New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (1999)

This chapter focuses on three gigantic urbanized places that currently occupy hegemonic positions in the spatial structure, aesthetics, economy, changing demography, contentious politics, and evolving cultural meanings of American history: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. By the 1990s, each had become a gigantic regional constellation or galaxy of man-imposed constructions, strewn apparently like confetti over vast landscapes of terrain and encompassing the lives of seventeen, fourteen, and eight million persons, respectively (see Figure 10.1).