Looking For Los Angeles

In Looking for Los Angeles 12 contributors present their responses to the world's newest major city. A variety of perspectives and approaches are covered. The text balances the importance of place with the importance of culture.

Editors have gathered pictorial representations of Los Angeles from the last three-quarters of a century, resulting in this selection of more than 200 stunning depictions of the city from different eras and different points of view.

Rieff looks at Los Angeles, the incarnation of the American dream, and finds the place and the fantasy radically transformed by the new immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass—embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South—is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities—and limits—quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.

Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism—is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer. Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature. In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living." We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters. So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformative over and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.

The birthplace of American modernism, Los Angeles is the epicenter for a new way of living for the last one hundred years, as manifested in its cutting-edge architecture and design. With roots in the innovative houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene, and Rudolph Schindler in the early twentieth century, this constantly evolving city became a crucible of modern living. Inspired by the International Style, architects and designers in Los Angeles developed their own individual styles with a rare sensitivity to site, landscape, and human scale. This brand of modernism, blurring the boundaries of indoors and outdoors, has since been imitated from Seattle to Sydney. Acclaimed architecture and design photographer Tim Street-Porter captures the best Modernist architecture of Los Angeles, from the seminal Neutra houses to the idiosynchratic structures by Frank Gehry. With iconic buildings by Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Charles and Ray Eames, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others, L.A. Modern presents the full spectrum of Los Angeles modernism in gorgeous new color photography.

Los Angeles may have a reputation as a concrete jungle, but in reality, it’s incredibly biodiverse, teeming with an amazing array of animals and plants. You just need to know where to find them. Wild LA—from the experts at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County—is the guidebook you’ve been waiting for. Equal parts natural history book, field guide, and trip planner, Wild LA has something for everyone. You’ll learn about the factors shaping LA nature—including flood, fire, and climate change—and find profiles of over one hundred local species, from sea turtles to rare plants to Hollywood's famous mountain lion, P-22. Also included are day trips that detail which natural wonders you can experience on hiking trails, in public parks, and in your own backyard.

A People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.