Beyond the Edge

What does a “real” city look like? Most Angelenos, if asked, would draw something like the Manhattan or San Francisco skyline--dense high rises at the center, less dense and less high rise at the edges. Our own city, Los Angeles, looks like this only if we squint--and ignore lots of contrary evidence. It’s not dense enough downtown; in fact, it has too many downtowns, and the suburbs are as filled with condos and townhouses as with the expected single-family homes on large lots. Moreover, a freeway-based view of spread-out Los Angeles gives an impression that one is never “in” town, but always on the “edge” of town. Edge after edge stretches for more than 60 miles, stopped only by ocean and mountain. Actual “traditional” downtowns are so rare that versions of them qualify as tourist attractions--Old Town Pasadena, the Third Street Promenade and CityWalk. None of these are in the city of Los Angeles.

The conclusion: Something is wrong with L.A.

The popular idea for what comprises a perfect city can be linked to the influential midcentury writings of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford. Echoes of their work continue to shape our image of what cities should be. Jacobs and Mumford often disagreed, but together they persuaded a whole generation of Americans that a “real” city was a mix of Greenwich Village and medieval walled cities. Such cities--dense, preferably walled, no cars, with people mixing on the streets--provided a locus of positive urban values. Any other kind of city was virtually immoral. This other kind of city was, in fact, the cause of social problems--alienation, community disintegration, deadening conformity, social and economic injustice. It is still difficult to read these authors, or an inheritor of their tradition, such as Richard Sennett, without feeling guilty about driving a car or shopping in a mall. These feelings also generate the idea that Los Angeles, just by existing, is wrong.

But this image of a “real” city needs correcting.

Many urbanists have been saying this for years. They know urban forms have been permuting and shifting since the 18th century. Historically, Los Angeles is not wrong--just typical and slightly ahead of the curve.

Los Angeles is a collection of “edge cities.” Edge cities include commercial as well as residential and industrial areas. They are complete cities in contrast to the classic suburb, which was primarily residential.

Suburbanization--where people live in residential communities but commute to work in a larger city--began in the 1850s, when better-off white-collar workers took street railways into the city, as shown in the work of historian Kenneth T. Jackson. The rise of “streetcar suburbs” (a phrase invented by Sam Bass Warner) at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries added a new twist: detached single-family homes more distant from work sites than had been possible in “walking cities”--where most people go by foot. This new transit was costly, however. As a result, street railways and subways served the middle class. The working class and poor couldn’t afford the fares, so they walked. Similarly, the poor today cannot afford the “edge city”--which requires a car.

“Edge cities” (a concept from Joel Garreau), on the other hand, are self-contained cities located adjacent to more traditional cities--with high-rise downtowns, some dense apartment dwellings and streetcar suburbs. A few edge cities emerged near large cities by the late 19th century. They were usually based on heavy industry--Homestead outside of Pittsburgh; Pullman, near Chicago, and, in the early 20th century, Orange County’s oil-based cities.

Southern California’s centerless edge cities are the most recent manifestation, but there are twists--shopping malls, high-rise office parks, tract housing and apartment clusters, all based on automobile transportation. These recent forms seem anti-urban because they didn’t look like their 19th-century predecessors. These previous versions had small downtowns with two- or three-story shopping blocks, nearby apartment buildings, perhaps some smaller commercial shopping strips--and seemed just as new to the late 19th century.

Los Angeles, growing in the era of the streetcar suburb, used the then-current technology to allow suburban growth--around USC, for example. At the same time, the street railway allowed nearby “edge cities”--from Pasadena to Long Beach--to interconnect. There were no spatial barriers, such as the bays in San Francisco, to force artificial compactness. Instead, people could vote with their feet to live in smaller, less congested urban units.

Across the United States for the past 20 years, older cities have been sprouting edge cities. But these new phenomena have been the normal mode of life in Los Angeles for many decades. In the 1920s, the Los Angeles area had other cities besides the city of Los Angeles, notably Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale. Pasadena, for example, with a 1920 population of about 45,000, was similar in size to Charlotte, N.C., the largest city in that state. Even Glendale, only about 13,000, was not much smaller than Albuquerque, at 15,000. And Glendale would expand 460% in the next decade. But the point here is not the explosive population growth, it is the early decentering--the confounding of traditional expectations of city life by this region’s apparently chaotic failure to cluster. From the 1920s on, Angelenos took advantage of transportation and terrain, building many interconnected small cities.

