Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
On the west coast, San Francisco is the perennial exception--Los Angeles is the model for the Western metropolis, not the older schools of American city building exemplified in cities like New York and Chicago.
No, I'd say Los Angeles is still the exception. Other cities may have a similar decentralized form and building types but they are much less dense. I don't think any city, possibly in the world combines the residential density of Los Angeles with such a decentralized autocentric form. Vancouver, BC is similar in some ways, but it's much less autocentric and more centralized; as well as a metro with a 1/6 of a population.
Also, I wonder if New York City and Chicago are of a similar type or not. Is Chicago a similar urban type with the difference in degree of size and density or are they too far apart? I assuming coming from the west coast, the differences would be small enough to appear to be the same type.
The density of Los Angeles comes in part because of its sheer size--but it isn't the density that is the model set by Los Angeles, it is the generalized lack of a center. Chicago is not a similar urban type, it is a representative of an earlier era of cities where there is a clearly definable center and a certain type of urban development brought on by a large pre-automobile and pre-streetcar city. Cities like New York and Chicago were large cities by the mid-19th century, and their surrounding regions were all heavily influenced by the center city and still are. Los Angeles is not like that--as you may have noticed by other posts here, many who visit Los Angeles have a hard time telling where downtown Los Angeles actually is--they mistake Century City for downtown. A defining feature of Los Angeles to many urban historians is the relative irrelevance of downtown Los Angeles. Instead of being the hub of the city, like the Loop or Manhattan or even Market Street, it's just another neighborhood--and, until recently, a relatively run-down and unpopulated neighborhood. Los Angeles became the prototype for the postmodern Western city--an anacephalic city, born without a fully-developed head.
The high, but relatively uniform, population density is part of this phenomenon--there isn't a definable highly populated zone surrounded by zones of lower intensity, it's mostly a mass of relatively undifferentiated moderately high density, except for the wealthier enclaves where population is lower, and the parts of downtown where people still don't live.
The density of Los Angeles comes in part because of its sheer size--but it isn't the density that is the model set by Los Angeles, it is the generalized lack of a center. Chicago is not a similar urban type, it is a representative of an earlier era of cities where there is a clearly definable center and a certain type of urban development brought on by a large pre-automobile and pre-streetcar city. Cities like New York and Chicago were large cities by the mid-19th century, and their surrounding regions were all heavily influenced by the center city and still are. Los Angeles is not like that--as you may have noticed by other posts here, many who visit Los Angeles have a hard time telling where downtown Los Angeles actually is--they mistake Century City for downtown. A defining feature of Los Angeles to many urban historians is the relative irrelevance of downtown Los Angeles. Instead of being the hub of the city, like the Loop or Manhattan or even Market Street, it's just another neighborhood--and, until recently, a relatively run-down and unpopulated neighborhood. Los Angeles became the prototype for the postmodern Western city--an anacephalic city, born without a fully-developed head.
The high, but relatively uniform, population density is part of this phenomenon--there isn't a definable highly populated zone surrounded by zones of lower intensity, it's mostly a mass of relatively undifferentiated moderately high density, except for the wealthier enclaves where population is lower, and the parts of downtown where people still don't live.
True, I didn't mean the high density was part of a "Los Angeles" model for urbanism, just that Los Angeles is unique in having a decentralized model but with relatively high densities, the biggest and densest of its type. Los Angeles may a high density as defined as older American cities; but it still exists. From another thread "what would your city's density be if it were the size of San Fransciso" a contigous 47 square miles of Los Angeles would contain about 900,000 people (more if one draws a blob-shaped boundary rather than than just a rectangle) most of it west of Downtown. This is just shy of Chicago; a similar area in Chicago would contain about 1.1 million but nowhere near that of New York City, which would be around 2.8 million.
Yea, I get that Downtown Los Angeles is rather unimportant, but from the 20s to the 40s it still had some importance. Some newer western cities, for example Seattle, downtown never declined as much in importance. One thing I noticed from the LA posters was how unfamiliar many were with downtown ("I visited it once or twice and saw it"), it was the sound of a tourist visiting rather than a local. This is a good read:
(mentions the decline of downtown, seems incomplete looks like it's a copy of a real book)
Thinking about it more, Chicago (how familiar are you with Chicago?) and New York City are the same type, it's just that someone much more familiar with one city than the other but not so familiar with newer western cities is likely to notice the differences rather than the similarities between the two. Both Chicago and New York City are "skyscraper cities", are the only two American metros to still have the majority of office jobs in the city center (though DC is close, perhaps if Arlington is included), and in general have a large amount of activity concentrated near the city center. The difference is Chicago's downtown is more distinct from the rest of the city, and building density and height drops very quickly though not as much to the north. For New York City, the difference between central business district and nearby neighborhoods is more blurred, the skyscrapers are mostly gone but the wall of buildings remain.
Downtown Los Angeles was already losing its importance in the 1920s--business was already shifting westward out of the old urban core, which never fully developed anyhow.
I have a copy of that Eric Avila book, it's very good, and like most histories of Los Angeles talks about the early irrelevance of downtown--Banham's Architecture of the Four Ecologies, Mike Davis' various books on LA, etcetera.
I was born just outside Chicago, and because I have a lot of family there, visit pretty regularly, and read histories of Chicago too. It's a fundamentally different kind of city--nobody is going to mistake any of their suburban office parks for the Loop!
Downtown Los Angeles was already losing its importance in the 1920s--business was already shifting westward out of the old urban core, which never fully developed anyhow.
Quote I found in an article that might interest LA residents, which looks like it's missing a city center park.
Peggy Richie, 81, and Katherine Nelson, 84, have lived in the city their entire lives and have seen the downtown morph from a place people want to be to a place people avoid. And in recent years, they have seen it morph back again.
Thanks for the Wv perspective. I love the look of some the mountain cities and towns.
WV (and rural/interior PA) is an area I'd like to visit. I'm familiar with a lot of the hilly areas of upstate & rural NY as well as in the hilly interior of New England. Curious how they compare. A friend from rural PA thought the people in rural Northern New England didn't sound "rural" because of their accent.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
