The City at Stake

Secession, Reform, and the Battle for Los Angeles

Raphael J. Sonenshein

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780691126036
  9780691115900
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400849642
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The City at Stake tells the dramatic story of how the nation's second-largest city completed a major reform of its government in the face of a deeply threatening movement for secession by the San Fernando Valley. How did Los Angeles, a diverse city with an image of unstructured politics and fragmented government, find a way to unify itself around a controversial set of reforms?


Los Angeles government nearly collapsed in political bickering over charter reform, which generated the remarkable phenomenon of two competing charter reform commissions. Out of this nearly impossible tangle, reformers managed to knit a new city charter that greatly expanded institutions for citizen participation and addressed long-standing weaknesses in the role of the mayor. The new charter, pursued by a Republican mayor, won its greatest support from liberal whites who had long favored reform measures.


Written by an urban scholar who played a key role in the charter reform process, the book offers both a theoretical perspective on the process of institutional reform in an age of diversity, and a firsthand, inside-the-box look at how major reform works.


The new afterword by the author analyzes the 2005 election of Los Angeles's first modern Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, a milestone in the development of urban reform coalitions in an age of immigration and ethnic diversity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface: Reform under the Gun
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE: The Dynamics of Urban Reform
• PART TWO: The Roots of Los Angeles Charter Reform
• PART THREE: The Battle over the Charter
• PART FOUR: The Unified Charter
• PART FIVE: The Battle over Secession
• PART SIX: The Future of Urban Reform
• APPENDIX ONE: Summary of the Charter Proposal
• APPENDIX TWO: Using Ecological Inference Model to Verify Results
• Bibliography
• Afterword: Reform, Diversity, and the 2005 Election of Antonio Villaraigosa
• Index