Super City

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Benjamin Davison
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Fruits And Vegetables ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Food Retailing ◽  
Air Conditioners ◽  
Industry Standards ◽  
Self Service ◽  
The City

Between 1914 and 1941, Los Angeles businessmen opened supermarkets across the city, beginning America's era of mass-food retailing. The very first in the world, Los Angeles supermarkets pioneered business practices and architectural standards that would, over the following decades, become industry standards. This includes self-service shopping, large low-slung buildings cooled by massive air conditioners, and a reliance on colorful displays of fresh fruits and vegetables. More significantly, Los Angeles supermarkets fundamentally reconfigured the ways Americans used urban space, first in Southern California and then across the rest of the United States.

Times, Tempos, and the Rhythm of Fast Fashion in Los Angeles and Seoul

2019 ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
Christina H. Moon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Korean Immigrant ◽  
Fast Fashion ◽  
Downtown Los Angeles ◽  
The City

Fast fashion is often a story about the most powerful global retail giants such as Zara and H&M. The rise and dominance of fast fashion within the United States, however, areintimately tied to the work of Korean immigrant communities within downtown Los Angeles. In the last decade alone, Koreans have refashioned the city of Los Angeles into the central hub of fast fashion in the Americas, designing and distributing clothing from Asia to the largest fast-fashion retailers throughout the Americas. This chapter explores the work of these fast-fashion families who blur the lines between design and copy, author and imitator, exploiter and exploited. How do their modes of work profoundly transform the material object of clothing? How do they complicate the assumed directions and global flows of design and production in the global fashion industry? And finally, what role does risk and failure play—in a landscape of creativity, aspiration, and imagining—to make fast fashion even a possibility?

City of Inmates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Colonial Form ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings ◽  
The City

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

scholarly journals The Boom Interview

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
The City ◽  
New Buildings

This interview with Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne was conducted by Boom editor Jon Christensen and Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture, urban design, and urban planning, and director of cityLAB at UCLA. Hawthrone is charged with covering new developments in architecture and urban design in Los Angeles and the United States, and thinking and writing about new buildings and how they might-or might not-change the way we live. More broadly, his subject is not just buildings, but the city itself, and how we understand it and ourselves. Hawthorne calls his big project “The Third Los Angeles.” Like no other critic in the land, Hawthorne has grasped the challenge of telling the story of a great city-its past, present, and future-while playing a prominent role in shaping the city's vision of itself, intellectually, creatively, and pragmatically. Hawthorne discusses the evolution of public and private space in Los Angeles, competing plans for the future of the Los Angeles River, freeways, housing, climate, and much more.

Inland Shift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Distribution Systems ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Global Logistics

This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.

Skateboarding and the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This chapter offers a brief history of the subculture and introduces readers to skateboarding practices. There is a detailed description of tricks and a discussion of how skateboarding forces a reexamination of classic urban sociology by focusing on the specific history of the growth of Los Angeles. In doing so we come to appreciate not only how skateboarding changes one’s perception of urban space, but also how skaters’ cognitive maps of the city offer a critique of classic Chicago School sociology.

From Bahianas to the King of Pop …

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Line ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Brazilian Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.

Spaces of the City

Global Cities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gottlieb ◽  
Simon Ng
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

The chapter analyzes and compares the different uses of urban space – whether public space, open space, or privatized space -- in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. It contrasts the modernist spatial strategies that cater to the automobile and traffic flow and the desire for speed with an alternative view about a more walkable, bikeable, and transit friendly urban environment. It compares the immigrant and different ethnic experiences – a Latino immigrant urbanism in Los Angeles, elderly women dancing in the streets of the city in China, or the immigrant communities constructed in the village-in-the-city enclaves in places like Shenzhen and Guangzhou. It describes the rise of the gated communities in all three places in contrast to the growing advocacy around the right to the city for everyone.

Justice for Samuel Faulkner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Community Members ◽  
South Central ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
South Central Los Angeles ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

The sixth chapter spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LA PD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States.

“Don't Sleep With Stevens!”: The J. P. Stevens Boycott and Social Activism in the 1970s

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
City Hall ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The City ◽  
Hilton Hotel

On 30 November 1978 thousands of people from across the United States took part in “Justice for J. P. Stevens' Workers Day.” In seventy-four cities activities such as rallies, marches, press conferences, film premieres, and leafleting were held in support of a union boycott against a giant textile company that had persistently shown its willingness to violate the law rather than recognize its workers' right to organize. In New York City more than 3000 demonstrators marched in front of the company's midtown headquarters as part of the nationwide day of protest that was endorsed by Governor Hugh L. Carey and the City Council. In Los Angeles hundreds of trade unionists and their supporters rallied in front of City Hall, while in Indianapolis protesters gathered at the local Hilton Hotel for a “hard times luncheon” of ham and beans that was designed to express solidarity with the company's low-paid workers. Finding that the hotel's table cloths were made by Stevens, enraged protesters ripped the fabrics from the tables and dumped them in a pile on the floor. Activities were also held in many smaller cities; in Albany, New York, for example, a rally was addressed by Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor-elect Mario Cuomo, who told consumers “to shun the products of J. P. Stevens as you would shun the fruit of an unholy tree.” Across the country, protesters carried signs urging consumers to steer clear of the company's sheets, a staple part of its textile business.

scholarly journals Future Policy Award 2018: The Good Food Purchasing Program, USA

2022 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Daniels ◽  
Alexa Delwiche
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Food System ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Economies ◽  
Food Purchasing ◽  
The City ◽  
Good Food

Adopted first by the City of Los Angeles in 2012, the Good Food Purchasing Program® creates a transparent supply chain and helps institutions to measure and then make shifts in their food purchases. It is the first procurement model to support five food system values—local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare and nutrition—in equal measure and thereby encourages myriad organizations to come together to engage for shared goals. Within just six years, the Good Food Purchasing Program has catalyzed a nationwide movement to establish similar policies in localities small and large across the United States, and inspired the creation of the Center for Good Food Purchasing. First adopted by the City of Los Angeles in 2012, it is a procurement standard that offers institutions a system in which current investments toward food are redirected toward more sustainable and fair suppliers. It uses a metric-based, flexible framework that produces a star rating. The Good Food Purchasing Program promotes the purchase of more sustainably produced food, from local economies, especially smaller and mid-sized farms and other food processing operations, which results in production returns at a more regional and local level, and ensures that suppliers' workers are offered safe and healthy working conditions and fair compensation, that livestock receives healthy and humane care, and that consumers—foremost school children, patients, the elderly—enjoy better health and well-being as a result of higher quality nutritious meals. This article will detail its implementation since 2012, provide current information on the impacts the Program has had on the agroecology of regions in the US food system, and recommendations for policy changes that could catalyze more accelerated impact.

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