had to create a central space that was instantly recognisable as

the core of the city. As in New York, London and Tokyo, the centre of the city is a space that

can be used to provide accessibility for business clients, efficient and proficient communication

links, and create a sense of cohesion and competitiveness. Unlike the already historically and

culturally established cityscape of Manhattan in New York, the centre of L.A. (Downtown) had

to be restructured if it was to become a leading capitalist power and space within the emerging

global economy - one achievement of this was that US banks moved their central offices from

major cities such as Chicago and Washington, and repositioned themselves in L.A. on the

Pacific Rim. Soja describes this transformation in a binary relationship where the:
 14

‘growing flow of finance, banking, and both corporate and public management, control

and decision-making functions have made Los Angeles the financial hub of Western

USA and (with Tokyo) the ‘capital of capital’ in the Pacific Rim…Juxtaposed against

this…are equally startling indicators of decline and economic displacement: extensive

job loss and factory closures in the most unionized sectors of blue collar

industry’(Soja, 1989: 192).

This relocation of workers and corporate entities helped to expand the central nucleus of L.A.,

yet paradoxically reshaped and introduced a relatively new mode of lifestyle on the periphery:

the space of the incessant suburbanisation of the outskirts of the city. An examination of the

peripheral areas of Downtown will be undertaken later. To obtain a clearer understanding of the

respatialisation of Downtown, it is essential to comment briefly upon the question of racial

identity and its relationship to ‘the internationalizaton of Downtown’ (Davis, 1987).

PLAYING THE RACE CARD

During the 1960s and 1970s Downtown LA had a number of factories that employed a

predominant black male workforce. As more black neighbourhoods and communities were

repositioned into areas such as Compton and South Central, many small factories were closed

down in Downtown to make room for multinational corporations. The white male, blue collar

workers who were employed in the peripheral areas of Downtown (primarily in aerospace

engineering plants in Orange County and, further afield, the computer factories in Silicon

Valley - see Castells and Hall, 1994), remained employed in their secure and stable workplace.

As tensions mounted within the poverty stricken African-American areas such as Downtown,

Watts, and South Central, the white members of these areas moved into the newer suburbs of

L.A.. Parallel to this relocation from the central nodality of L.A., many white citizens were

able to evade the high city and property taxes that were, and still are, characteristic of

Downtown. Within the peripheral areas (the suburbs), taxes were reduced and those levied on

property resulted in a dramatic saving for the white suburbanite. The appeal of the suburbs
 15

was not just one of security and a return to a sense of ‘community’, but was also based on

financial needs and gains.

It is interesting that this transformation corresponds directly to the Central Business District of

L.A. (Downtown) becoming a multinational and global competitor, thus embodying a capitalist

drive for wealth, power, and control. It was also a place where a variety of businesses were

operating, especially with the increase in Japanese owned companies. As more and more capital

was invested into the centre of L.A. - through international banking and other commercial

capitalist enterprises - the price of real estate rose and inner city housing declined. Traditional

notions and areas of public space gradually disappeared: that is space that is assumed to be

democratic and free, an area that excludes no-one regardless of class, race, or gender (this will

be discussed in greater depth throughout Chapter Two).

As African-American and other ‘Other’ groups became increasingly marginalised within the

workplace, the ‘white’ male workforce prospered in terms of property development and land

ownership. The successful attempts to create a Central Business District, encouraged many

white families to reposition themselves in the ‘safe’ communities of the peripheral suburbs.

This suburbanisation was encouraged by Los Angeles’s already established sprawl of freeway

networks. As more roads were built (each forming a spoke attached to the central node of the

city) it enabled the prosperous and emerging middle-classes to experience both the advantages

of working in the city and life at home in the suburbs. The two lifestyles were able to be

separated. This can also explain the transformation of the suburbs into ‘enclaves’ which will be

examined shortly.

What I have discussed is a brief examination of the restructuring process of Downtown L.A.

during the 1960s, where (because of economic status) the white middle classes were able to

escape from the chaos and ‘processed’ fear of the centre of the city to the safe haven of

suburbia. This respatialisation was taken further during the 1970s, and especially during the
 16

Reagan Administration of the 1980s. Mike Davis argued in 1987 that ‘the “new” downtown

Los Angeles is pulling away international banking and finance, establishing a centre of great

radiating lines of communication and trade for the Pacific Rim…Los Angeles is setting itself

up as the Pacific’s economic capital’ (Davis, 1987: 67). What this suggests is that as global

links emerged through telecommunications and information technology, Los Angeles became a

network base from which to explore and develop links with the countries of the Far East.

Positioned on the West coast, L.A. was (and remains) a space that was accessible for Japanese

companies to establish sub-contractors for trade with and within the United States.

Increasingly, throughout the 1980s, more businesses in the Central Business District were

owned by countries other than America, causing a further re-structuring of employment

practices.

