Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 4

            This week I decided to comment on another classmate’s blog post. The blog post itself detailed the student’s drive from UCLA to downtown LA amidst the typical downtown LA traffic in order to spend time with his cousin. The blog post details the trip itself, as well as the area surrounding his cousin’s apartment, specifically the LA live area. Here is the comment left on his blog:

            I really enjoyed reading your blog seeing as, as a Los Angeles area native, I am all too familiar with the frustrating monotony of LA traffic. I especially liked your use of metaphors and colorful language to illustrate this concept, as well as the identification of the freeways you took, which allows LA residents to truly empathize with your situation. As for your observations around the LA Live area, I again found your colorful descriptions of how the area “becomes alive during the night” to be both illustrative and indicative of the area for those who have never explored it and, in a sense, nostalgic for those that grew up amongst it.

            As far as the blog’s relationship to themes and ideas covered in class and in the readings, I think you did a great job relating the LA Live portion of your trip to class concepts, but I would have liked to see you analyze how your trip down the 10 and 405 freeways embodied, or failed to embody, other class-related ideas. Specifically, while I thought it was clever that you related the sense of anonymity and, as you put it, “dog eat dog” mentality you saw in the LA Live area to the post-metropolis theme of individualism that we covered in class, I would have liked to see you incorporate other ideas of the post-metropolis into the freeway portion of your trip. For example, considering how Los Angeles is a proverbial poster child of the post-metropolis, I find the sheer fact that such horrendous traffic exists in Los Angeles rather contradictory. Seeing as the post-metropolis is characterized by several specialized hubs that are all connected by automobile, it is not surprising that an area as dense as the Los Angeles Metropolitan area would have a few congested freeways. The interesting aspect of this gridlock is that it seems to revolve around a common center, downtown LA, a concept represented very well in your blog. Seeing as the post-metropolis is characterized primarily by a secular trend of decentralization, it is very curious that Los Angeles would display such blatant centralization as it pertains to traffic trends. One final point, I feel that your blog would benefit by comparing the individualism you saw at LA Live with Robert E Park’s quote that, “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.”

            Overall, I really enjoyed your blog and I hope these few suggestions both inspire and assist in writing your future blog posts.

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 3

     Inspired by the lecture detailing the drastic change between the third and fourth urban revolutions, I decided to drive around Chino and Chino Hills, two small, at least originally, agricultural cities on the periphery of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. I chose this location because I felt that it embodied the relatively recent emergence of the post-metropolis city. Where cities founded during the third urban revolution were heavily centralized and had a common and uniform level of organization, these post-metropolis cities were characterized by decentralization, Post-Fordism and, most importantly in the context of this blog, fragmented inequality. Early urbanized metropolises, such as Chicago and Manchester, were centered around manufacturing centers that arose from an earlier division of labor. These metropolises were also rigidly organized by class, a theme that was seen universally throughout each individual city. This concept was represented in the Chicago School Model, a model that detailed the socio-economic layout of 1920’s Chicago. According to the Chicago School Model, the city was centered around a manufacturing center which was immediately surrounded by the slums that this manufacturing center produced. These slums, which housed the poorest individuals in the city were poorly maintained and unsanitary. Beyond the slums, were the modest homes of the working class, who tended to live closer to the city center where they worked. Finally, beyond the homes of the working class were the suburban homes of the upper class, who lived on the cities periphery far from the poor conditions in the city’s center. While this model holds true for many cities across the US, it is neither true of Los Angeles, nor any city within the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, including Chino and Chino Hills. Los Angeles and countless other contemporary cities instead reflect the idea of the post-metropolis. The post-metropolis is characterized by a shift toward decentralization fueled by a shift from public transportation networks to individualistic automobility. Rather than a large center controlling the periphery in a predictable and uniform way, the post-metropolis is defined by multiple differentiated centers that are united by automobiles. These differentiated centers can range from industrial regions to theme parks to, in the case of Chino and Chino Hills, shopping centers.

     Anyways, on to the trip itself, I had been to Chino and Chino Hills a few times before, but had never really explored the area. Of course, I started with the places I knew, the shopping centers off of highway 71 at Grand/Edison, the areas around Chino, Chino Hills and Ayala High Schools and a developing shopping center off highway 60 on the periphery of Chino Hills. In addition, I explored the surrounding area of each destination and made a point to visit a variety of residential and commercial areas within each municipality.

     Let me start with Chino, an agricultural city that has long been a major producer of California milk. The most striking observation I made while driving around Chino was how agriculturally based it was, a rarity in the Los Angeles area. The first thing I noticed was the sights, sounds and smells of what Chino was known for, cows. After further exploration, I found that Chino is more than just agriculture, as it also boasts a small airport, museums, numerous parks a prison and several large manufacturing centers. 

Turning to the residential aspect, the streets were grid-like, the communities seemed tightly knit and socio-economically consistent and the schools seemed well funded and safe. Although Chino has an atypical economic foundation when compared to other cities in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, its residents, residential life and residential layout are anything but atypical.

  On to Chino Hills, a once agriculturally based community and economy that was hardly distinguishable from Chino that has become a major shopping hub of suburban Los Angeles. The large open fields and manufacturing centers that once characterized the city have nearly all been replaced by shopping centers, movie theaters and restaurants.

Residentially, the layout of the more modern housing development is highly atypical, consisting of long, winding roads in lieu of the previous grid-like pattern, the schools at least appear to be better funded than the schools in the Chino school district and there is a greater discrepancy in the quality of housing, where the older houses match the quality of the houses seen in Chino, the more contemporary developments are characterized by larger and more expensive housing.

