Los Angeles is the textbook city for the 21st century, says urban geographer Michael Dear Today’s crop of urban analysts acknowledges a debt to the literary critics. Especially to the people who thought up structuralism. For contemporary city planners, the old metaphors don’t apply any more. No longer can cities be described as living organisms. According to geographer Michael Dear, it would be more apt to describe a city as a text. It is something one can read and interpret. Dear was one of the organizers of a conference, held at USC in November, on developmental trends in Los Angeles. A professor of geography as well as urban and regional planning, he worked for a time as a city planner in London. Pressed for a literary metaphor for Los Angeles, he suggests that “Gormenghast” would do quite nicely. Gormenghast is the name of a mythical castle which figures in a tormented trilogy of Gothic novels by British writer Mervyn Peake. “It is a huge structure,” says Dear, “which would seem, at first glance, to be complex and impenetrable. But to those who know its workings, it provides a way to rewards and satisfaction.” It has also transformed itself, he says, into the paradigm of city growth for the rest of this century and the formative years of the next. “Our thesis is simply this,” he told his colleagues at the conference: “In its absolute size, its huge scale of decentralization, its polycentrism, LA is the archetype for future urban development. “It is, in fact, the capital of the 21st century.” Dear acknowledges that this may well come as a shock to those who have delighted, over the years, in perpetuating a somewhat less flattering image of Los Angeles. Most Americans are familiar with the standard LA cliches: That the city is the mecca for the nation’s “fruits and nuts,” a group of suburbs in search of a city, a fantasy landscape distinguished by a number of classic ecologies—the Beaches, the Hills and, of course, the Freeways (otherwise known as “Autopia”’). But according to Dear, the city has largely replaced Chicago—since the 1930s the accepted prototype for metropolitan development—as the world’s premier post-modern city. The Chicago model proved potent and enduring for as long as it did because it best exemplified the growth of a city around a ‘downtown’ core of urban socio-economic activity. Throughout the Third World, however, a different kind of city was taking root—a large, sprawling entity with several centers of activity. But neither Sao Paulo in Brazil nor Mexico City succeeded in taking the wind out of Chicago's sails because they simply didn’t work well enough as major international urban centers. Los Angeles, however, is a different story. While the world was dismissing the city as an urban aberration, it has gone quietly about its business supplanting the Chicago model as the shape of cities to come. It has done so, Dear says, “by imposing a First World economic and financial system on a Third World urban structure.” Urban analysts are intrigued by a number of developments here, notably by an ongoing process of large-scale economic restructuring. Many key industries—the automotive being a good example—have either closed down or moved out to the suburbs or beyond. But while deindustrialization has been pronounced, Los Angeles has concurrently reindustrialized along different lines entirely. “It’s estimated that at least half of the local economy is tied up now with the defense industries,” says Dear. Los Angeles has also undergone massive geographical restructuring. The conventional downtown area, which had apparently lost out to the city’s Drang nach Osten, has since been revitalized. Moreover, says Dear, this in-town revitalization has been accompanied by the birth of massive suburban tracts, perhaps best epitomized in Orange County. Meanwhile, Los Angeles has taken on the ambiance of an international city. It is playing an increasingly significant role in the world economy, and especially in the booming Pacific Rim. And it has made considerable gains in attracting major in- While the world was dismissing Los Angeles as an urban aberration, it has gone quietly y about its business supplanting the Chicago model as the shape of cities to come. ternational capital investment. The city has also attracted significant waves of immigration, from the east and south, that have provided it with a pronounced ethnic flavor. On the debit side, says Dear, LA is not an ideal place to live. And it won't get a lot better in the short or middle term without strenuous effort. For example: © The city is overcrowded, and the poor and lower-income segments of the population will continue to find themselves pressed for affordable living space. O The glut of automobiles on a transportation network ill-equipped to accommodate it may eventually lead to the gridlock urban planners have been warning about for so long. O The quality of air will deteriorate yet further. Dear notes that studies are now indicating that the physiological development of children in Los Angeles has already been adversely affected by certain kinds of air pollution (see box). Acid fog and rain, especially in the beach communities, will persist, while Pasadena, Glendale and the eastern communities continue to face daunting breathing hazards. O Because of its size, LA will continue to be plagued by massive social problems such as homelessness and drug abuse. Of course these are national in scale, but Dear believes that they are intensified in LA because the city is so large. “These factors are going to make LA seem more and more like an overcrowded Third World city with the superficial gloss of an advanced world city, in terms of its economic and financial activities,” he says. But Dear insists that he is not trying to portray LAas a nascent Mexico City. “The standard of living here is far superior, on the average.” In fact, the city’s decentralized, sprawling structure makes it an ideal candidate for survival well into the next century. “It works as well as it does,” says Dear, “‘because its nodes of activity are so spread out. Had LA been founded around a single downtown core, it would have stopped long age.” Consequently, LA has established an image not only as an exciting place to live, but as an exciting city to study as well. Perhaps because it has made a convincing case for itself as an important postmodern center, it has become attractive to academics caught up in the thrall of post-modern approaches to the social sciences. “We've gone out in the past and counted the new buildings and cars and have analyzed the city’s economic and social structure,”’ explains Dear. “But we are now doing it with a more cultured and educated eye, a new awareness, both of the city and of what we are trying to achieve.” It’s a matter, he says, of reading between the lines. Sheldon Teitelbaum