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No offense, but it's only a debate for trolls or people that may consider only 4 cities in the US to be urban because LA is much more urban over a much larger area than all of the rest. If there are any objective criteria for why LA isn't urban, I'd like to see them. The only one that I can come up with is population density within the city limits. I can see that, but within the city limits there aren't just "pockets" of urban. There is a huge contiguous area with 1 million people and about 17k people per square mile.
My personal take is that people may get a skewed take on LA because when they visit LA they spend most of their time outside the dense area and then when they visit it, they never get out their car except to walk down Hollywood Blvd. They are comparing their their experiences walking in SF and Chicago versus driving in LA. Or something. I can't explain it. I'm not from LA originally so I'm not sticking up for my hometown, but I can't explain how people can see the same thing so differently.
I suppose that's part of it--I have spent a lot of time driving in Chicago's extensive suburbs--the greater Chicagoland sprawl area is as big as Los Angeles' and less limited by geography (no inconvenient mountains to stop the sprawl!) and was built on largely the same bones. But Chicago's location (two-thirds of the way across the continent) and era of construction (founded in 1830 and a major city by the Civil War) meant a very different urban form for Chicago's older sectors--Los Angeles was still a bucolic ranch town of 6000 people when the Great Chicago Fire happened, in a city that by then had 300,000 residents!
But now, Chicago the city has 3 million residents and another 7 million in the surrounding suburbs, while Los Angeles has 4 million residents and another 8 million in its metro area. So in many ways they're pretty comparable--the OP is basing their posts largely on "feel," subjective perception, rather than actual figures or exploring the regional or historical differences that make one city different from another.
If there are any objective criteria for why LA isn't urban, I'd like to see them.
There seems to be damned little in the way of objective criteria being applied...
which is what makes it all about the context more than the content.
Quote:
The only one that I can come up with is population density within the city limits.
Well... how about starting with common denominators of what makes a City and can be applied to them all?
As an example, starting with the central business district and working out in concentric circles
from there in much the same way as cities will develop from their origins? Make sense?
Typically, that CBD will yield to a combination of old housing stock and secondary business buildings
or industrial areas and then the oldest of the suburbs... which then yield to the outer suburbs and smaller towns...
that have been annexed over the decades to make the modern City limits. Hows that?
The question remaining is where do you stop?
How far out from that CBD do you go?
And from the other end...
how many of those outlying areas which often do have urban characteristics as well...
how many should be counted alone or assessed moving back in toward the center?
In LA in particular... my experience is of 10 or maybe even 50 overlapping Venn circles.
But the only characteristic binding them together is the coincidence of all being in the same valley...
being dependent on the same water scheme and related to that (water) more than anything...
they have bound themselves into an overlarge political alliance.
But there's nothing organic binding these very disparate communities together.
Not even the Dodgers.
hth
Last edited by MrRational; 10-30-2011 at 04:31 PM..
That's just it--Los Angeles is a city defined by its relative lack of a center. Technically it has a downtown, but through much of the period of Los Angeles' ascendance, the center was pretty much irrelevant. This was explored by Reyner Banham: Amazon.com: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (9780520219243): Reyner Banham, Anthony Vidler: Books who dismissed Los Angeles' downtown, but has also been explored by the so-called LA School of Urbanism who consider Los Angeles the prototype for the post-WWII, postmodern urban type--a city without a center, disjointed from itself by merit of its decentralized transportation system and abandonment of the traditional "urban core." This school of urban theory transcends the older "Chicago School" of urban thought just as Modern and Postmodern architecture transcended the "Chicago School" of skyscraper architecture, who, lacking Greek or Roman precedent for skyscraper design, opted to make early multi-story office towers look like classical columns, with base, shaft and capital. And just as new materials and technologies freed later architects from classical forms to inspire architects like Frank Gehry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, cities too no longer had to follow classical models of the dense, important core surrounded by neighborhoods, industrial and resource areas all paying fealty to the city center. But when that technology starts to fail us, as our ability to keep up with infrastructure and energy demands starts to break down, do we return to known, traditional modes of city building, or start experimenting on some new hybrid of our own?
So perhaps Los Angeles, in the view of the LA School of Urbanism, is urban--but it is a definition of "urban" not properly answered by older, Chicago-style cities.
There seems to be damned little in the way of objective criteria being applied...
which is what makes it all about the context more than the content.
Well... how about starting with common denominators of what makes a City and can be applied to them all?
As an example, starting with the central business district and working out in concentric circles
from there in much the same way as cities will develop from their origins? Make sense?
