Los Angeles has infamously been known for its urban sprawl. A recently released map makes it look like LA could easily swallow several major US cities inside its bloated city limits belly. See the map below and follow the subsequent discussion on reddit.com.
Directly related: the exhibition Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City tries to tackle the homegrown problem, envision ways that could help Los Angeles lose some of the body fat and prepare for a brighter future. Rethink LA is on display for one more week, until September 4, at the A+D Museum, 6032 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles.
18 Comments
They just ripped off this map of Detroit, but goodness, L.A. is big!
This is a map of LA county not the city of LA. And there is a city of LA, with a downtown area that has skyscrapers and people commute to it. Which is not to miss the point that LA is a sprawled out decentralized area with all the pros and cons of that. This map it think is more interesting as an image of civic pride, a depiction of LA as bigger and badder than other cities, which I find amusing but not super informative (see reddit). I think LA county would fit inside the greater SF Bay Area - so there!
hey rendodge, welcome to archinect!
that heavy blueish line (marked LOS ANGELES BOUNDARY) is technically the city of l.a. - so there!
and the 405 going through 'pittsburgh' - that's actually the 110 (where carpool lanes were idiotically taken over by the guberm'nt and turned into toll lanes :angry: )
Yes, this is LA City inside the blue boundary, around 470 square miles. (Versions of this map have been floating around since the 1920s.) LA County is about 10x that size, holding almost ninety municipalities.
When Richard Neutra and his CIAM colleagues compared dozens of same-scale city maps in 1933, the many panels needed for the LA version “produced a monstrosity of oversize."
Also: the amount of area inside a municipality's boundary in and of itself is not sprawl or a development pattern, naive comments about a "bloated city limits belly" aside. (You could carve it up into ten smaller jurisdictions and still have the same overall physical form.)
The big problem with LA's big area has to do with governance, or adequate governability. There are 35 separate planning areas, for example. The number of neighborhood councils is pushing a hundred, and still counting. Every couple of decades, part of the city talks about seceding. About ten years ago the (San Fernando) Valley attempted this (again), but the measure failed.
Both the City of Los Angeles (compared to other cities) and the County of Los Angeles are huge by land mass standards, although comparing metro areas is a challenge. The map above is indeed the City of Los Angeles, not the county, although the cities that fit within the map have varying degrees of sprawl and land use patterns. Obviously, leaving out the other New York boroughs is a bit of a distortion when comparing the tiny Manhattan to the City of LA, and St. Louis city has had a restricted boundary for over 150 years, allowing for a much larger metropolitan area than the core city, not unlike the Washington, D.C. area, vastly larger than the relatively tiny District of Columbia.
With respect to comparing the map to the Bay Area, it all depends on what is included. The nine county Bay Area, at 6,900 square miles is certainly larger than the 469 miles of the City of LA or the 4,000 square mile County of LA. But that is comparing one county to nine. If you include the counties in the larger LA region (LA, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, Ventura, and Imperial counties), you have a region of 38,000 square miles, much larger than the Bay Area. Land use patterns vary, but LA is big.
Long Beach is not even included. And yes they are comparing LA CITY LIMT NOT COUNTY. add parts of Ventura county and orange. Lots of traffic!!!!!
The selection of Boston on the east side makes a profound point about migrant culture and world leadership. I enjoy comparison of top American cities to one of the world's best megalopolis cities.
Manhattan is not a city, it is a borough.
At least it doesn't call it New York...
Newark or Miami could easily have been squeezed into the Westchester/ LAX neighborhood.
Newark NJ fits inside Westchester, LA
They forgot to include Gallup, NM
They did not include Oklahoma City in this overlay!!! Haha! While OKC is not a large population metro area (about 1.5 million), the city limits are crazy huge out into the hinterland....620 square miles!!!!! So.....for grins LA "city" can fit inside OKC "city" limits, with room to spare. :-))))))
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