Public Los Angeles
A Private City's Activist Futures
Title Details
Pages: 270
Illustrations: 52 b&w photos
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 11/15/2019
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5623-5
List Price: $35.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 11/15/2019
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5622-8
List Price: $104.95
Related Subjects
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)
Public Los Angeles
A Private City's Activist Futures
Housing, popular politics, and the formation of modern Los Angeles
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- Description
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- Contributors
Public Los Angeles is a collection of unpublished essays by scholar Don Parson focusing on little-known characters and histories located in the first half of twentieth-century Los Angeles. An infamously private city in the eyes of outside observers, structured around single-family homes and an aggressively competitive regional economy, Los Angeles has often been celebrated or caricatured as the epitome of an American society bent on individualism, entrepreneurialism, and market ingenuity. But Don Parson presents a different vision for the vast Southern California metropolis, one that is deftly illustrated by stories of sustained struggles for social and economic justice led by activists, social workers, architects, housing officials, and a courageous judge.
Public Los Angeles presents insights into LA’s historic collectivism, networks of solidarity, and government policy. A follow-up to Parson’s seminal Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (2005), this volume helps shape our understanding of public housing, gender and housework, judicial activism, and race and class in modernday Los Angeles and asks us if history is repeating. Parson’s work anchors a collection of nine essays by friends and mentors who deepen the discussion of his themes: Dana Cuff, Mike Davis, Steven Flusty, Greg Goldin, Jacqueline Leavitt, Laura Pulido, Sue Ruddick, Tom Sitton, Edward W. Soja, and Jennifer Wolch.
The book is richly illustrated. Biographical and curatorial essays by the book’s editors, Roger Keil and Judy Branfman, provide background material and a coherent storyline for a mosaic of fresh Los Angeles research.
—William D. Estrada, curator of California and American History, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
—William Deverell, director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
—Gilda Haas, cofounder, Right to the City Alliance and L.A. Co-op Lab
—Stephanie Pincetl, director, California Center for Sustainable Communities, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA
Laura Pulido
Dana Cuff
Mike Davis
Steven Flusty
Greg Goldin
Jacqueline Leavitt
Sue Ruddick
Tom Sitton
Edward W. Soja
Jennifer Wolch