Los Angeles School of Urban Studies

Walter J. Nicholls

In the early 1980s, urban researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC) began to study urban restructuring processes through a series of detailed cases studies on the Los Angeles region. Much of the research in urban geography and sociology up to that time had focused on East Coast industrial cities and was largely informed by models developed by Chicago School scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. However, rather than finding a city with concentric zones ordered by a dominant center, Los Angeles researchers found a fragmented urban region with a center that was too weak to impose order on all the different parts. These researchers believed that they had identified new patterns of urbanization and drew on a wide body of theoretical work (from Marxism to postmodernism) to understand them. Moreover, many suggested that although underlying urbanization processes ...

Users without subscription are not able to see the full content on this title. Please, subscribe or login to access all content on this website.