L os A ngeles School

The Los Angeles School refers to a conceptual approach to understanding contemporary patterns of urbanization based on Los Angeles. Formed by an ensemble of critical geographers, urban planners, and urban historians working in Los Angeles during the 1980s, it argued that cities were developing in new and emergent ways that rendered the centralized, concentric‐ring model of the Chicago School increasingly obsolete. Based on Chicago, the paradigmatic modernist city, the Chicago model was not equipped for making sense of the emerging trends and patterns of development that marked the post‐Fordist, or what some Los Angeles School scholars have called the “postmodern,” metropolis. As has been most explicitly and forcefully argued by Michael Dear, the polycentric, decentralized, and disorderly character of Los Angeles reflected what was unfolding across urban America and beyond, and formed the basis for claiming Los Angeles as the new prototypical city of contemporary urbanization.