Hymn to the Great People’s Republic of Brooklyn

Abstract

All postmodern roads lead to Los Angeles. Or so it often seems. For here, as David Lyon reports, is ‘the world’s first truly postmodern city’ (Lyon, 1994: 59). Lyon cites the city’s accelerated de-industrialization, concentration of high-tech occupations, low-paid service and manufacturing jobs, its ‘constantly moving, fragmentary urban flow’, squalid slums and gentrified neighbourhoods, airports, hotels and shopping malls as paradigmatic of postmodernity (59–60). For Edward Soja, one of the city’s leading interpreters, LA is ‘the world’s most symbolic space of urban decentralization’ (Soja, 1995: 23) and this ‘symbolic centrelessness’, in particular, says Lyon, makes LA ‘a metaphor for postmodern consumer culture in general: all is fragmented, heterogeneous, dispersed, plural and subject to consumer choices’ (Lyon: 61).