ABSTRACT
Between the Watts riots of 1965 and what are now called the Rodney King or Justice riots of 1992, the urban region of Los Angeles experienced one of the most dramatic transformations of any comparable region of the world. For the resident Angelenos of the early 1960s a radically different, an ‘Other‘ Los Angeles seemed to be developing beyond their control or understanding. And it would increasingly, over time, replace many more familiar urban worlds with shockingly new ones. Over the same period of about thirty years, a group of local scholars have been trying to make practical and theoretical sense of this radical restructuring of Los Angeles and to use this knowledge to understand the often equally intense urban transformations taking place elsewhere in the world. What I would like to do here is draw upon the work of what some, perhaps prematurely, have begun to call the Los Angeles School of urban studies, and to argue that the transformation of Los Angeles represents both a unique urban experience and a particularly vivid example of a more general sea change in the very nature of contemporary urban life, in what we urbanists have called the urban process.
