Los Angeles: A Truly Decentralized City
My post this week is in response to my classmate Laiza's bus trip where she questioned if Los Angeles is really as decentralized as we make it out to be. Read her post and my comment here.
Hi Laiza! I really enjoyed reading your post. I admire how you devote so much time and effort to getting to campus. Your outlook as taking the bus as an opportunity to observe and interact with the city and your fun writing style makes your blog engaging and interesting to read. Your observations themselves are very thorough and I found your point of view intriguing and your blog has made me think about the city differently.
I have not lived in Los Angeles for very long, so I definitely have a different experience with the city than you do. I think, however, that there is a very noticeable and real difference between the organization (or lack thereof) of Los Angeles and the structure of Chicago, Manchester, New York, and other cities of the Third Urban Revolution. While I agree that Los Angeles does have some traditional center of industry or business, I don’t see our city as being perfectly relatable to the centralized urban metropolis of the Third Urban Revolution. Instead of having one central business district like the Chicago School Model, I think Los Angeles might have a handful or multiple city “centers” that organize levels of periphery.
When we went over the Fourth Urban Revolution, we learned that decentralization is the key feature of the post metropolis cities. We discussed in class how the private automobile is essential to this decentralized metropolis. With personal cars, the new city “centers” are each individual’s respective home, and their periphery are all the places of work, culture, consumption, and social life within a radius accessible by their cars. As you explain in your post, you rely on public transportation to get from home to school to work and back to home each day. Maybe because you do not use a car to access your post metropolis periphery, you experience Los Angeles more like a structured, centralized metropolis with main thoroughfares and radial public transportation. Because the private automobile is so essential to the post metropolis, it would makes sense that using a private automobile is essential to completely taking part in the city.
In “The Growth of the City”, Ernest Burgess describes the Chicago School Model with the central business district “loop”, surrounded by the zone in transition, then the zone of workingmen’s homes, the residential zone, and the commuters’ zone in progressive concentric circles. In a way, you live in such a commuter zone because you travel many miles to school and then to work. Like Friedrich Engles observed in industrial Manchester and wrote about in “The Great Towns”, you too use public transportation that takes you on main streets into the more centralized areas for your school and work. These models don’t exactly correlate to being a student at a university rather than an employee in an industrial zone, but the comparison could be made that UCLA campus is a central zone itself. Thousands of individuals are organized around UCLA for education, teaching, work in several different sectors, and research. Most students live within a few miles of the campus, with other students, professors, staff, and faculty often living farther away.
I think the fact that you spend so much time on buses each day, and especially because you have to walk between the bus stops and your destinations, public transportation in Los Angeles is not the same as in the urban metropolis of the Third Urban Revolution. If your school and work were close to each other and the bus went more directly from your home to UCLA and the place of your work, Los Angeles would be more comparable to the Chicago model. Because the places you must go are so spread out, I think Los Angeles is indeed decentralized and an example of a post metropolis. Your not using a car, which is supposedly essential to Los Angeles, does give you a different experience in the city and I found your post so insightful and it is helping me to think about modern cities and Los Angeles in particular in yet another way. Thank you so much for your point of view and your post and I look forward to reading your blog for the rest of the quarter :)
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| This image shows variations of social networking, but I think the same patterns and distributions apply to city form and function I still think that Los Angeles belongs in the category of "Decentralized" cities. My classmate's starting place (home) is far from and not directly connected to her different centers of importance (work, school, even the bus stops). Also, the other people who use these centers and pieces of infrastructure start from different and spread out locations. |
-Teresa Pilon
References:
Burgess, Ernest W. "Chapter 37: The Growth of the City." The Blackwell City Reader. By Gary Bridge and Sophie
Watson. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2010. 339-44. Print.
Engels, Friedrich. "The Great Towns." The Blackwell City Reader. Ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. 2nd ed. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 11-16. Print.
Rodriguez, Laiza. "Week 4: The Not-so-Decentralized LA." Web log post. Navigating Los Angeles: Cities and Social Difference. N.p., 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 16 Nov. 2012. <http://uclageography.blogspot.com/2012/10/week-4-not-so-decentralized-la.html>.
Image from: http://connectedprincipals.com/archives/6413
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