The New Urban Studies: Los Angeles Scholars Use
Their Region And Their Ideas To End The Dominance Of The ‘Chicago
School’ D.W. Miller, The Chronicle of Higher
Education
Since the 1920s, urban studies has been dominated by the view that
cities grow according to a tidy pattern: a commercial core
anchoring concentric rings of industry and settlement. In an
article on the website of The Chronicle of Higher
Education, D.W. Miller says scholars in Los Angeles are
challenging the assumptions of the long-dominant ‘Chicago School,’
arguing that the future of urbanism looks a lot more like L.A.: an
ever-expanding sprawl of semi-autonomous communities without a real
center. ‘Despite its reputation for sprawl, Los Angeles is actually
very densely populated,’ says Miller. ‘Fourteen million people live
in the metropolitan area. . . . Over the past century, the area has
grown by an average of about 500 newcomers every single day. . . .
The great question is, how will the region accommodate those new
multitudes in an area that is environmentally delicate, socially
unstable, economically unpredictable, and politically fragmented?’
— LU
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