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For most of its two hundred years of existence, the Los Angeles region has been viewed as an exception to the mainstream of American urbanism. The city conjures up visions of endless metropolitan sprawl, ubiquitous freeways, inconsequential architecture, idiosyncratic lifestyles, and smog. These images have been encouraged and exaggerated by the movies and television that Hollywood has sold to the world. In many ways, the Southern California region is different from other cities. For instance, it stands in stark contrast to Chicago, which has been regarded as the prototypical industrial metropolis. For most of this century, urbanists have analyzed the cities of the world according to the precepts of the "Chicago School." There is, however, a deep problem with these exceptionalist narratives of Southern California. They render much of what happens in the region as merely illustrative a series of quirky set-pieces, even staged opportunities. Fortunately, as the volume of scholarly attention on Southern California increases, new challenges are being offered to our assumptions concerning our urban future. The dominance of the Chicago model is now being assailed by what may be an emergent "Los Angeles School." The Southern California prototype, with its emphasis on multicentered, multicultural, dispersed patterns of low-density development, may become the new paradigm of metropolitan development. In appearance at least, Southern California bears an strong resemblance to other emerging "world cities," including Sao Paulo and Mexico City, as well as to other fast-growing centers in the United States, such as Atlanta, Seattle and Phoenix. As Joel Garreau recently pointed out: "Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles." Southern California is destined to play an important role in the emerging geopolitical world order; it is likely to become a world capital of the Pacific century. Southern California is also a melting pot of a global mosaic of cultures and races; it will represent the "cutting edge" in the evolution of the American social contract. And Southern California is a prototype of urban development in the U.S., maybe even the world; it is already the place to which the international community refers in search of a vision of the city of the future. Already, many research and teaching activities at the University of Southern California are dedicated to regional issues. In recognition of the global significance of Southern California, the Universitys Strategic Plan has identified the region as an important laboratory for the study of the basic and applied social sciences. In pursuit of this initiative, the Provost has established a Southern California Studies Center at USC, and committed $1.5 million to support its first three years of operation. |
