Critical Responses to the Los Angeles School of Urbanism¹

This article reviews critical responses to the Los Angeles School of Urbanism that have appeared in the urban studies literature since 1986. Common categories of complaint include the accusation that L.A. scholarship lacked sufficient evidence to support its claims and that the language and rhetoric of the School were hyperbolic. Some criticism was also decidedly personal and discipline-specific in tone. Constructive engagement with the L.A. School was evident in the growing corpus of empirical and theoretical comparative urban research. In particular, recent research work of the "New Chicago School" reveals several concordances with the L.A. School.