ABSTRACT
This chapter shows why Los Angeles is not a "global city" or "world city" as it is now commonly referred to in the social sciences. The focus of the global cities discourse has been on the centrality of global cities to the evolving international political economy as key "command and control" centers—as engines driving global economic growth, primarily through the capacity of their political economies to command capital flows. In the new postmodern context, the "end of empire" strikes as a good way to characterize the current state of political-economic development in Los Angeles and the "legacy of imperialism" an apt metaphor for the current state of its racial and ethnic relations. Many of the people writing about the "ethnic economy", including many social scientists, have romanticized the entrepreneurial element in this kind of economic activity and its putatively beneficent consequences for local economic development.
