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Leisure activities, including place‐based food experiences, have become central to defining urban identities and branding places. Mobile and affluent urbanites' search for authentic and cosmopolitan experiences is increasingly guided by corporate digital media such as apps and websites that direct them to previously ignored working‐class, ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, which are being discursively and materially reconfigured to meet their needs, in turn causing the displacement of long‐time residents. We examine the relationship between food and gentrification through the lens of digital media, suggesting that they play an important role in shaping urban experiences and cities. Specifically, we investigate narratives produced by popular digital food media, not least websites and apps providing restaurant ratings and reviews, and their relationship to ongoing patterns of gentrification in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Paris. Using mixed methods that combine census data with 'hybrid fieldwork' in online and offline foodscapes, we identify some spatial patterns and key characteristics of food‐driven gentrification, highlighting the aestheticization of everyday life and its significance in encouraging and legitimizing planetary gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to safe and affordable financial services is essential to the economic well‐being of individual households and entire urban neighborhoods. However, prior research raises concerns about spatial inequities in the distribution of brick‐and‐mortar financial services offerings—either mainstream financial institutions or alternative 'fringe' financial service providers—and the resulting implications for financial inclusion and social justice. This study uses a novel method to identify fringe financial ecologies that captures the recent tandem processes of abandonment by mainstream financial institutions and the proliferation of alternative financial service providers. We explore how fringe financial ecologies potentially overlap existing inequalities of race, class and subprime mortgage lending in two US metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, California, and Miami, Florida. Our results raise concerns that communities of color, low‐income neighborhoods and otherwise vulnerable segments of the population are disproportionately at risk of both financial exclusion and predatory targeting. We find that fringe financial ecologies are associated with a high prevalence of subprime mortgage lending. The results advance an understanding of financial ecologies that raises awareness about place‐based financial exclusion as a form of systemic racism in the broader context of the national reckoning with racial justice in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California, from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean, to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since California's most recent drought (2011−17) but clash with incumbent gravity‐fed water and sewer systems, political economy and urban geographies. Engineers navigate these path dependencies through incremental technical improvements of existing infrastructures to increase wastewater recycling. These interventions largely reproduce given infrastructure configurations and urban geographies of water and wastewater while marginalizing other voices in struggles over water circularity and stymying critical debate about more progressive change. We argue that novel infrastructural practices are deeply political and normative and can be explained by four dimensions of the 'technopolitics' of wastewater restructuring in Los Angeles: materiality and inherited topologies of infrastructures; circularity discourses; entrenched knowledge cultures; and institutional orders of infrastructure management and public control mechanisms of infrastructure investments and tariffs. We conclude by discussing how these four dimensions of an emerging technopolitical regime of wastewater recycling expand concepts of power that explain urban metabolic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the impact of North American economic integration on apparel-related employment in Los Angeles and provides a first look at consequent changes in the composite of apparel-related occupations in the Los Angeles apparel industry. It assesses the effects of new NAFTA-generated transnational production networks and global production strategies on apparel industry employment, including the creation of ‘new NAFTA jobs’in the greater Los Angeles area, as well as changes in hiring patterns across occupational categories. The article also explores the accessibility of NAFTA-generated apparel jobs to displaced workers in the labor-intensive segments of the industry. The findings suggest that the new NAFTA jobs are inaccessible to the thousands of apparel manufacturing workers displaced by the trend in offshore sourcing. Finally, the article discusses the implications and consequences of recent state-industry partnership programs designed to train and cross-train sewing operators for jobs that are rapidly leaving the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses governance restructuring in Los Angeles, California and Toronto, Ontario. In Toronto an aggressively neoliberal provincial Ontario government decreed an amalgamation of six individual municipal governments and one regional administration. The consolidationist argument, often associated with dirigiste government and compact central city ideals, has now become the means of choice to integrate regional blubber belt hegemony in more than one jurisdiction in Ontario. In Toronto and Los Angeles, what appear to be limited struggles over local jurisdiction and administration of service delivery, are struggles over the urban dimensions of a globalized work, at least in part. Amalgamation and secession become fighting metaphors of change in the war of position in which urban actors find themselves in the age of the global city. Although the old City of Toronto, had retained its hegemony in the region since the introduction of Metro government exactly because it has become one, albeit the strongest, player in a regionally federated system of metropolitan governance, its position had also been waning in the final years of the Metro model.

