ABSTRACT

The ISS, the center that brought together the presentations that are the revised essays in this book, was for a decade attached to a graduate school located in the small city of Claremont, east of Los Angeles. This is not where the project was first conceived, nor has it obviously found there everything that one otherwise might associate normally with “a home.” Indeed, if one comes—as I now do—to think about the ISS in that former location at the same time that one reads the work of Mike Davis on the history of urban “development” in the greater Los Angeles area, it is difficult to imagine a less-promising place to carry out a project like the ISS than that one (Davis 1990, 1998).