Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Narratives

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Ghost Metropolis is a work of spatial, visual, and textual, storytelling, so the structure of the work weaves these families of narrative together.  Narratives are always in motion, implicitly spatial in mind and body: we travel paths and these journeys are the cognitive grounding for storytelling. 

Mapping the past alone does not convey the meaning of that which has been mapped, nor the contribution of each topos to the grand ensemble of a global metropolis.  Narratives do that, linking emplaced events and action that made the region what it is.
 
Narratives are stories told sequentially, but they are not always semantically textual.  Stories were spatial before they were verbal, and every journey of humanity--highly adapted with binocular vision and powerful visual neural processing--has been an embodied journey one.  There are many ways to narrate.  Ghost Metropolis presents these three main types of storytelling: spatial, textual, and visual.  Only textual-semantic narratives are intrinsically linear and narratological.  So, the visual narratives take genre that defies narrative form internally, and links them, sequentially, into narrative form.  It is hoped that by doing so the non-linear qualities of visual objects can work synergistically with the linear form of semantic text, to achieve levels of understanding and explanation greater than any one genre alone.
 
Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. There cannot be a single narrative for so great a concentration of global humanity--persons numbering in the hundreds of millions--over so many centuries.  Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives.

All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them.  In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is bursting with narratives.  But in practice I cannot tell that many, and I have been forced to combine, collapse, interweave, and shrink a gigantic world into a highly compressed network of selected essayistic narratives.