Los Angeles city limits

In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North

The “right to consume”? Re-thinking the dynamics of exclusion/inclusion in consumer society

Consumption is a political relationship. This article considers competing political discourses around consumption as different versions of a hypothetical right to consume. In the first section, we consider how the domain of consumption can express the critical potential of the “right to the city,” a concept inspired by Henri Lefebvre that has had widespread influence in urban studies and related fields. In the second section we consider how the right to consume can also become a bulwark for capitalist ideologies of an individualistic and destructive right to consume. A third section concludes on recent trends in consumption studies that point to ways that capitalism seeks to assuage and manage these tensions through ongoing innovations in consumer technology and finance. New questions about rights and democracy must emerge to confront this new techno-economy of consumer relations. In short, while we affirm the right to consume for the most vulnerable, we also insist on deconstructing the system of consumption as it is currently configured