REAGAN’S CRACKDOWN

The class and spatial polarities that were discussed above, come to the fore once again when

looking at the effects of the development of the Central Business District. As more and more

people from Hispanic countries relocated to the ‘golden land’ of L.A., the largest ethnic and

racial minority were no longer the black community, but was the poverty-ridden Hispanics.

Within the black and Hispanic ghettos of L.A. during the 1980s, there was poor education, a

lack of welfare state benefits, increased unemployment - due to the privatisation campaign

characterised by Reaganomics - and with this came the illegal drug trade and gang warfare (see

Davis’ ‘Hammer and the Rock’ (1990: 267-322) for further analysis of the gang war). The

policies and processes that Reagan introduced further marginalised (those stereotyped) ethnic

groups. It was the ‘white’ men who had achieved a college education that enjoyed the benefits

of the ‘internationalisation of Downtown L.A.’. The white suburbs, during Reagan’s

crackdown on poverty and the homeless within the centre of L.A., helped to create an ideology

of fear, whereby what was seen to be threatening within the ghettos of Downtown and its

surrounding areas, was believed by middle and upper class ‘white’ families, to be capable of
 17

infiltrating into the hills of L.A. and suburbia. As discontent grew within and between ethnic

groups such as blacks, Hispanics and Koreans, the Reagan Administration regarded Downtown

L.A. as a space that needed to be restructured even further. This was achieved by closing down

‘traditional’ public spaces such as parks, organising and encouraging the LAPD to use

aggressive tactics against the homeless and other undesirable groups, particularly male black

youths and increasing the economic benefits for the upper and middle classes, rather than

improving opportunities for the poor.

This crackdown on open public spaces, or rather the privatisation of these spaces, encouraged

and created a transformation of the traditionally perceived free and public space of Downtown

L.A., into a space that Davis argues resembled a ‘fortress’. During the Clinton Administration,

the poverty and inequality of Downtown has remained. Although Clinton has made attempts to

focus upon the problems of L.A., he has been more an observer than a believer or doer. In a

recent Observer article, it was commented that in the mid-1990s ‘most of these down-and outs

are not drug addicts or winos, but people who had been ‘downsized’ in Silicon Valley and

elsewhere in what once was the embodiment of the American Dream’ (McCrystal, 1996: 24).

During the 1990s, it is not just those low paid ethnic minorities who have borne the brunt of the

restructuring of Downtown, but also those who once believed themselves to be members of the

middle-classes, when employed by the defence bases that encircle the region of L.A. city. They

were taxpaying citizens who never envisaged themselves to be a part of L.A.’s homeless

‘problem’. This increase in unemployment and homelessness further accentuates my theory that

what has emerged within Downtown is an exclusion of space from the ‘undesirables’, space

that is deemed to be a part and essential component of a free, democratic society. What one is

left with is a re-creation of an area that is dominated by control, fear and power, all dictated by

the hierarchical structure of the State and the LAPD.

In accord with this, methods of surveillance and excessive policing techniques have increased

dramatically. The erection of a model of the panopticon (to be discussed) in the Central
 18

Business District and Downtown has been mirrored within the suburbs. The prosperous social

groups restructured their supposed places of community into walled villages; an enclosed space

that excluded those who did not live there or those who were not invited into their privileged

areas of home life. This is in accord with Davis’ powerful argument and analysis of the

‘carceral city’. In the next chapter I shall take this a step further by examining how the

increased surveillance operates in conjunction with an ideology of fear, as well notions of

Foucault’s panopticon and its adjacent theories of power and control, and the emerging

information technologies. What this will suggest is that public and private space has collapsed

into a space that can possibly be called a ‘Third World’ space: a place where visible and

invisible fences are erected according to social accessibility and economic wealth. This will

offer an answer to the question of how this militarisation of the city has transformed and

created a new process of urbanisation.

1
The Watts rebellion has not only been discussed within debates concerned with multiculturalism and Black America,
but has also become an important component of American urban theory. For further discussion of this event see Mike
Davis (1990) and Edward Soja (1989).
2
By the term community I mean that citizens went in search for a mythological ‘authentic’ place where individuals
could interact with each other without fear, and could try to recreate an image of a rural village. The term is
ambiguous for it refers to a place where individuals are referred to as a whole, rather than separate people. Within Los
Angeles this causes problems, for many citizens who live in Downtown do not wish to be associated with those who
conduct their business within the same space, for they do not experience the same social hardships and inequalities.
Yet, as Philip Kasinitz states, ‘the fact that today any group wishing to make a political claim automatically starts to
refer to itself as a “community” reveals the legitimacy that communities (as opposed to individual citizens) are
accorded in American life.’ (Kasinitz, 1995: 167). Thus, I use the term relatively loosely to refer to a group of
individuals who share the same spatial location.