Remapping Los Angeles, or, Taking the Risk of Class in Postmodern Urban Theory

Los Angeles is an oft-cited example where recent political, economic, technological, and demographic changes are all seen as leading to urban restructuring, including restructuring of class relations. Shaped like an hourglass—with well-paid white professionals and producer service workers at the top, low-paid non-union immigrants and consumer service workers at the bottom, and a squeezed middle—the new class structure is manifest in the city as spatial polarization, a central feature of postmodern urbanism. With this restructuring has come a decline of class-based politics. Progressive political response ranges from a normative reassertion of class-based politics to their abandonment in favor of “new” post-class identities and struggles. This paper presents a middle ground between reassertion versus abandonment of class-based politics based on a threefold rethinking of the concept of class in this literature. An alternative “mapping” is presented, using U.S. census data for Los Angeles, siting a variety of class relations (capitalist, independent, feudal, communal) as spatially ubiquitous rather than polarized across the landscape. Each of these relations is understood as one in the contradictory ensemble of class and nonclass positions people occupy, complexly conditioning their identities and struggles. The paper concludes with a discussion of class relations and struggles in two seemingly polarized urban places, Malibu and Fontana, highlighting some political implications of this alternative mapping.