Typically, that CBD will yield to a combination of old housing stock and secondary business buildings
or industrial areas and then the oldest of the suburbs... which then yield to the outer suburbs and smaller towns...
that have been annexed over the decades to make the modern City limits. Hows that?
The question remaining is where do you stop?
How far out from that CBD do you go?
And from the other end...
how many of those outlying areas which often do have urban characteristics as well...
how many should be counted alone or assessed moving back in toward the center?
In LA in particular... my experience is of 10 or maybe even 50 overlapping Venn circles.
But the only characteristic binding them together is the coincidence of all being in the same valley...
being dependent on the same water scheme and related to that (water) more than anything...
they have bound themselves into an overlarge political alliance.
But there's nothing organic binding these very disparate communities together.
Not even the Dodgers.
hth
The concentric circles that you describe for LA sound like villages or neighborhoods to me. So LA is made up of independent neighborhoods. How is that different from London or Paris? Come to think of it, where is Paris' central business district? Most would say that it's La Defense. Can a CBD be anymore disconnected and non-organic than La Defense? Well perhaps London's Canary Wharf might be. Maybe Paris and London aren't urban either.
Can I ask what was your experience in LA? I have a feeling that you drove from place to place when here and are comparing that experience to taking transit and walking in other cities. That's what I did here for years. Now I take transit and walk when I can and I have a much different feel for the city. I understand it a lot better. Which is not all good because I also am better acquainted with its shortcomings which could occupy a forum all it's own.
The (Venn) circles (as in Venn Diagram) that you describe for LA sound like villages to me.
That term "Villages" works for those Venn circles...
These outlying areas that were once individual towns that got annexed (as they mostly are).
Way back in this thread someone wanted to include Venice Beach and Santa Monica when discussing LA.
It still seems out there to describe or imply this conglomeration as being a cohesive whole.
...or neighborhoods to me.
But no, I don't like neighborhoods...
(been struggling to describe why -will get back to it maybe)
Can I ask what was your experience in LA?
About 35 years worth of traveling in and out; and a couple years when I lived in OC.
Not a local but more time than most non locals.
Anyway, the point is not so much what LA is (or NY or London or Paris) for that matter... but rather what scale and reference can fairly be applied when considering these overlarge cities that are statistical outliers relative to the more compact cities and their more, lets say, ordinary urban schema.
There are all manner or reasons to say LA is special.
OK. It stands almost alone among a very few.
But then comparative references shouldn't be used...
especially when it's done w/r/t cities like Sac or even SF and Chicago...
and locals shouldn't get their noses out of joint when those same differences are pointed out.
That's just it--Los Angeles is a city defined by its relative lack of a center. Technically it has a downtown, but through much of the period of Los Angeles' ascendance, the center was pretty much irrelevant. This was explored by Reyner Banham: Amazon.com: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (9780520219243): Reyner Banham, Anthony Vidler: Books who dismissed Los Angeles' downtown, but has also been explored by the so-called LA School of Urbanism who consider Los Angeles the prototype for the post-WWII, postmodern urban type--a city without a center, disjointed from itself by merit of its decentralized transportation system and abandonment of the traditional "urban core." This school of urban theory transcends the older "Chicago School" of urban thought just as Modern and Postmodern architecture transcended the "Chicago School" of skyscraper architecture, who, lacking Greek or Roman precedent for skyscraper design, opted to make early multi-story office towers look like classical columns, with base, shaft and capital. And just as new materials and technologies freed later architects from classical forms to inspire architects like Frank Gehry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, cities too no longer had to follow classical models of the dense, important core surrounded by neighborhoods, industrial and resource areas all paying fealty to the city center. But when that technology starts to fail us, as our ability to keep up with infrastructure and energy demands starts to break down, do we return to known, traditional modes of city building, or start experimenting on some new hybrid of our own?
So perhaps Los Angeles, in the view of the LA School of Urbanism, is urban--but it is a definition of "urban" not properly answered by older, Chicago-style cities.
The lack of a true center is not the main issue, in my opinion. Tokyo is an example of a city that doesn't have a true center, but it is far more urban than LA because of the streetscape.
I don't think you can say enough about streetscape, and that to me is LAs biggest issue. It has a very inconsistant streetscape, with many sections that have big setbacks, 6-8 lanes of road, and generally not a very pedestrian friendly environment. Of course there are many sections that have a good streetscape, but it's inconsistant.
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LA is a unique animal. I'm reading a book 'Los Angeles and the Automobile: the Making of the Modern City' by Scott Bottles (which I highly recommend) which traces the development of LA from being a small mission town surrounded by country ranches, to a semi-walkable small city based on the street-car and railway, to the early 20th century when it started becoming suburban. LA really DID invent suburbia, and became suburban as early as the turn of the century, at a time when all the other great metropolises such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco were highly urban and dependent on public transport. Even in the early days, however, I think LA's type of 'urbanity' was dominated by single houses, and there was more open spaces than the old streets of the Eastern city. This is because LA was tiny compared to New York, Philly, Boston in the late 19th century.
