http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/
What's good in the hood?! (We'll find out!)
Amy
Monday, October 8, 2012
Neighborhoods.
I love living in a city long enough to understand how it's been divvied up into neighborhoods. (I may or may not enjoy the street cred, too... hmm.) Anyway, the LA Times has had an awesome "Mapping LA" project going since 2009, and with the help of readers' input, the map is really a great way to investigate LA on the neighborhood scale. Check it out:
http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/
What's good in the hood?! (We'll find out!)
Amy
http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/
What's good in the hood?! (We'll find out!)
Amy
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Let me start off by saying that I loved several aspects of your blog post. I loved the way your vivid writing style draws the reader in and I especially loved the way you incorporated a map into your post. With that being said, I feel that there are a few suggestions I could make that would help in your future blog posts. Firstly, make sure you are actually visiting the locations that you are talking about. Secondly, the most important aspect of these blog posts is relating a Los Angeles location to a class concept. Now that we are approaching the end of the quarter, there are seemingly countless concepts to choose from that we have discussed in depth (and occasionally ad nauseum) in class. The concept that I believe is the most visible in cities that I have personal visited is the carceral enclaves of the post-metropolis. Carceral enclaves is a fancy way of saying parts of the cities are walled off to the undesirable public. There are many examples that we can see in cities in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area that embody these carceral enclaves. Physical access is one way that cities restrict access to those that they deem to be undesirable. For example, gated communities are very common in cities where people want to differentiate themselves from others they deem to be inferior. Some gated communities do not even have physical gates, but rather they rely on the symbolic nature of gated communities to keep these undesirables out. Central to the idea of restricting physical access is the concept of automobility, which is a critical aspect of the post-metropolis. Because there are still many people who rely on the public transportation system, certain cities take advantage of this fact and restricts the extent to which public transportation penetrates the city. Finally, the existence of bum proof benches is a final aspect of restricting social and physical access. Bum proof benches are benches that are made in such a way that someone cannot lay down without it being extremely uncomfortable that way “bums” cannot sleep there because they are undesirable to the public. These ways that cities restrict social and physical access are amongst the easiest to identify while visiting a location.
ReplyDeleteAnother class concept that I believe fits in the cities of Los Angeles is the concept of decentralization. The post-metropolis, or the 4th urban revolution, broke away from cities being strictly centralized like in the 3rd urban revolution. An example of how Los Angeles is decentralized is the way that there are patches of mini-centralization, such as the centralized locations of car dealerships. In a centralized city, like Chicago and Manchester, there would not be these patches, but rather everything from manufacturing centers to family owned business would be found in the middle or the center of the city.
Finally, a class concept that is easily seen is the absence of factories and manufacturing centers in modern cities such as Los Angeles, which is indicative of the rise in the information economy.
Hopefully these suggestions make you future blog posts easier. Happy Blogging!