     This comparison between Chino and Chino Hills highlights the idea of the post-metropolis, as two once similar municipalities have differentiated economically, which has consequently led to a class and cultural differentiation. While it is clear that the two cities chose to define themselves by their different specializations, it is the result of these choices that most pertains to the ideas in this blog. Somewhat obviously, Chino Hills, which chose to characterize itself around the emerging concept of consumerism, creating numerous shopping centers along every exit of highway 71, became the more affluent town, an idea reflected in their seemingly superior residential and school systems. While this economic discrepancy between the two cities certainly produced class differences, where the more affluent move into the area with better housing and school systems, it also seemed, at least to me, to produce a sense of ethnic difference, which does not follow logically from an economic discrepancy between two cities. The people I met or saw in Chino were primarily ethnic minorities, primarily Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, while the residents of Chino Hills were primarily Caucasian. Furthermore, the few shopping centers in Chino consisted of primarily low-end stores and nearly every gas station had signs acknowledging that they took EBT payments, while Chino Hills had no such signs on their gas station windows and had more high-end stores, typically frequented by affluent Caucasian customers.

While it is not clear if this differentiation of economic principles caused this alleged ethnic difference or if it is merely an effect of correlation or limited sample size, it is clear that the post-metropolis trend of automobility has produced a profound sense of individuality which has further strengthened Robert Park’s idea that the city is composed of little worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate. 

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 2

   With only one concept to base my first blog post on, Emile Durkheim’s concept of the division of labor, I paid a visit to the suburban city of Walnut, specifically, Mt. San Antonio College, a Los Angeles county community college nestled on the border of Walnut, West Covina and Pomona. On the macro level, the city of Walnut and its surrounding area appear to be sharply divided by class, with the more affluent living atop a hill that overlooks much of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. On the micro level, as one of the largest community colleges in the state, Mt. San Antonio College boasts an incredibly diverse and eclectic student body, representing a wide array of social inequalities, ranging from religious and cultural to political and gender differences. However, much like its surroundings, the most striking social inequality that Mt. San Antonio College boasts is class differences in the form of its students’ pre-major program. Like the majority of class differences, the inequalities reflected in Walnut and Mt. San Antonio College stem from the concept of job specialization, or, according to Durkheim, division of labor. Durkheim believed that a job differentiation was functional by nature, believing that it occurs in response to the problems that arise when cities become more materially and morally dense. More importantly to the context of this blog, however, Durkheim believed that when people become so differentiated and specialized that they could no longer be tied together by a common culture, cultural fragmentation and, thus, social difference arises.

While I was able to identify this idea in the city Walnut, as the majority of people who live on the hill are doctors or high-paid executives, it was far easier to spot on a college campus. Possibly because community college students must decide on a major quickly, in order to transfer to a 4-year college, the majority of students were one of 3 pre-majors: business economics, mathematics, and a science based major within the pre-med umbrella. The only commonality between these majors is that they eventually lead to higher paying careers and at least a perceived sense of superiority, a theory that was confirmed when I spoke to the students that were on campus. Furthermore, it was also plain to see that Mt. San Antonio College was allocating a significant amount of their budget toward improving certain departments over others. While this was clearly visible in that the mathematics, science and business economics departments were the only departments that had no classes cut from their curriculum, it was made most evident by the fact that the three departments were housed in the newest and most expensive buildings, while other departments, such as the art history department, conducted their classes from portable classrooms.

It is clear that both Walnut and Mt. San Antonio College epitomize how Durkheim’s concept of division of labor can rapidly transcend its original functionality, instead morphing into a dysfunctional entity characterized by elitism and class inequality. It is these class differences that have emerged from job specification that serve to further classify, define and alienate groups within the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, supporting Robert E Park’s view that the city is made up of little worlds that touch, but never interpenetrate.

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 1

While growing up in a small, relatively affluent town in the shadow of Los Angeles had its advantages: a low crime rate, a top-ranked education system and a generally close-knit community; it is perhaps its greatest drawback that best characterized it. The town, divided by a small foothill and the 210 freeway, was most notoriously known for a misguided perception of geographically based superiority that bisected the town into north and south sides. While growing up on the southern, outcast side for the first 12 years of my life, I never paid much attention to the stigma imposed upon me as a result of living below the freeway. It was not until moving to the northern, more privileged, side that I realized just how little the north thought of the south. With no real explanation of this faulty mindset’s origin, I was left to wonder how a freeway and a small hill made such a monumental difference in the reputation of its citizens. This blog aims to shed light upon, explain, and perhaps even answer these types of questions. In addition to my own personal inquiries such as the one stated above, my desire to explore these concepts and ideas is further fueled by my desire to one day work in the quasi-field of public interest law, making these matters of social inequality and perceived supremacy all the more relevant to my life. I believe that it is through the formation of complex, dense and culturally diverse cities that social difference is born and I have found, from my own personal experiences, that this social inequality is both represented in and perpetuated by the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. Over the next 10 weeks I will be exploring both new and familiar parts of Los Angeles with an eye toward either supporting or debunking this belief. This brings me to the “thesis” of my blog, the statement that will be hidden in the shadows of each post made, rarely deliberately discussed, but always represented. Robert E. Park once said, “[that] The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.” Although there will inevitably be unique circumstances that call into question the accuracy of his belief, I believe adamantly that Robert E. Park’s statement best characterizes the contemporary city. Although I will discuss numerous aspects, themes and theories that relate to the idea of social difference, it is this viewpoint that will unite and synthesize all of the observations made, ideas analyzed and information presented.