The article examines the experience of Korean business in Los Angeles within the of urban transformation. The principal argument advanced in this article is that responses to urban transformation diverge between industrial sectors, the ethnic migrant communities and regions. The past two decades of industrial change in Los Angeles illustrate a typology of selective and systematic disinvestment in the city's basic productive capacity, including the closures of manufacturing plants in the inner city. It is important that corresponding transformations in the spatial division of labour did not replace the old divisions. Instead there was an evolving sequence of partial and selective transformations in the structure of the city's labour markets. In the case of Korean small businesses in Los Angeles, the sectoral shift revealed a clear pattern in their specific responses to this urban industrial change. While Korean migrants were self-employed increasingly in the small-firms sector, their shares in both manufacturing and construction sectors experienced accentuated growth between 1975 and 1986.

The adage that Los Angeles, California was a number of suburbs in search of a city may have been a somewhat accurate, though an overly simplistic, description of the spatially dispersed metropolis that seemed to be thumbing its nose at the model of successive concentric zones of urban land use established by the urban ecologists of the Chicago School. Faced with the historic fact that Los Angeles was a hispanic city that predated the intrusion of North American capitalism, Anglo LA sought to create its own centre. While the Anglo Central Business District was seeking a new centre in Pershing Square following the North American conquest, the Plaza fell into disrepair, being used as the site for the city reservoir and then as a wholesale fruit and vegetable market. A revitalized park depends on getting rid of the street people or, according to researcher David Houk of the Pershing Square Property Owners Association, getting nicely dressed people to come into the park and outnumber them. To these ends, a performance area and food and retail operations, which cater to a nicely dressed clientele are proposed.

The proposition that social divisions are manifest in the built environment and patterns of land use is perhaps most forcefully evidenced by the late twentieth-century urban restructuring in the U.S. and other advanced industrialized nations. In many cities the recent transformation of the central business district into a centre of finance and real estate capital housed in skyscraping office towers has been matched by the continued deterioration of working-class neighborhoods and the elimination of poor neighborhoods that had encircled the downtown area and threatened its expansion. Economic development policies aimed at facilitating the economic and spatial restructuring of urban areas have been largely unconcerned with issues of equity. The competition between jurisdictions for the investment of mobile capital has led to the predominance of subsidies and incentives and though these programmes have been publicly justified in terms of the public benefits that allegedly accrue, a great deal of evidence has shown that those benefits are quite unevenly distributed.

The article examines the community and class struggles in Los Angeles, California against corporate development forces. The political isolation of Los Angeles communities also occurs within the setting of a city tremendously segregated by race and class, intentionally designed is such by private developers in the early 1900s. Pico Union, Skid Row, and Route 2 are only three of the communities in Los Angeles that have organized to gain political autonomy. The lack of political accountability to working-class communities in Los Angeles had bred the need for creating mass based solidarity within communities.

The article focuses on the conference "A New Urban and Regional Hierarchy? Impacts of Modernization, Restructuring and the End of Bipolarity," held in Los Angeles, California in April 1992. This conference was sponsored by Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association in cooperation with the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and the Comparative Social Analysis Program of UCLA. It was co-organized by professors Susan Fainstein and Ivan Szelenyi, and its aim was to examine whether there is a new urban and regional hierarchy. The main theme was the urban impact of third world modernization, global economic restructuring and the end of political bipolarity with the collapse of eastern European communism. Panels on these three trends tended to be segregated, with separate discussions of changes in Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia. The systems approach characterizing global cities perspectives, in which specialization in multinational service industries or corporate command looms so large, flirts with functionalism.