QC

LA thoughts, Day 5. Damn it’s been 5 days already? So the idea I’ve heard from multiple people is that LA is not a single city or mega city but a collection of small cities connected by highways/transit. I don’t think this is quite right. It’s like a dozen partial cities.

It’s not a bunch of relatively self-sufficient little cities like say dogs in a pack, but neither is it a tightly interdependent entity like organs in a body. It’s something like a bunch of mutual symbiotic, like lichens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen 

The result of this is that whatever function a particularneighborhood serves, it serves it for the whole of LA. Skid row is overwhelming compared to the patches of homeless encampments in Seattle because catchment area is the whole damn county. The malls are super-metro sized.

I get a sense of being overwhelmed everywhere compared to other big cities. Like everything is just too big for its neighborhood. I did not get this sense in London say, which is also in a sense a bunch of villages connected by the Tube.