Customer Reviews

The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The power of this book is the "up close and personal" portrait it gives of the people and events that shaped the modern era of Los Angeles and the sinking of the illusion of eternal land. What a story he tells, including naming the key players and their real estate interests, especially the complicit role of planning professionals and politicians.

Changes in the region take place so quickly that current events need a scorecard and a constant updating from this traveling historian who puts miles on his car that are needed just to keep up with it all, and to keep us conscious of what is happening before our eyes. Unlike many of the fashionably post-modern critics with their morbid fascination for the contradictions and the big picture, Fulton doesn't theorize or jargonize about the City. Like a hunter who tracks his prey by following all the little bent branches and signs of habitation, he takes us to the places that make up the region, Bell, Commerce, Lakewood, Lynwood, and like a good hunter, he does not stand apart from his prey. Fulton shows basic empathy for all the misguided professionals and greedy politicians who unconsciously and consciously sullied and exploited the region, as well as the naiveté and the shortage of savvy of some of its would be saviors.

Written like a compelling detective story, but one for which he does not have an ending, the book is a must for anyone who lives in the region. They will be both weighted down and enlightened by reading it, and for you people from other regions, for example burgeoning cities in the NIC regions of Asia, you best read it now to get an idea of what is coming your way!

George Rand, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Architecture and Planning
Graduate School of Architecture
UCLA

This book is a must read for anyone willing to expose themselves to the stories behind the stories of Los Angeles. The stories reveal the apathetic and self-centered nature of some Los Angeles citizens (who will never really admit they are from "Los Angeles"), and sets the stage for an entire change of mindset among Los Angelenos. This mindset is one that takes notice of the community, and the larger metropolis that communities make up. For a graduate city planning student as I, these stories help shape some basic values of mine regarding the nature of cities and communities. I strongly recommend this book.

You and I aren't fools. We keep our eyes open. We follow the news. But the region where we live is so huge and complex. And changing so quickly. With short deadlines and tight budgets, most of what the media packages as "news" is not -- just old caricatures recycled with new names. Southern California is romanticized, demonized and satirized, because Southern California stereotypes make for great entertainment.

As amusement, this works. But half truths, myths and stereotypes make it virtually impossible to talk seriously about our region's future. Imagine trying to raise a child if all you had to go on was a video of the Hollywood movie, "Parenthood." The movie makes you laugh, it makes you cry. But it's useless for helping you figure out how to manage your family budget or what to do when your baby wakes up crying in the middle of the night.

That's our position as citizens, voters and taxpayers. Clueless. Not a problem -- if "Southern California" was just a soap opera. Or if we lived in a monarchy. But it's not and we don't.

Driving one rainy day from his home in Ventura County through "suburb after suburb, shopping center after shopping center and tract after tract," journalist and planner Bill Fulton began a journey of discovery that led him to write an extraordinary book called "The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles." He calls it "an amalgamation of political science, history, sociology and urban planning" aimed at "telling good stories and ferreting out their meaning." With a passion for accuracy and depth, he illuminates overlooked parts of the landscape, like the seventy-foot tall mountain of freeway debris dumped across the street from homes on a quiet street in Huntington Park. He sheds revealing new light on familiar stories like the Orange County bankruptcy. Uncovering the hidden social fault lines beneath the surface of Southern California, Fulton's book is a rich portrait of a giant metropolis in transition, a practical guidebook for understanding where we really are and how we got here.

"It is not surprising," Fulton writes in the introduction, "that when Los Angeles finally grew so vast as to be unfathomable even to those who lived there -- when the gap between the illusion of a spacious suburban lifestyle and the daily reality of a massive metropolis could no longer be papered over with dreams -- the growth machine began to collapse under its own weight. Happy suburbanites turned angry about traffic jams and high taxes, reducing their tolerance for more suburbs. Struggling inner cities began to rise up against decades of neglect. Farmers and environmentalists protested the loss of open land. In short, the formula that had built Los Angeles so quickly no longer worked."

