POST-SUBURBAN CALIFORNIA:
THE TRANSFORMATION OF POSTWAR
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (eds.)

University of California Press, 1991 (hbk), 1995 (expanded paperback).

[ *POSTSUBURBAN CALIFORNIA won the 1992 Robert G. Athearn Award from the Western History Association.]

During the last 100 years Orange County, has matured into an important component of the larger Los Angeles region. For several decades, this region has been one of the major industrial metropolises in the world. Within it, Orange County recently has developed its own powerful sub-regional economy, which ranks among the top thirty in the world. Like much of Southern California and the larger Sunbelt, Orange County has been rapidly transformed from a predominantly agricultural area into one that is important both industrially and "postindustrially" as well. A social transformation that has taken place over the course of a century in most nation-states and major cities has occurred in Orange County during a mere forty years.

Orange County's national image as a bastion of conservatism and as a hotbed of right-wing activism has long substituted for deeper analysis of the complexities of the region. The editors of this volume bring a very different perspective to bear. We believe that Orange County is far from being a static, "kooky" backwater area. During the last two decades, new businesses and their owners and managers have transformed it into a metropolitan area which exemplifies a dynamic world beyond traditional industrial society. In the 1940s, Orange County was a rural region distinct from Los Angeles. During the 1950s and 1960s it developed as an almost indistinguishable part of Los Angeles's suburban fringe. By the 1980s, it began to develop a sufficiently self-sustaining economy and cultural life that it can again become viable as a distinct subject of study. We believe that Orange County's emerging social order should be described through its economy, its technologies, its cultural themes, and its political life -- and the interplay among them. This book differs from many regional studies which focus exclusively on one slice of the social order -- the economic structures, political organization, culture, spatial arrangements, or some other dimension.

OC has about 2.3 million residents who live in about 30 cities. The largest cities include about 10% of the residents. San Diego County, with a comparable size population, has about 50% of its residents in the city of San Diego. No single city dominates OC's artistic and commercial life, in contrast with traditional urbanized regions.

Postsuburban regions have distinct locations for commerce, recreation, shopping, arts, residences and religious activities. These activities are often all conducted in different places which are linked primarily by private cars. This fundamentally decentralized arrangement makes postsuburban regions complex, incoherent, disorienting, dynamic, and lively. Postsuburban regions cannot be easily understood with traditional categories of suburb and city or by focussing on one city, such as Irvine, since residents of any one city travel throughout a post-suburban region for work, shopping, worship, recreation, and arts.

We have identified four key themes to help interpret Orange County's remarkable transformation from a minor agricultural region into a substantial metropolitan area in less than forty years: the shift from traditional capitalism to informational capitalism, the development of a pervasive consumer culture, the shift from provincialism to cosmopolitanism, and the development of a multicentered functionally differentiated spatial organization. We label this multi-centered spatial organization, "post-suburban," since it arises from a suburban spatial form. Orange County, like about 20 other post-suburban regions in the US, is an "anticipatory region," one whose economic, social and political life foreshadows the future for other regions.

This collection of nine studies examine Orange County's changing business structures and their labor markets, its emerging culture and changing politics, and its spatial organization. The chapters of this book also examine the inescapable tensions inherent in Orange County's emerging economy and society, tensions that presage the future of post-suburban development in the United States.

Hardcover 1991 edition: 307 pages & 20 b/w illustrations ISBN 0-520-06716-9 $34.95 cloth Worldwide. Note: You can obtain a 20% discount to $27.96 per copy if you specify this rate code:393-000

Paperback 1995 edition with a new 20 page introductory essay, Beyond the Edge: The Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions" ISBN 0-520-20160-4 $16

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Last modified 10/8/98