ABSTRACT
Michael Dear's model reflects postmodernist thinking, particularly ideas of an important group of Southern California intellectuals identified as the Los Angeles (LA) school of urbanism. The LA school of urbanism consists of the work of a group of intellectual mavericks with different approaches, but who share enough in common that they self-identify and are identified by others as distinct school of urbanist thought. The LA school of urbanism includes neo-Marxist geographers, left-wing urban sociologists, postmodernist architectural critics, labor historians and other Southern California intellectuals. Postmodern urbanism described by the LA school is characterized by edge cities, privatopias, minoritization, theme park environments, fortification, containment centers, and technopoles. The most enduring of the Chicago School models was the zonal or concentric ring theory, an account of the evolution of differentiated urban social areas by E. W. Burgess. The complexities of real-world urbanism were further taken up in the multiple nuclei theory of Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman.
