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2008.07.13 Snobbery, The Real I love LA / 1
I have this suspicion that I’m the last person in the world to read City of Quartz–isn’t it like taught in every LA high school? Nevertheless, my adviser suggested I get hip to Mike Davis as my dissertation proposal gets more and more located within questions about urbanity. So, in preparation for a trip to LA, I raced through Davis’s archaeology of his (sort of) home town. Then on my return to Chicago, I picked up its (sort of) sequel, Ecology of Fear, and blazed through that.
There is a Post-it on my monitor now, reading “it’s ALL ABOUT PROPERTY,” since that is more or less what I have taken from these two books. Especially in City of Quartz, Davis shows how the entire LA region has had its social policy dictated by, if nothing else, the sale of private property. Hysteria about declining property rates, about the “right” to own a single-family home, about the need for ocean views regardless of the ecological toll, about gutting the tax base, etc… these all fuel the modern city. And what you get is the mess of LA, a city I have never particularly liked.
And yet in the opening of City of Quartz, Davis calls out the haters for the simplicity of the elitist position of LA-hating. It’s not bold and edgy in the least to hate Los Angeles, nor is it a sign of some sort of cultural distinction or advanced taste. Hating LA is as much a cliché as loving it, if not more, since I imagine more people hate LA (including its former residents moving to more and more removed pockets of new development in the desert) than love it.
So rather than risking being a bore, I have to modulate my opinion of the city to a more nuanced one, and City of Quartz helps with that. No amount of social planning can change my lingering issue with the city (”smog” and “rain” are not, in fact, seasons), but the book does demonstrate that LA is not, actually, all that exceptional. He could have written a very similar book about Chicago, or even, more appropriately, about Detroit. Since while the Windy City has made immeense efforts (with rather good results for developers) to rebuild its downtown, Detroit has sort of abandoned it, much like LA abandoned its downtown, moved a few blocks over to Bunker Hill, and started fresh.
In other words, there is nothing exceptional about how avarice and greed fuel the distribution of tax money to developers that is limited to Los Angeles and its environs. Anyone who reads Ben Joravsky can see that Chicago is no better. Chicago just somehow manages to look less guilty. So the ultimate motivating factors (including a pervasive, structural racism) are not culturally unique. And Davis even blames the midwestern Protestants who made up the first wave of Anglo residents of LA for inscribing that very structure of racism into the city before there were even racial minorities to discriminate against (LA was held out as a last, shining beacon of White Urban Protestantism without a black threat–with great weather, to boot!).
But where City of Quartz manages to universalize Los Angeles, Ecology of Fear returns with the particularizing focus, only by showing how Los Angeles has been constructed in such a specific place and in such a specific way to set itself up for persistent destruction, over and over. The constant bending to the will of developers and homeowners has ruined the ecological public policy of the region, with consequences that get hidden in the third world that exists under the freeways. The county spends ludicrous sums to protect Malibu mansions from natural wildfires (made even tougher to fight because the firefighters have to delicately dance around houses while trying to save them), creating at the same time a panic of mythical arsonist terrorists trying to torch the nice, quiet little beach community. Yet then the city treats the absolutely atrocious fires (with higher body counts) consuming the tenements in downtown as Acts of God, as retribution against people who came here illegally.
If you own a house, or if you build houses, you draw a lot of water in this town. If you’re a poor person who rents, you don’t draw shit. This is still the thesis of City of Quartz, of course, but it shows how specifically in LA, that sort of politics creates (natural) disaster after disaster. And where it doesn’t create disaster, it encourages the creation of unreal (surreal) simulacra that try to coverup for its massive public failing.
The final chapter of Ecology of Fear (very similar to this pamphlet) draws a new map of Los Angeles similar to the Burgess diagram of Chicago as a ring of concentric communities defined (in part) by dwellings. It is also the best chapter in the book, as it perhaps veers toward required reading. Davis’s concentric circles diagram is far more complex, but that also reflects the much larger interest in compartmentalizing and walling that current urban areas demonstrate. The homeless are walled into downtown, and the affluent are walled into their gated communities. In the meantime, you have edge cities (Schaumburg is Davis’s Chicago example) that suck money, residents, and tax base from collapsing “inner” suburbs (Cicero, let’s say, or even the now fantastically fascinating Dead Zone of Bensenville).
