Award-Winning Suburban Historian Discusses “The New Suburbia” From Her Post-Eaton Fire Vantage

Becky Nicolaides has spent most of her career arguing that suburbs are not what people think they are. Her latest book, “The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945,” won the 2025 Kenneth T. Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association, and traces how Los Angeles County suburbs shifted from majority white to majority nonwhite over a single postwar generation. On Thursday at 6 p.m., Nicolaides discusses the book in a virtual conversation hosted by the LA Planning History Group.

She is joined by Ken Bernstein, Principal City Planner for the Los Angeles Department of City Planning and manager of the city’s Office of Historic Resources, who directs Los Angeles’ historic preservation policies and is himself the author of “Preserving Los Angeles: How Historic Places Can Transform America’s Cities.” The pairing places suburban demographic history alongside the question of which places get preserved, and for whom.

Nicolaides, a research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and a former tenured professor at UC San Diego, is a longtime Altadena resident. She lost her home in the Eaton Fire on January 7, 2025, an experience that has sharpened the book’s questions about who shapes a community and who gets to return after disaster. Pasadena and San Marino are two of the four detailed case studies in “The New Suburbia,” alongside South Gate and Lakewood.

The conversation is free and open to the public, but requires advance registration.

Becky Nicolaides on “The New Suburbia” will run on Thursday, May 21 at 6 p.m. Online via the LA Planning History Group. For more information and to register, visit beckynicolaides.com. Admission is free.