Perhaps the dominant political rhetoric of our time is that which divides society into a self-correcting market and a government, one is the necessary and primary cause of our social ills. Government programs designed to mitigate or solve problems, we are told, unfailingly make the target problem worse and create additional, unforeseen problems. Better to leave well enough alone, even if later we lack the means to travel from our driveway to a workplace nearly one hour away on a good day.

Drawing on a wealth of archival materials from city agencies, Steven Erie's “thick description” of 125 years of Los Angeles political history is a refreshing rejection of these bromides. Erie's central claim, unlike recent analyses of the city's globalization by Soja and Kotkin, is that the semiautonomous development bureaucracies and key political and bureaucratic leaders of Los Angeles financed and built a local and regional infrastructure that is the foundation for one of the world's premiere trading regions. Erie finds that the success of this local development regime occurred despite occasional opposition from powerful corporations and the “natural” disadvantages of location.

Local governance and public entrepreneurship, not market and technological forces, are the primary forces in Globalizing L.A. Erie claims that Los Angeles is unique in that city government controlled the bureaucracies responsible for water and power, harbor, and airport development. These institutional arrangements enabled a local development state to mobilize and deploy both public and private resources to build an infrastructure that supports the region's global trade and competitiveness. City officials utilized three bureaucratic strategies in this effort: electoral mobilization and passage of numerous bond issues, clientele relations with the industrial beneficiaries of infrastructure development, and effective lobbying of state and federal officials. By 2001, the Los Angeles metropolitan area trailed only eight nation-states in gross domestic product, and almost 15% of all U.S. global trade flowed through its gateways.

Erie recounts the transformation and evolution of the local development state. Reformers' defeat of a laissez-faire growth regime and the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad provided the foundations of the local development state in the municipal airport and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Between 1933 and 1992, mayors and port and airport officials, with federal help, transformed the ports and airport from local facilities into major gateways for regional, national, and global commerce. The use of the two ports for expanded shipbuilding, airplane manufacturing, military transport, and oil drilling during World War II was critical to infrastructure development and the city's emergence as a force in global trade. New forms of autonomous governance of the airport, the eventual cooperation between harbor officials, and mayoral leadership also shaped the region's growth.

However, building the infrastructure for global trade became a contested and uneven political process. Community opposition to airport expansion and noise, the impact of federal environmental legislation, and the imposition of a new state fiscal regime beginning with Proposition 13 have shaped more recent trade-infrastructure projects in the post–Tom Bradley era. In the 1990s, container traffic in the ports nearly tripled, and ambitious port expansion plans continued. Yet port expansion plans had to overcome municipal transfers of agency funds in order to mitigate local fiscal problems, new environmental and governance reform challenges, and a harbor-area secession movement.

Landside initiatives—major rail and highway corridor development and regional airport plans—accompanied this expansion in global trade. Erie finds that regional approaches that employed joint-powers authority for project financing and governance were implemented with more success than highway corridor projects. Implementation of NAFTA-inspired cross-border highway development prevented new trade-transportation bottlenecks. He analyzes how political and community conflicts have undermined regional approaches to the planned expansion of Los Angeles International and construction of a new international airport in southern Orange County.

Erie concludes that although the global engagement of Los Angeles has brought many benefits to the region, its future as a world trade and transportation center is uncertain. Infrastructure and regional development policy now occurs in a new political-economic context. The policy environment contains more numerous and diverse trade constituencies, ethnic minorities and immigrants, and affected municipalities and communities. New costs, such as those associated with continued growth and security measures, have generated alternative concepts for the region's global future. Projected shortfalls in airport capacity have not been addressed. Finally, the ongoing conflicts between democratic accountability and the autonomy and entrepreneurial interests of agencies—in an era when a term-limited and fiscally constrained mayor enjoys greater control over development agencies—are not yet resolved.

The emergence of Los Angeles as a leading trade center provided substantial local, regional, and even national economic benefits in the twentieth century. Erie presents a relatively balanced, though by no means comprehensive, account of the economic, spatial, and sectoral costs and benefits of the city's globalization. This discussion leaves several questions unanswered. First, do the benefits of trade infrastructure development invariably produce more economic benefits than costs? Is there a point at which the costs and/or the inequities of restructuring are too great? Second, his analysis of environmental challenges to the local development state raises quality-of-life issues. In what circumstances does infrastructure development undermine a city's or region's quality of life? And, finally, he underscores the role of governmental institutional arrangements in local and regional development and of leadership in mobilizing voters to support these projects. What remains unclear is whether the local development regime bears much resemblance to what we call a democratic polity.