"While the growth consensus has collapsed," Fulton continues, "no new paradigm has emerged to take its place." While we continue to assume that Southern California will grow bigger, hardly anyone imagines life will be better. There will certainly be a future for the nation's largest urban area and the world's twelfth largest economy. But will it be one we want to live in

?Only if we make it so. The quest begins when "we redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region," Fulton writes. "We can no longer afford to be suburbanites, no matter where we live. We must instead, learn once again to become citizens of this metropolis, no matter how reluctant a metropolis it may be." Where to start? Go to your local library or bookstore and read this book.

Rick Cole
Urbanist and ex-Mayor of Pasaden

Wow! William Fulton's look at the workings of Los Angeles government takes the reader on a trip through history to help discover how Los Angeles got to be how it is today. Many different case studies explore various elements of this "Reluctant" metropolis, such as the story of one particular block downtown, the fight with Las Vegas over water rights, how the urban transportation system came to be the way it is--and why it will never change, and how a college student singlehandedly and unintentionally changed the face of Ventura County politics forever. These are just a few of the fascinating tales William Fulton spins of Los Angeles. As a member of a Southern California transit advocacy group, I found the entire book hard to put down. After reading this well-written book, the reader should be more knowledgeable about the west's largest metropolis and how many elements come together to shape a region. I hope you enjoy this book with the same enthusiasm with which I did.

This book is for any person who likes to read about Los Angeles. Gives thoughts and theories of how and why L.A. developed the way it did. Ventura county politics and growth issues are also adressed in the book.

William Fulton's a rockstar...he's a planner, he's a journalist, he lives in southern California, and he writes about southern California. Damn.

This book is so well written. SoCal is very politically apathetic, so it takes some gripping prose to shake us out of our coma. He tackles bickering local agencies, squabbling egos, litigious neighboring cities, backlash against the entrenched growth "machine," opposition to mixed-use developments, and Chinatown water issues.

The paperback edition has an Afterword chapter that brings us up-to-date with the subject matter. Fools whine that there's no professional football team in L.A., but can you believe that downtown's last 2 Fortune 500 corporations, Arco and Times Mirror, were eaten up by out-of-state companies in the 1990s?

Wow! William Fulton's look at the workings of Los Angeles government takes the reader on a trip through history to help discover how Los Angeles got to be how it is today. Many different case studies explore various elements of this "Reluctant" metropolis, such as the story of one particular block downtown, the fight with Las Vegas over water rights, how the urban transportation system came to be the way it is--and why it will never change, and how a college student singlehandedly and unintentionally changed the face of Ventura County politics forever. These are just a few of the fascinating tales William Fulton spins of Los Angeles. As a member of a Southern California transit advocacy group, I found the entire book hard to put down. After reading this well-written book, the reader should be more knowledgeable about the west's largest metropolis and how many elements come together to shape a region. I hope you enjoy this book with the same enthusiasm with which I did. --James D. Umbach, Student (Government), CSU Sacramento

Excellent and fascinating read for anyone interested in Los Angeles. The first 20 pages are worth the price of the book.

Read this book! It is the best book I've read on development and growth in the LA basin. It's very well-written and incorporates both political and professional planning vantage points. Describes very succinctly the interplay between water, developers, and municipal leaders over the past century. Don't believe the whiner who rated this at two stars: he's a disgruntled slow-growther who has a personal bone to pick. Fulton captures the essence of Los Angeles without necessarily endorsing or advocating a position.

Fulton is an expert on the history and political processes underlying the growth of Southern California over the last century, and he lays out how many of these same political ideologies and schools of urban thought have fundamentally malformed Los Angeles, as well as many other American cities, in The Reluctant Metropolis. Most elements pertinent to SoCal's development - the water supply, the creation of an idealized suburbia a la 1950's and its appeal to Midwesterners, the streetcars (and later veritable inundation with automobiles and freeways), and much more - all of the proccesses that created a paradox, with Los Angeles being the only top-tier, alpha-level global city that fundamentally rejects every single element of traditional "urbanity." But this is not a story unique to LA, and it is precisely because many other booming American cities risk suffering the same fate that this book is highly important reading for all interested in the future of the USA's urban centers.