Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 7

     For this week’s blog, I decided to explore SimplyMap.com, a UCLA website that allows students to manipulate census collected variables and map them out spatially across the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. After what seemed like hours of mindless and unsystematic manipulations, I finally found a variable, or in this case, a relationship between variables, that both interested me and directly related to class concepts.

     For this week’s blog, I decided to use SimplyMap to explore whether Frederick Engels’ description of a socially and economically stratified Manchester was in any way present in Los Angeles. Specifically, I wanted to see if the presence of large manufacturing centers significantly affected the quality of life in the immediately surrounding area. While it is obvious that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area does not accurately reflect the type of Concentric Ring Model that Engels based his description of Manchester off of, the fact remains that if the presence of manufacturing centers had a negative affect on the surrounding residential area, it should be clearly visible across all of Los Angeles’ scattered manufacturing hubs. In order to test this hypothesis, I compared the spatial distribution of two census gathered variables: quality of life and the amount of manufacturing sites within an area.

The first thing you notice when comparing the two maps is the nearly uniform negative correlation between them, made evident by the fact that as the amount of manufacturing sites in an area increases, the quality of life decreases. While this is not a perfectly static trend, the overall relationship of quality of life and manufacturing capacity in each city is enough to reject the hypothesis that the relationship is purely coincidental. While I wanted to visit an area with a low quality of life that appears to be dictated by the presence of manufacturing, I realized that I would not have any means of comparison. In essence, knowing ahead of time that the quality of life was lower than other areas would serve to bias my view of the area. In order to counterbalance this effect, I decided to compare an area characterized by high manufacturing and low quality of life, in my case, the Watts and Inglewood areas, and an area characterized by a high quality of life and minimal manufacturing, in this case the Pasadena area. Furthermore, my familiarity with the Pasadena area allowed me to visit areas that eliminate other socio-economical variables. That is, I visited the poorer areas of Pasadena in order to form a more direct comparison that eliminates as many confounding areas as possible. This way, I could determine whether or not a higher quality of life was a direct of result increased manufacturing hubs or other variables.

     First I visited the Inglewood and Watts areas, I started in the Inglewood area, taking the 405 to Florence, turning down Crenshaw and east on Manchester, which I found rather fitting, and down Compton into the Watts areas. Needless to say, since it was my first time in the area I had to see the Watts towers, which were actually much smaller than I imagined, but nevertheless incredibly interesting. Rambling tangents aside, I then visited the Pasadena area, exploring the Old Town and Paseo areas around Colorado and the more residential areas around Lake, Allen and Sierra Madre. Rather than describing each area individually, I will instead simply provide a comparison between the regions. Needless to say, the Pasadena area was much nicer, aesthetically and psychologically; that is, it was cleaner and felt much safer. Specifically, the Inglewood and Watts areas seemed to have a higher population of what David Sibley would deem the “uncivilized other,” such as the homeless. Furthermore, there were far more people walking around in Pasadena than in the Inglewood and Watts areas. 

While it can be argued that this was simply a result of more commercial shopping areas, the same trend was seen in the residential areas as well. The Pasadena streets were kept far cleaner and had far more stoplights, while the Inglewood area was characterized more by stop signs. Whether that is relevant is a separate discussion, I am merely making the observation. One final comparison that reflected the differing quality of life was the presence of prison like bars surrounding the properties and on the windows in the Watts and Inglewood areas. Such bars were completely absent even in the most impoverished areas of Pasadena. Confounding variables accounted for, the lower of quality of life is embodied by a perceived lack of safety, above all other differences.

     Now that we have identified an obvious difference in quality of life seemingly independent of income, racial distribution and other variables, we must now see if this difference is a direct result of the presence of manufacturing seen in Engels’ description of Manchester. While the areas are so close in proximity, it is impossible to conclude that the areas are differentially affected by pollution or other such variables. What we can hypothesize, however, is that the allocation of funding may be playing a role in the difference in quality of life. With manufacturing centers and the coinciding, potentially overbearing health regulations sucking funding from the educational system and public safety and health initiatives, crime rates are likely to increase, which seems to be the major predictor of quality of life when socio-economic statuses are held in check.

      While the relationship is pure correlation, there does appear to be a direct relationship of manufacturing and a lower quality of life despite the fact that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area reflects a post-metropolis layout, while Engels’ Manchester reflects a metropolitan, Concentric Ring layout.