Los Angeles
Two American researchers built that idea: Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The High Cost of Free Parking (2005), who showed that free parking is a hidden subsidy to the car, and Richard Willson, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and author of Parking Reform Made Easy (2013), who explained how to reform the parking minimums that zoning codes impose on every building.
On Los Angeles in this archive
- Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Los Angeles 3 min read - Urban ecology
Matthew Gandy: Urban Nature Reveals Power in the City
Matthew Gandy shows that water, waste, parks and expressways are nature produced by political decisions: urban…
Erik Swyngedouw 3 min read - Urban psychology
Dolores Hayden: Transform Spaces, Transform Gender
Dolores Hayden shows how homes, suburbs and public memory reproduce gender inequality and how design can undo it.…
African American 3 min read - Urban form
How Five Elements Make a City Legible and Accessible
Kevin Lynch's five elements, paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, explain how people read a city, and…
Kevin Lynch 3 min read - Public space
Why Cities Should Not Be Identical Models: Jennifer Robinson
Jennifer Robinson argues in Ordinary Cities that every city can produce theory and that judging them by the…
AbdouMaliq Simone 3 min read - Urban economy
Ananya Roy: The State Can Also Be Informal
Ananya Roy shows that urban informality is produced by the state as it tolerates, authorises or demolishes…
Los Angeles 3 min read - Urban economy
Why Some Cities Innovate and Others Do Not: Michael Storper
Michael Storper explains why some cities innovate and others do not: organisations, technologies and territories,…
Richard Florida 3 min read - Housing
Art Washing: Murals, Investment and Displacement in Cities
Art washing uses murals, galleries and festivals to prepare working-class neighbourhoods for investment.
Sharon Zukin 3 min read - Climate change
Shade in Extreme Heat: A Divisive Privilege and an Urban Right
Shade is survival infrastructure distributed unequally: redlined neighbourhoods are hotter, awnings are cut as…
Los Angeles 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities
Michael Peter Smith argues in Transnational Urbanism that globalisation is made by migrants and networks in…
Michael Peter Smith 2 min read - Urban form
Michael Dear: Postmodernism and Critical Urban Planning
Michael Dear led the Los Angeles School and brought postmodernism into urban planning. What the postmodern city is…
Michael Dear 3 min read - Surveillance / data
Stephen Graham: Militarisation and Surveillance in the City
Stephen Graham describes in Cities Under Siege the new military urbanism: how techniques of war, surveillance and…
Stephen Graham 2 min read - Urban psychology
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City: How We Perceive Cities
The Image of the City (1960) by Kevin Lynch explains how we perceive cities through five elements: paths, edges,…
Kevin Lynch 3 min read - Urban economy
Nik Theodore: Neoliberal Urbanism, Informal Work and Migrants
Nik Theodore explains how neoliberal urbanism produces precarity, what his studies of day labourers and migrants in…
Neil Brenner 2 min read - Public space
John Friedmann: Transactive Planning and Community Participation
John Friedmann proposed transactive planning: a dialogue between technical and community knowledge.
John Friedmann 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
David Harvey 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
African Cities by Garth Myers: Reassessing African Cities
African Cities (2011) by Garth Myers proposes reading African cities on their own terms: postcolonial, informal,…
AbdouMaliq Simone 2 min read - Urban economy
Land Policy: Power, Value Capture and Spatial Justice
Land policy decides who gains from urban growth. What it is, how Edward Soja links it to spatial justice and which…
Los Angeles 2 min read - Public space
Thirdspaces: Soja and Bhabha's Third Space in the City
Thirdspaces are the hybrid places where the dichotomies of public and private, centre and periphery break down.…
Henri Lefebvre 3 min read - Housing
Sonia Hirt and Zoning: The Roots of Urban Inequality in the USA
Zoned in the USA (2014) by Sonia Hirt shows that the exclusive single-family zone, unique in the world, raises…
Los Angeles 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall read Johannesburg as a modern African metropolis rather than an exception. The…
AbdouMaliq Simone 3 min read - Urban economy
City of Quartz by Mike Davis: The Inequality That Made Los Angeles
City of Quartz (1990) by Mike Davis excavates the power that built Los Angeles: developers, homeowners, police and…
Los Angeles 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Urban Condition: The Fragmented Metropolis of Globalisation
The Urban Condition (1999) by the Ghent Urban Studies Team describes the dispersed metropolis of globalisation and…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban economy
