ABSTRACT
The six discourses show that making sense of the whole urban region, the spatiality and sociality of the urban fabric writ large. The six discourses are: Flexcity, Cosmopolis, Exopolis, Metropolarities, Carceral Archipelagos and Simcities. Urban sociologists have instead been content primarily with detailed empirical studies of the new capitalist city, leaving its theorisation and explanatory discourse to geographers, political economists and other non-sociologists. Orange County is one of the richest, best-educated, and most staunchly right-wing and Republican counties in the US. Beginning in the eventful year of 1989 in Berlin, Beijing and other major world cities, and punctuated in Southern California by the spring uprisings in 1992 and the postmodern fiscal crisis of Orange County in 1994, the postmetropolis seems to be entering a new era of instability and crisis. As with the discourse on urban spatial form, the discourse on the changing social forms and formations in the postmetropolis has instigated a new vocabulary.