The building of the freeways just followed the development of vast housing estates that stretched on well beyond the city limits. By the 1960s most of the LA city limits were already built up. LA is the archetypal 20th century metropolis, but in contrast to other cities that developed during the time, it's centre never really attained a great degree of dominance. The metropolitan area was simply too vast and sprawling, and there were many communities competing as economic and population centres.
I think LA has become increasingly more urban in the past 20-30 years, though. Having visited LA without every getting behind the wheel of the car, I definitely noticed this. It's actually not that hard to get around the most of the main urban spots without a car. No, LA is nowhere like most metropolises with such huge populations, but it has corridors and nodes of urbanity that extent well beyond the tradition centres like Downtown or the Wilshire corridor. Century City and Studio City are like satellite downtowns, and outlying cities like Santa Monica, Pasadena feel pretty urban as far as street-life is concerned. While LA's financial district isn't that happening, Little Tokyo, Westlake, Koreatown all have a pretty 'city-like' feel in my opinion. As the metro expands I think you will see more TOS corridors and you will see Los Angeles begin to feel truly urban. At this stage it's still transitioning from a vast surbuban sprawl (still differentiated from most sprawled cities in being non-radial. It's similar to say Houston or Phoenix in this respect, not not as similar to say Atlanta or Seattle) into a more conventional type of city.
I have the Bottles book--pretty good stuff, but Los Angeles' suburbs in 1910 weren't automobile suburbs (autos were still rich folks' toys then), they were streetcar suburbs, with a streetcar/interurban network more extensive than any other in the country. They were broader and lower than eastern models for the same reasons I mentioned above: climate, geography, and architectural fashion, as well as the greater distances that could be traversed by an electric streetcar than a horse-drawn streetcar--distances that took the old nag an hour could be covered by a high-speed PE train in five minutes.
Los Angeles became the new "conventional" city: the only difference between a suburban strip mall on the outskirts of the Los Angeles metro area and one on the outskirts of Chicagoland is the direction towards downtown, and maybe they have Hardee's instead of Carl's Jr or Von's instead of Dominick's. Nobody builds new cities like Boston anymore.
As to Tokyo, that's a vastly different society dealing with vastly different economics and transportation worlds. Compared to Tokyo, even the densest American cities are practically unpopulated in terms of density.
There isn't a single "urban" form which all cities must inevitably reach. Cities exist to serve economic needs, not to follow some predestined universal pattern of urban development. Their physical forms are an expression of their economic realities, geography, and other factors--as unique as fingerprints.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg
I have the Bottles book--pretty good stuff, but Los Angeles' suburbs in 1910 weren't automobile suburbs (autos were still rich folks' toys then), they were streetcar suburbs, with a streetcar/interurban network more extensive than any other in the country. They were broader and lower than eastern models for the same reasons I mentioned above: climate, geography, and architectural fashion, as well as the greater distances that could be traversed by an electric streetcar than a horse-drawn streetcar--distances that took the old nag an hour could be covered by a high-speed PE train in five minutes.
Los Angeles became the new "conventional" city: the only difference between a suburban strip mall on the outskirts of the Los Angeles metro area and one on the outskirts of Chicagoland is the direction towards downtown, and maybe they have Hardee's instead of Carl's Jr or Von's instead of Dominick's. Nobody builds new cities like Boston anymore.
As to Tokyo, that's a vastly different society dealing with vastly different economics and transportation worlds. Compared to Tokyo, even the densest American cities are practically unpopulated in terms of density.
There isn't a single "urban" form which all cities must inevitably reach. Cities exist to serve economic needs, not to follow some predestined universal pattern of urban development. Their physical forms are an expression of their economic realities, geography, and other factors--as unique as fingerprints.
I think the trend towards development in the suburbs/suburbanisation is certainly most pronounced in American cities. Australian cities, which are very auto-centric, are still very radial in comparison to most American cities. The city centres are still pretty vibrant with some of the highest land values, but the suburban nodes are also becoming more urban. I think this trend is again returning to American cities, but they are still more suburban-centric. European cities and Asian cities tend to have strong cores but are also compact enough that the entire city and much of the surrounding metropolitan has a very urban feel. Sometimes this 'downtown' feel extends right to the city limits, with cities like Amsterdam or Singapore being examples of this. Bangkok's actual city footprint is probably that of a smallish American city, yet it has the population of Chicago.
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