Poverty Capital by Ananya Roy: The Critique of Microfinance
Poverty Capital (2010) by Ananya Roy shows how microfinance turned poverty into a market. From Grameen to…
Los Angeles 2 min read - Mobility
The Right to Mobility: Social Justice in Urban Transport
The right to mobility is the right to get there, not to move. What David Harvey and Susan Handy explain, what…
David Harvey 3 min read - Urban ecology
Jennifer Wolch: Environmental Justice and Green Planning
Jennifer Wolch measured park poverty in Los Angeles and formulated the urban green paradox: the park that corrects…
Michael Dear 2 min read - Public space
Edward Soja and Spatial Justice: The City After Chicago
Edward Soja defined spatial justice: geography produces injustice and changing space is doing justice.…
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read - Public space
Dolores Hayden and Feminist Urbanism: The Grand Domestic Revolution
Dolores Hayden showed that housing and cities were designed as if care work did not exist. What The Grand Domestic…
Dolores Hayden 2 min read - Public space
Inclusive Citizen Participation: Forester and Irazábal Explained
Inclusive citizen participation means reaching those left out. What John Forester teaches about deliberation and…
Clara Irazábal 3 min read - Public space
Gender Inequality in Urban Space: Causes and Responses
Gender inequality in the city is measured in time, fear and opportunity. What Dolores Hayden and Leslie Kern…
Dolores Hayden 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Production of Space in the Global South: Robinson and Pieterse
The production of space in the Global South needs its own categories. What Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities). The…
AbdouMaliq Simone 2 min read - Mobility
Parking Policies: Shoup, Willson and Urban Mobility
Parking policies decide how many cars enter the city. What Donald Shoup and Richard Willson propose on minimums and…
Richard Willson 3 min read - Public space
Spatial justice: what it is, after Soja and Fainstein
What spatial justice is and how Edward Soja (Seeking Spatial Justice) and Susan Fainstein (The Just City)…
Susan Fainstein 2 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Security and Technology: Surveillance (Lyon and Graham)
Cameras, drones and facial recognition are transforming urban security. What David Lyon and Stephen Graham explain,…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Public space
Urban Space and Power: Foucault, Massey and Soja Explained
Urban space is an instrument of power and a field of resistance. What Foucault's panopticon, Massey's power…
Michel Foucault 2 min read - Urban economy
Creative Economy: Innovation or Inequality? Scott and Pratt
The creative economy drives urban innovation and distributes inequality. What Richard Florida, Allen J.
Richard Florida 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Postcolonial Urban Fragmentation: Inequality and Resistance
Why postcolonial cities remain divided: Fanon's city, Graham and Marvin's splintering infrastructure, Caldeira and…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Urban economy
Deborah Cowen: Global Logistics, Power and Urban Transformation
Deborah Cowen shows in The Deadly Life of Logistics that global logistics was born in war and now governs ports,…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Urban economy
Ann Markusen: Creative Economy, Artists and Urban Development
Ann Markusen measured what artists contribute to the urban economy, defined creative placemaking and criticised…
Richard Florida 3 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Violence and Insecurity: Caldeira, Wacquant and Davis
Urban violence and fear reorganise the city into gated enclaves and abandoned peripheries. What Teresa Caldeira,…
Teresa Caldeira 2 min read - Infrastructure
Urban Infrastructure and Competitiveness: Glaeser, Florida, Storper
Why urban infrastructure decides economic competitiveness: Glaeser on connecting people, Florida on talent, Storper…
Richard Florida 2 min read - Public space
Decolonising Urban Space: What It Means and How It Is Done
Decolonising urban space dismantles the hierarchies colonisation left in cities. What Ananya Roy and Jennifer…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Urban form
The Horizontal City and Suburbanisation: Fishman and Hall on Sprawl
The horizontal city grows outward with low density, cars and highways. How Robert Fishman and Peter Hall explain…
Robert Moses 3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Militarisation: Surveillance and Control (Graham and Davis)
Urban militarisation brings the tactics and technologies of war into the surveillance of cities. What Stephen…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Jennifer Robinson and Ordinary Cities: Urban Theory from the South
Ordinary Cities (2006) by Jennifer Robinson holds that all cities are ordinary and sources of theory. Her critique…
AbdouMaliq Simone 3 min read
