Los Angeles Stories

Available Now: World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories.

Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city. Los Angeles—the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways—might seem inhospitable to ideas about connecting with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city. Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; “Arroyofest,” the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants' initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin. Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city.

The Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban Setting questions the production and representations of both the real and imagined L.A. by documenting hidden histories that portray a collision of elements, including race, class, gender, identity, food, and space.

Los Angeles isn’t planned; it just happens. Right? Not so fast! Despite the city’s reputation for spontaneous evolution, a deliberate planning process shapes the way Los Angeles looks and lives. Editor David C. Sloane, a planning professor at the University of Southern California, has enlisted 30 essayists for a lively, richly illustrated view of this vibrant metropolis. Planning Los Angeles launches a new series from APA Planners Press. Each year Planners Press will bring out a new study on a major American city. Natives, newcomers, and out-of-towners will get insiders’ views of today’s hot-button issues and a sneak peek at the city to come.

Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles is a novel examination of Los Angeles-based socially engaged art (SEA) practitioners’ equitable placekeeping efforts. A new concept, equitable placekeeping describes the inclination of historically marginalized community members to steward their neighborhood’s development, improve local amenities, engage in social and cultural production, and assert a mutual sense of self-definition—and the efforts of SEA artists to aid them. Emerging from in-depth interviews with eight Southern California artists and teams, Co-Creative reveals how artists engage community members, sustain relationships, and defy the presumption that residents cannot speak for themselves. Drawing on these artists and theoretical analysis of their praxes, the book explicates equitable community engagement by exploring not just the creative projects but also the underlying phenomena that inspire and sustain them: community, engagement, relationships, and defiance. What further sets this book apart is how it deviates from the conventional who and what of SEA projects to foreground the how and the why that inspire and necessitate collectively creative action. Co-Creative is for anyone studying arts-based community development and gentrification, given it complicates and enriches the current conversation about art’s undeniable and increasingly controversial role in neighborhood change. It will also be of interest to researchers and students of urban studies.

Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles’s most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city’s inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and writers such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rubén Martínez, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles’s nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States. While notions of racial memory, coloniality, biopolitics, internal colonialism, cultural assimilation, Mexican or pan-Latinx cultural nationalism, and transnationalism permeate this anthology, contributors advocate the idea of a contested modernity that refuses to accept mainstream cultural impositions, proposing instead alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Featuring a wide variety of voices as well as a diversity of subgenres, this collection is the first to illuminate divergent, hybrid Latinx histories and cultures. Redefining Los Angeles’s literary history and providing a new model for English, Spanish, and Latinx studies, Latinx Writing Los Angeles is an essential contribution to southwestern and borderland studies.