ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the intellectual history of the Los Angeles (LA) School. The Los Angeles School of urbanism emerged as a coherent challenge to established urban theory during the mid-1980s. Academic discourse seems to favor the pretense that intellectual progress occurs in a reasonably ordered way, with one paradigm replacing its outmoded predecessor as a consequence of accumulated anomalies that prove the predecessor's obsolescence. In the case of Los Angeles, it may surprise some that a region notorious for an apparent contempt for its own history should, in fact, possess a rich heritage of intellectual, cultural, and artistic heritage. The foundations of a putative school were completed in Marco Cenzatti's examination of the thing called an LA School of urbanism. The programmatic intent of the LA School remains fractured, incoherent, and idiosyncratic even to its constituent scholars, who most often perceive themselves as occupying a place on the periphery rather than at the center.