The LA Times has a really interesting piece on their website about the continued division of Los Angeles into smaller and smaller neighborhoods. The feeling is that with the seemingly endless sprawl, these small neighborhoods give people a sense of identity and location into the larger whole of the city. Additionally the neighborhood divisions, from a purely administrative standpoint, allow for greater accuracy when describing where something is happening or where something is at. How many times have you thought "So is this in Silver Lake or Echo Park?"
However the twist is that these invisible demarcations function so successfully to divide the city, that the whole of Los Angeles is often forgotten. By establishing so specifically a place, that sense of pride or identity of being part of Los Angeles as a whole is often overshadowed by being part of Eagle Rock or Mid-Wilshire. The article points to how this differs from New Yorkers, who regardless of being Upper East Side or SoHo still identify with the whole rather than just the part.
What is most interesting to me is how the boundaries, which are usually just an arbitrary street, become points of contention. The interactive map allows you to click on a specific neighborhood, see the related census data (schools, education, etc.) but also has reader comments, many of which are complaints about where the boundaries for that neighborhood start and stop.
The whole study, which will be part of a continually evolution on the LA Times website, really raises some interesting issues about Los Angeles, and really many cities (Phoenix...Denver) that may have outgrown a collective identity.
That is a really interesting project, you're right. And you point out one of the most interesting apsects, in the critical comments on how neighborhods are defined: who sets the boundaries?
Mapping is inherently subjective, and often ideological.
I'm really intrigued by this sentence from the map description-
"As communities gain in size or importance, or diminish, we’ll reflect those changes in these maps."
It's interesting to think if a community could rally together to change the map boundary, perhaps even overnight. Would Google add a "neighborhood" option to Google Maps that would redraw boundaries in real time the way it monitors traffic?
Right. I don’t think the map of Los Angeles can be viewed in a linear way, with regards to planar scale physical division or hierarchical scale social division. Some cities have an obvious cultural and spatial division between north/south or east/west neighborhoods. I suppose it often comes from geography, i.e. coastal versus inland, but here that’s not true. There are likely just as many wealthy people in Venice as there are in Silver Lake, and just as many poor. Skid Row is only a few miles from Bunker Hill. And places like New York have a wild amalgamation of people in proximity too, so why is their identity supposedly not as segmented as ours?
It seems to me a critical difference between NY and LA is the fact that the car shaped this town - not only contributing to sprawl, but we're a car-encapsulated crowd. LA's streets are NY's sidewalks which lend more immediacy and frequency to human interaction. New Yorker's share subways and cabs and move through their days in many more shared and overlapping ways than those in LA. The dependency on the car makes LA a much more individually insular experience.
Actually, it was the elaborate and far-reaching streetcar and inter-urban rail system that shaped much of this city's structure in the decades between about 1900 and 1920, before automobility had caught on.
Re: collective identity or lack thereof in a city.
There was an interestingpost on Landscape+Urbanism blog the other day. In it he discussed a recent proposal that has been floated for Detroit (but which could be applied to other shrinking ciites). The idea involves de-centralizing the Metro area of Detroit from an unified urban form of (depopoulated) metropolis and instead having multiple (smaller in population) urban villages connected via parklands, transportation networks etc..
The proposed is thought provoking and illustrative of the concept which could be applied to shrinking ciities in general.
This concept also ties in nicely with a recent plan (to bulldozed large areas of up to 50 US cities) proposed by the Obama administration modeled on Flint Mi. approach to dealing with declining population.
Mapping LA
The LA Times has a really interesting piece on their website about the continued division of Los Angeles into smaller and smaller neighborhoods. The feeling is that with the seemingly endless sprawl, these small neighborhoods give people a sense of identity and location into the larger whole of the city. Additionally the neighborhood divisions, from a purely administrative standpoint, allow for greater accuracy when describing where something is happening or where something is at. How many times have you thought "So is this in Silver Lake or Echo Park?"
However the twist is that these invisible demarcations function so successfully to divide the city, that the whole of Los Angeles is often forgotten. By establishing so specifically a place, that sense of pride or identity of being part of Los Angeles as a whole is often overshadowed by being part of Eagle Rock or Mid-Wilshire. The article points to how this differs from New Yorkers, who regardless of being Upper East Side or SoHo still identify with the whole rather than just the part.
What is most interesting to me is how the boundaries, which are usually just an arbitrary street, become points of contention. The interactive map allows you to click on a specific neighborhood, see the related census data (schools, education, etc.) but also has reader comments, many of which are complaints about where the boundaries for that neighborhood start and stop.
The whole study, which will be part of a continually evolution on the LA Times website, really raises some interesting issues about Los Angeles, and really many cities (Phoenix...Denver) that may have outgrown a collective identity.
boyle heights represent
That is a really interesting project, you're right. And you point out one of the most interesting apsects, in the critical comments on how neighborhods are defined: who sets the boundaries?
Mapping is inherently subjective, and often ideological.
great maps.
but why are maps always planometric?
I'm really intrigued by this sentence from the map description-
"As communities gain in size or importance, or diminish, we’ll reflect those changes in these maps."
It's interesting to think if a community could rally together to change the map boundary, perhaps even overnight. Would Google add a "neighborhood" option to Google Maps that would redraw boundaries in real time the way it monitors traffic?
Right. I don’t think the map of Los Angeles can be viewed in a linear way, with regards to planar scale physical division or hierarchical scale social division. Some cities have an obvious cultural and spatial division between north/south or east/west neighborhoods. I suppose it often comes from geography, i.e. coastal versus inland, but here that’s not true. There are likely just as many wealthy people in Venice as there are in Silver Lake, and just as many poor. Skid Row is only a few miles from Bunker Hill. And places like New York have a wild amalgamation of people in proximity too, so why is their identity supposedly not as segmented as ours?
It seems to me a critical difference between NY and LA is the fact that the car shaped this town - not only contributing to sprawl, but we're a car-encapsulated crowd. LA's streets are NY's sidewalks which lend more immediacy and frequency to human interaction. New Yorker's share subways and cabs and move through their days in many more shared and overlapping ways than those in LA. The dependency on the car makes LA a much more individually insular experience.
Actually, it was the elaborate and far-reaching streetcar and inter-urban rail system that shaped much of this city's structure in the decades between about 1900 and 1920, before automobility had caught on.
Re: collective identity or lack thereof in a city.
There was an interestingpost on Landscape+Urbanism blog the other day. In it he discussed a recent proposal that has been floated for Detroit (but which could be applied to other shrinking ciites). The idea involves de-centralizing the Metro area of Detroit from an unified urban form of (depopoulated) metropolis and instead having multiple (smaller in population) urban villages connected via parklands, transportation networks etc..
The proposed is thought provoking and illustrative of the concept which could be applied to shrinking ciities in general.
This concept also ties in nicely with a recent plan (to bulldozed large areas of up to 50 US cities) proposed by the Obama administration modeled on Flint Mi. approach to dealing with declining population.
^ That's a beautiful graphic representation of the LA neighborhoods. I'd love to get my hands on a print.
They're from Ork Posters. I've got the Seattle one, LA's next.
Holy crap, rationalist! You have single-handedly supplied me with birthday presents to numerous of my friends. Job well done.
.._. .._ _._. _._ ...the FCC will hunt you down for naming yourself has such
this is great
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