Magazine

The major industries of Los Angeles are manufacturing, media and — it occasionally seems — urban theorizing. The city has long served as a quarry for manufacturing larger claims, from Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the Bonaventure Hotel as the architectural incarnation of “late capitalism” in his influential 1984 essay Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, through Mike Davis’ Marxist studies of race and class struggles in 1990’s City of Quartz and Edward Soja’s kinetic sojourns through L.A.’s post-metropolitan sprawl in 1996’s Thirdspace.

The best-known example of these remains Reyner Banham’s influential 1971 manifesto Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Written after the expatriate Englishman first learned how to drive (in order, he said, to “read Los Angeles in the original”), the book celebrated the city’s ad hoc, spontaneous approach to urban development.