Rowe, PeterDavis, DianeDunham, Duke2026-06-1720262026-05-202026Dunham, Duke. 2026. Los Angeles in Pieces: Space-Time, Structure, and Self-Organization in the Evolving Capitalist City. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Design.32704872https://p2p8-sa-zuvru-a9vusux.re-cotta.com/handle/1/42741296Los Angeles is in pieces. The basin's morphology, governance, and industrial geography have fragmented across one hundred and seventy five years of capitalist urbanization, producing a city whose internal coherence has been lost in the transitions between successive phases of self-organization. This dissertation reads the basin as a self-organizing system whose space-time structure at any moment is the resultant of dispersive and centralizing forces operating across the territory. Each phase of urbanization corresponds to a specific configuration of these forces and each phase transition occurring when the previous balance tips and the territory reorganizes into a new structural form. Drawing on the complexity-theoretic frame developed in the natural sciences across the twentieth century, from Einstein’s theory of relativity to Prigogine's dissipative structures and Bak's self-organized criticality to the urban applications by Allen and Portugali. This dissertation specifies an analytical framework for reading urban form as the emergent product of forces operating at a multitude of scales rather than as the imposition of master plans, zoning codes, or growth models. The basin's history is read across three phases organized around three primary industries. The dispersive phase from 1781 to 1920 organized the territory through agriculture, the colony grid, and the rail network. The centralizing phase from 1910 to 1965 consolidated the basin under petroleum and the hierarchical governance of water, the freeway, the defense economy, and the redlining maps deployed. The de-spatialization phase from 1965 to 2025 detached the forces organizing the basin from the territory itself, with capital de-spatialized through securitization and governance fragmented across competing jurisdictions. Within each phase, five turns, spatial, economic, environmental, social, and political, propagate the dispersive-centralizing dynamic across the registers through which any industrial regime exerts force on the territory. The Piranesian cartographic operation that the dissertation develops assembles the resulting fragments into a single relational field, refusing the disciplinary specializations that have studied each fragment in isolation. The contemporary moment is read as a fourth phase transition in which the center that organizes the basin has been taken out of play, shifted to a geographically locatable coordinating point. The political interface at Wilmington, where the closure of the Phillips 66 refinery is being matched by the arrival of logistics infrastructure, and the cultural interface at the Sunset Boulevard soundstage cluster, where state subsidy and institutional capital are coordinating a layered occupation of the configuration, are read as the two specific edges where this transition becomes visible. The composite center, distributed across logistics infrastructure, institutional capital, state-subsidized cultural retention, reorganizes the basin through mechanisms the basin's eighty-eight municipalities cannot themselves direct. The dissertation's contribution is fourfold. The theoretical insight specifies how urban form is created and space is ordered: not through master plans but through the emergent resultant of forces operating at every point on the territory. The functional insight specifies how the city operates: as a field of agents pursuing productive equilibrium between dispersive and centralizing forces, with industries organizing through risk-reward calculations that depend on the territory's specific fitness landscape. The professional insight specifies that design must intervene: at the intermediate scale of the industrial cluster between the local jurisdiction and the global system, where the framework of space-time structure and self-organization spatialize themselves within a city. The disciplinary insight specifies that the allied design disciplines must re-form: by adopting complexity theory as their underlying scientific framework, by developing cartographic instruments capable of reading the basin's space-time structure, and by constructing propositions at the scale the contemporary moment requires. The recovery of design's agency depends on whether the disciplines that produced the framework can use it.application/pdfenCapitalist UrbanizationComplexity TheoryLos AngelesPolycentric UrbanismSelf-OrganizationUrban MorphologyUrban planningArchitectureGeographyThesis or Dissertation2026-06-170009-0005-4072-8527