Eric Avila’s, Pop Culture in the Age of White Flight is an interesting exploration of the white suburbanization of post-war, urban American cities using Los Angeles as his model. Avila situates his argument among a few major, (sub)urban events/areas, including the flight of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to LA, Disneyland in LA, LA film culture and film noir, among others. Avila creates not only a nuanced version of post war race relations, but also discusses how urban space plays heavily into the story as a whole.
Los Angeles presents a perfect setting for Avila’s discourse for multiple reasons. In the preface Avila says, “Historically removed from the entrenched ethnic and class hierarchies that defined social relations in older American cities, Los Angeles provides an ideal setting for understanding the process of white racial formation” (xiv). The city did not truly develop until post WWII, which enabled city planning that situated minority groups in central areas (chocolate city) while created a suburban sprawl to appeal to white, potential home owners (vanilla city).
Avila goes through the ways in which these two worlds have been purposely separated into urban and suburban societies. In discussing the construction of space he says, “These values underlie the new spatial culture of suburbia: in enclosed theme parks that directed the movement and gaze of its public, in self-contained housing subdivisions planned according to the disciplined lines of the grid system, and in freeways that channeled the flow of traffic along a uniform line of movement, above and around the inner city.” This discourse flipped my understanding of the relationship between urban planning and race on its head. Avila presents a version in which the separation of race was taken into account before and during the development of the city, rather than being a result of its development.
All in all I found this book to be pretty eye opening for me in terms of the ways in which cities are structured for the benefit of some and the suffering of others. I did, however find the book to be very wordy and repetitive. More specifically I felt that the author clung onto specific buzzwords and drilled them into the readers head. I think it would have said the same thing and been half as long, but such is the state of scholarly writing at times.