Cities - Environmental Transformations - page 104

city was really no more than a small town, but
between the 1880s and the 1920s its population
rose from 35,000 to nearly 1 million inhabitants
(Soja, 1989: 194). Following this 28-fold increase
in the size of its population, Los Angeles continued
to expand rapidly throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, reaching a modern-day population of around
10 million people. The second key characteristic
is the spatial size of these sprawling cities. The
urban region that is now part of Los Angeles
County, for example, encompasses 10,570km 2 ;
that means that the city region now occupies
approximately the same amount of land as the
whole state of Massachusetts . 1 To put things
another way, between 1975 and 1990 Los
Angeles's population grew by 45 per cent, but
this increase in population was coupled with a
threefold increase in the surface area of the city
(Davis, 1999). In his book The Geography of
Nowhere , James Howard Kunstler (1994) argues
that the suburbanized city is an urban form
that has only been made possible by the ready
availability of affordable oil (for a broader dis-
cussion of the contemporary significance of
oil to society see Chapter 2 in this volume). We
discuss in greater detail the future challenges
that appear to be facing such cities later in this
chapter.
Los Angeles has grown to such an extent that
it has now become part of a new breed of
urban centres identified by the term 'megacity'.
While various definitions of megacities exist, they
are generally identified on the basis of having
populations in excess of 10 million people. On
the basis of this measure, there are currently
23 megacities in existence today (this figure is,

however, set to rise to 36 by 2025) ( Observer ,
2012: 36). While some of these megacities are
industrial (the Rheine-Ruhr agglomeration) and
suburban (Los Angeles) cities, which have ex-
panded to megacity status over a relatively long
time periods, many megacities of the present
and future are still going through rapid episodes
of urban growth. Much of this new wave of rapid
urban expansion is occurring in South and South-
east Asia. If we take Indian urbanization as an
example, it is estimated that by 2030 this single
nation state will be home to six of its own mega-
cities, with a combined total of 56 million people
living in the cities of Delhi and Mumbai ( Observer ,
2012) . 2 T he increasing scale of urbanization that
is associated with megacities, combined with
their unprecedented rates of growth, are making
it very difficult to effectively plan the provision
of services and control the environmental harm
caused within such places (see Marcotullio and
McGranahan, 2007).
Although megacities may appear to reflect
the ultimate form of urban growth, a new urban
phenomenon appears to be now emerging. In
southern China we are starting to see the first
example of multiple megacities merging to form
a mega urban region. In China, the cities of Hong
Kong, Shenhzen and Guangzhou are beginning
to amalgamate. This so-called 'endless city' has
a combined population of approximately 120
million people. Other mega-regions are emerg-
ing in Japan between Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto and
Kobe (with an estimated combined population of
60 million people by 2015), and in Brazil between
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo (combined popula-
tion of 43 million).

Los Angeles and the postmodern city

For more on the nature of urbanization in Los Angeles, and the nature of the
so-called postmodern city, search for 'Ed Soja - The Postmodern City/Bonaventure Hotel'
on YouTube. This short video is an excerpt from an Open University documentary that was
shown on BBC television in the early 1990s.