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.
Conversation
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.
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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.
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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.
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My theory: all other cities evolved from disconnection to connection, from isolated neighborhoods to interdependent one’s, never quite losing their original isolated character. Here it feels like the neighborhoods and the connective tissue co-evolved.
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Meta-Point: few other cities *invite* so much theorizing attention. I figured out Seattle to my satisfaction within like 2 days, but LA I suspect could suck up a lifetime of my attention if I let it. Closest was Bombay, where I lived (in a protected campus enclave)for 4 years
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If you could construct affinity maps, I suspect you’d get a high score for Bombay-LA, in “if you like X you’ll like Y” sense. Similarities go well beyond both being balmy western-coast film industry cities. Bombay was literally a bunch of islands that were linked up.
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The surrounding voidz needed to be filled. Space allowed it to happen this way. It's the one thing that limited SF LDN NYC
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