Unlike any other city in recent years, Los Angeles has been the subject of grand theorizing in urban studies, so much so that many write of an “L.A. school” of urban theory. With its sprawl, smog, postindustrial economy, and postmodern architecture, this California city is often presented as an ideal-type representation of urbanized, globalized dystopia. While some of the studies of the L.A. school are useful, they are too often impressionistic and imprecise, pitched at an unsatisfying level of abstraction. In contrast, Raphael Sonenshein's detailed and empirical study is a useful and refreshing antidote, and when paired alongside his 1993 book, Politics in Black and White, serves as the definitive account of the city's political history since the 1970s.

Sonenshein takes up the question of the meaning of urban reform in the complicated modern world of Los Angeles. In its traditional Progressive Era sense, municipal reform meant the victory of rationalistic upper-class WASPs, with their blueprints for efficient executive power and the authority of bureaucratic experts, over the ethnic political machines. Los Angeles, in this understanding, is a triumphant reform city, with a weak mayor, weaker local political parties, and a bureaucratized style of politics. But all of this is quite obvious. The more interesting point that Sonenshein raises in The City at Stake is that reform is the terrain on which all the political battles are fought; put differently, the rhetoric and symbolism of reform are used by all political coalitions vying for power in modern Los Angeles. This is an even more complicated matter because of the emergence of a sizable Latino electoral coalition in recent decades that disrupted the stable divide of the era of Mayor Tom Bradley, which pitted white liberals and African Americans against white conservatives.

Sonenshein examines the politics surrounding the ratification of charter changes in Los Angeles in 1999, a document that had not been overhauled in any substantial degree in more than 70 years. Charter reform arose on the issue agenda for two reasons. First, the city's establishment viewed charter reform as an instrument to relieve some of the tensions in the San Fernando Valley section when a serious secessionist movement began there. Second, charter reform was viewed as a line of attack for the aggressive new mayor, Richard Riordan, to pursue his agenda to increase mayoral power.

Initially, the city council appointed a commission to recommend charter changes to be put before voters, but Mayor Riordan refused to play ball with the council. Instead, the mayor supported an elected commission to make charter recommendations. The two commissions went about their work independently. The chairs of both commissions soon realized that issuance of separate recommendations would doom reform, since two blueprints would cancel each other out. So the commission chairs worked hard and successfully to reconcile differences and present a single, revised charter to city voters. In this important opening, the two charter commissions were able to seize command of the symbols of reform and force charter changes onto the ballot that most of the political establishment in Los Angeles might have otherwise avoided. The city's voters endorsed the changes.

The unified charter commission responded to the mayor's claims that he needed greater managerial authority. Power shifted from the city council to the mayor. The charter changes also established neighborhood and regional representational structures that the commissions hoped would salve wounds in the San Fernando Valley.

The development of charter reform was circuitous, but Sonenshein was fortunate to hold a front row seat, serving as executive director of one of the charter reform commissions. He was able to chart every twist and turn. He does so dispassionately, demonstrating the power of the participant-observer technique in an able researcher's hands. He is particularly adept at mapping the strategic maneuvering of the different groups and players in the charter reform process.

Sonenshein also employs ecological regression techniques to demonstrate the increasingly complicated, fluid nature of coalition building in Los Angeles. He finds that liberal Jews, white conservatives, and Latinos joined to support charter reform, but that these groups moved in opposite directions when confronting other important votes in this same era, including the defeat of a measure to allow the San Fernando Valley to break away from Los Angeles.

After skillfully winning greater formal power in his city, Riordan, the driving force behind the changes, saw his informal power sink. He had angered the unions and city council in his quest for charter changes. The strange creation of two charter commissions, which seemingly made the prospects for charter change impossible, created an opening that allowed the two commissions to merge their power and, for a brief time, control the reform agenda in the city. Such are the ironies of political power and the unintended consequences of change that grand theories of urban politics often neglect. Sonenshein's careful study of political power in Los Angeles reminds us of the importance of urban leadership in the shaping of cities, and of the likelihood that Los Angeles politics will be increasingly dynamic and unpredictable in the future.