This spread of Los Angeles was initially seen as a solution to a grave urban problem: congestion. We have forgotten about this problem precisely because we have solved it. But in 1920, any solution to crowding would have pleased everyone. The concept that busy street life constituted the essence of urban life came later, after the excessive crowding had been fixed, in the 1950s, with urban theorists like Jacobs. The old problem of congestion got turned into a new virtue: community. In this vision, Los Angeles fell short. It fell farther than short, becoming the symbol of what ailed the American city.

Yet the wrongly maligned edge cities of L.A. are both historically interesting and offer positive solutions to many urban problems.

Historically, cities are not natural: Human political actions create them. The medieval notion that city air was free emerged because monarchs granted cities special privileges--corporate charters, legal enabling devices which cities still need. A group of people create a city by a legislative grant; this is still the case--for example, the new city of Malibu. The medieval city protected itself with huge defensive walls, which were extremely costly to build and maintain. Their now-charming compactness kept costs down.

U.S. cities, including the many cities in L.A. County, legally resemble their medieval counterparts: They exist by the statutory grace of state government. But America has differed from Europe in its lack of walled cities. From the beginning, cities were able to expand, annexing surrounding areas: Los Angeles did the same as virtually every other U.S. city--growing until it collided with other cities doing the same thing.

All U.S. cities differ from most cities in the world because of our founding circumstance. After the revolution, our founders used the best ideas they could. In the 18th-century United States (but not in Europe), cities were irrelevant. Thomas Jefferson’s famous comment--that cities contribute to the body politic as much as sores do to the human body--was ensured by the backhanded treatment of cities in the U.S. Constitution--which does not mention them.

Each state can treat its cities differently. However, the 19th-century practice of “free” incorporation--incorporation with relatively few restrictions--included cities as well as businesses. Cities proliferated. By the 1870s, the U.S. landscape was dotted with “cities,” sometimes amounting to no more than a glint in a speculator’s eyes.

Given these historical foundations, in particular the ability to start new cities, Americans have shown consistent preference for small-sized bergs, often widely decentralized.

This is what we have in Los Angeles, only more so. Today, most “Angelenos” do not live in the city of Los Angeles. Roughly 60% of the people who say they live in Los Angeles live in unincorporated areas or in smaller cities--ranging from very large Long Beach to tiny Vernon. Most of these cities are indeed edge cities, but they are often autonomous, culturally and politically unique and have feisty internal lives as interesting, if not as well known, as those of the city of Los Angeles.

Typically, those who try to address urban issues see these multiple cities as a problem, as somehow unnatural. But they are quite American, quite typical and offer solutions to big-city problems. The problems smaller cities solve include citizen alienation from the political process; slow police response time; giant and distant school bureaucracies; complex layers of planning offices, and unresponsive community redevelopment agencies.

These cities even possess that elusive thing--community. In these smaller cities, people call city council members who often campaign door to door, complain to school boards, rely on fast police response and argue directly with planning offices. What often appears to be a faceless mall-land turns out to be permeated with localism.

These cities of Los Angeles all have their own character and sense of place. Historians are beginning to understand this, and there are several books and dissertations being written on such places as South Gate, El Segundo and Torrance. These new works will show that Los Angeles is not a place without meaning, not a series of soulless edge cities, but rather congeries of places with highly complex histories. When we viewers see only a generic landscape the reflection is on us and our ignorance, not on the places and people.

Asserting that Los Angeles cities are real edge cities cannot make quite the impact that seeing their city halls does. One cannot visit all these buildings in a day: They are everywhere and have a range of looks that challenges any categorization. Diversity is the physical actuality created by city governments in Los Angeles.

If for every time we imagined Los Angeles we did not picture the City Hall, as did “Dragnet,” but instead imagined one of Los Angeles’ other city halls, we would think of our region more expansively, more appreciatively. These city halls vary from the beautiful moderne Glendale City Hall to Inglewood’s generically invisible and most un-city-hall like high-rise building. Some city halls, La Verne’s for example, could be a suite of lawyers’ offices in a new mall, while Bradbury’s could be the headquarters of a forested state park and Culver City’s practically shouts civic pride. They all serve as concrete examples of the edge cities that comprise Los Angeles.

Cities change. Previous versions often gain charm with distance in time--and cleaning up. Restored medieval and early modern cities are great places to visit. Yet today, preservationists have had to search hard to find a well-preserved, original Levittown house. Even as we grow accustomed to it, the classic postwar suburb has begun to disappear. Even as we build and reshape edge cities, we have to learn to understand them. The edge city most Angelenos live in is not “worse” than the traditional city, just different. Most Americans know this, too, and they express themselves by moving, shopping and working in them.