Politics of Los Angeles (Coursework Sample)

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Politics of Los Angeles
The elites have a created a picture of insufficient funding to both sectors. With the education elites concerned with the funds available and their accountability. With this the quality of education is greatly affected in that there are less students going to school, schools are opening late, and staff are being reorganized. Majority of their health counterparts have the view that with insufficient funds, the county cannot support its own health care reform efforts. There is need for higher level training for their leaders to improve leadership quality and generally, there is unequal distribution of resources.
Consensus can be brought by collaborative kind of leadership whereby decision-making is a collective duty binding them together in the resulting failure or success. Both have agreed to pay higher taxes to keep the K-12 funding going elaborating this collective duty of concern to the education sector. Therefore, it is important to use democratic approaches in resolving a crisis whenever it pops up.
The L.A. school urban theory is a model that approaches urban study from not only an empirical point but from a theoretical perspective because of the contemporary politics which include urban political economy. It was developed by Marxist geographers and postmodernist scholars as well as interdisciplinary communities working across the Southern California.
It is a post modern urbanism whereby, the centre no longer controls the peripherals, with the altered geography, there is flexibility in specialization and therefore the hinterlands predominate and determine what remains at the centre and not the other way round. This means that the school focuses much on the periphery.
It is also an eclectic theory about construction of urban space. The school has a very expansive definition of urbanism with scholarly activities covering a variety of issues (Burgess and McKenzie 1925). Among these issues are the city’s architecture and economic foundation of the peripherals, homelessness and poverty alleviation, impact of the federal, state and local policies as well as chronicle emergence of ethnic and religious communities.
The L.A school has its limitations as much as it is more flexible than the Chicago school. The school does not pay attention to local states; this is either as an independent variable affecting urban space or a dependent variable affected by geospatial relationships. It also has a built in economic determinism driven entirely on economic factors. While the L.A. school is driven post industrialization the concentric school of Chicago is driven by industrialization. This therefore, is a study that detests elites who remain static while the world around them is changing everyday.
The Chicago school of urbanism is a modern theory that views a city as a whole. The centre organizes the urban hinterlands and from where developments starts and spreads. It is consequently considered a zonal or concentric ring theory.
The Chicago school has been around for a long time due to its simplicity, tenacity of its developers and universality. This is so because it was used as a model for urban studies in different cities over a long period. It sees the elites as fragmented and competes against each other. Like the L.A. model it has its own limitations.
The Chicago school is underdeveloped theoretically in that its explanatory factors do not contain any variables, they are just historical events. There are no identifiable change agents that define the change of an event to an outcome. Like L.A. school also it does not pay attention to the local politics therefore, does not adequately represent state-society relations (Dear 2000). The relationship between cities has not been adequately catered for in this model, the consequences of the urban space have not been well researched empirically.
The entrepreneurial school is a more progressive model based on a business run, low tax, government that pursues private strategies of developing the area economically. In this theory, the urban space grows to fulfill the capitalist needs of the economic organization as the global financial players considered impersonal forces leading the way (Dear and Frosty 2002).the form and the function of the states are derived from the capitalistic economic state. The state secures spaces for production and accumulation and the status of the business activities do not differ regardless of the state structure or level; municipal or regional level (Clark and Dear 1984).
The limitation of the school was that the public interest was delegated. The public officials served at the behest of private interests. The developers view the landscape for development from an undifferentiated perspective; they never paid attention to the environmental, fiscal and other externalities they impo...