We Built This City, We Built This City on Rock (and Greed) or Why L.A. Looks the Way It Does

All references to the band Starship aside ( I love me some baaaad 80s music!) this blog is a summary of how L.A. came to be so sprawled out.

I have been reading Mike Davis's work, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster as planning in and around the greater Los Angeles area is where I would like to focus my career after grad school. I've read good and bad things about Mr. Davis's writing and
critics have called him paranoid, a left-wing nut, etc., So I was wary to approach it with a very open-mind and not acceptable every word as gospel.

To read Ecology of Fear or City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in the City of Los Angeles, his prior work on the city of L.A. does make one wonder how sound the author's mind truly is (his, not mine, though there is always room for questioning there too) Mr. Davis has written several other works, his latest is called, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk.

Mr. Davis does come off as a bit of a conspiracy theorist/end times street prophet, but he has done a lot of research and he's firmly rooted in what he believes.

A word of warning: I read Ecology of Fear on Saturday mid-afternoon and only on Sunday night was I able to peel myself off of the floor from despair and face the rest of the week that's how devastated and depressed I was over some of the things mentioned that could have been entirely preventable! OK, it wasn't that bad, I managed to squeeze in a few episodes of the TV show Bones and do some laundry too. But the evidence against common-sense development is pretty damning.

For example, do you remember those horrible fires that burned, without abatement for days, in Malibu last summer, 08? Apparently, Malibu has a documented history of wildfires. The Chumash and Tong-va Indians would burn the bush every year in order to prevent it from getting more dry and brittle with each year, thus heightening the fire potential, but the Spanish put an end to that. (Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis, New York: Vintage Books: a division of Random House, First Vintage Books edition, August 1999, 99) But annual wildfires didn't deter greedy twentieth century developers who saw the potential for beachfront property to be sold at a premium, nevermind the fact that multi-million dollar homes would be built, literally, in fire corridors.

Now, as a future urban planner and general common-sense oriented human being, I would assume that the city would be responsible and step in saying that there is documented, long-standing evidence that says that it would be unwise to build here. But the city of L.A. has a long history of looking the other way as cold hard cash is slipped discretely into pockets or treasuries and Malibu was not the first occurrence. It's an age-old story- avarice and real estate, politics and corruption- have you heard about Illinois's governor lately!? However, L.A. really takes the cake in terms of real estate greed.

Chapter 2 of Ecology of Fear, "How Eden Lost Its Garden" is awash with examples of developers who used their political pull to slash and burn areas zoned specifically for agriculture, just so they could plop down more subdivisions. I'm not saying real estate in and of itself is bad. But L.A. in the early twentieth century was swarming with developers who were more like locusts, trying to put down houses wherever there was earth!

Early environmentalists tried to point out that rampant development would have a devastating effect on the already fragile ecology, but they didn't have the deep pockets and spheres of political influence that the developers enjoyed. A few measly environmental protection measures were set up, but rarely were they enforced. And slowly the land of orange groves and unspoiled mountain ranges became the faceless, bland facade of suburbia.

Some of the early eminent urban planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and Harlan Bartholomew saw the writing on the wall. They observed that "the things that make [Los Angeles] most attractive are the very ones that are the first to suffer from changes and deteriorate through neglect." (as cited by Davis, 62) Charles Mulford Robinson, champion of "the City Beautiful," was involved in authoring a report for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission in 1907 (Davis 63), and called for boulevards and parks, only to have his words go unheard.

And for you architecture buffs, Richard Neutra weighed in and criticized the annihilation of the Los Angeles hillsides at a symposium of architects and planners right before World War II broke out. (Davis 72) This is ironic because Neutra is now known for his private homes that are nestled in the hills of Hollywood, among other places.

But, I realized, after a handful of Riesens chocolates and many outraged sighs later, that it would be hypocritical of me to sit here and wallow and lament the current state of Los Angeles. Haven't I been advocating opportunity through hardship?! Isn't every difficulty also a challenge to do better, to rethink?

It's pointless to bemoan that which we cannot change, i.e. the past, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from past blunders and use it to shape the future.

As George Santayana observed, "Those who do not learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it." Therefore, armed with the knowledge of what really didn't work, I look forward to shaping the future with ideas that will work, for the good of all people.