{"id":2278,"date":"2014-06-02T06:57:03","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T13:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2014-06-02T06:57:37","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T13:57:37","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e39-the-laleph-with-edward-soja","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2278","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E39: The LAleph with Edward Soja"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"edwardsoja\"Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Edward Soja<\/a>,\u00a0Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of such books as\u00a0Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory<\/em>,\u00a0Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places<\/em>, and now the new\u00a0My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization<\/em>. They discuss downtown’s\u00a0Bonaventure Hotel back when he sat for a BBC documentary on it<\/a> and now; how all of us may only ever talk about “my Los Angeles” when we talk about the city; why he no longer even answers the question, “Do you like living in Los Angeles?”; why it surprises people to find Los Angeles has become the densest urbanized are in America; how the “metropolitan model of the city” became so deeply ingrained in our culture, and how that model itself now undergoes changes; how Los Angeles missed out in the 19th’s century’s phase of centralized urbanization, and what that\u00a0means for the city today; what he’s noticed by keeping an eye on the cross-streets; the “hot-bedding” going on at all those small motels nobody seems to use, and how that fits in to the wider scheme of survival techniques used by informal urban populations; how he discovered in Los Angeles the “largest industrial manufacturing center in the United States,” and indeed “the largest job machine in the world”; why observers outside and the inside the city suffer so many blind spots regarding it; Los Angeles as “a kind of laboratory for understanding urban dynamics all over the world”; Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Aleph<\/a>“, and how that story’s central concept of a point that contains all points helps us understand Los Angeles; seeing the spatial aspect of all things as of equal interest to the historical aspect of all things; his current “weird book,” neither quite a novel nor an academic work, dealing with the ultra-spatially just first city in civilization; when people began noticing that “something is happening in suburbia”; and what it means that greater Los Angeles has developed a suburban Chinatown \u2014 especially to those with adventurous palates.<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0<\/span>here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span>iTunes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Edward Soja,\u00a0Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of such books as\u00a0Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory,\u00a0Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, and now the new\u00a0My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. They discuss downtown’s\u00a0Bonaventure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2283,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}