The walls are even present at the building level. In City of Quartz, Davis writes about stealth architecture, where the building itself is hidden–all of its aesthetic value is removed from public view. I experienced this first hand: when walking down Wilshire in Santa Monica, I came upon a Vons, where I wanted to buy bagels. Here is a supermarket, on a rather main street, and there is no entrance from Wilshire. (Later I was told that the tiny door that looked like an employee entrance is, actually, a way into the store–but that entrance is not even visible from inside the store). There is just a giant beige stucco wall, with Hokusai’s Great Wave in mosaic along the edge. In the corner is a walled up shopfront. You have to walk around the entire building to the parking lot in back in order to find the entrance, which then engulfs you right into the supermarket experience like any contemporary grocery store. My friend, in fact, never even walks down Wilshire to get to this Vons–there is a network of parking lots that she ventures down, instead. That was how I returned, and, really, the aesthetic and commercial charge was much better felt taking this (literally private) route, abandoning Wilshire to the homeless who were just beginning to stir under their surplus army blankets.
After two nights in Santa Monica, my trip took me to three nights at the Hilton in Universal City. I had never really understood Universal City (especially why it didn’t seem to be colored in on any maps of LA I would see), but that turns out to be because the space is unincorporated LA County land owned entirely by MCA. Universal City, in other words, is an wholly private city, with no political allegiance or tax responsibility to the City of Los Angeles. And it’s in Universal City that LA is being rebuilt in simulacrum. So I close this post with Davis’s words about CityWalk, a place I ventured to three times during my stay, each time rather cringe inducing. This description though, should be held up in comparison to, say, Millennium Park and the Miracle Mile in Chicago. What are, functionally, the real differences? The Chicago structures were built by the city, and homeless manage to sneak in. Plus Chicago has a Gehry… But the motivation is the same: build an idealized, fake city that can lure in people who want to pretend that they are walking in a city and experiencing the “real” Chicago (or LA), when, really, they’re just experiencing what manages to rob the city’s tax coffers blind, which is, nonetheless, what the real (privatized) city now is (and does).
But tourists are increasingly reluctant to venture into the imagined dangers of Los Angeles’s “urban jungle.” As one MCA/Universal official complained: “There’s somebody on every street corner with a ‘Work for Food’ sign, [and the city] is not fun anymore.”
Yet there is a growing hunger among younger members of the middle class for pedestrian-scale public space. The accelerating privatization of experience associated with life in gilded ghettoes and gated suburbs has created a craving for crowds, street life, and spectacle…MCA and Disney…think they can capitalize on this demand for urban sensation by recreating vital bits of city life within the secure confines of their theme parks. The consumers of this junk-food version of urbanity are generally homogeneous crowds of upscale shoppers and tourists, and there is little of the real “promiscuity”… that Burgess claimed animated Chicago and New York in the 1920s…
MCA pulled the rug from under Hollywood redux with the announcement that its nearby tax-dodge enclave Universal City would construct a parallel urban reality called “CityWalk.”
Designed by master illusionist Jon Jerde, CityWalk is an “idealized reality”: the iconic features of Hollywood, along with Olvera Street and Mid-Wilshire, synthesized in “easy, bite-sized pieces” for consumption by tourists and residents who “don’t need the excitement of dodging bullets…in the Third World country” that Los Angeles has become… To alleviate the sense of artificiality in this melange [of architectural styles], Jerde proposed to add a “patina of age” and a “dash of grit”:
Using decorative sleight of hand, the designers plan to wrap the brand new street in the cloak of instant history–on opening day, some buildings will be painted to suggest that they have been occupied before. Candy wrappers will be embedded in the terrazzo flooring, as if discarded by previous visitors.
Since the opening of CityWalk in 1993, plans for Hollywood redevelopment have been more or less shipwrecked. Even spruced up and Disneyfied there is no way that the real boulevard can compete with the Platonic ideal-type on Universal’s private hill. As MCA has taken pains to emphasize, CityWalk is “not a mall” but a “revolution in urban design,” a monumental exercise in sociological hygiene. But critics have wondered if it isn’t, instead, the architectural equivalent of the neutron bomb: the city emptied of all lived experience. “Have we so lost L.A. as a real city,” asked historican Kevin Starr, “That we need this level of social control for anything resembling urban experience?”
source: Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, New York: Vintage, 1998, 393; 397-398.
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Sud added these pithy words on Jul 21 08 at 18:11Great post mo, the only other thing I would add is that there is clearly a different model going on in the US vs. Europe. In euroland, they seemed to have always kept a big chunk of the city center for the uber-rich, which when they moved out could be resold as retail space for NikeTown. This further raises property values and gives them a ‘gentrification beachhead’ for future expansion: think what Knightsbridge did to the area around Soho, etc.
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