Searching for City Boundaries

by Tony Chavira

The biggest problem with relentless suburban development is that it seems unbroken, and I’d be hard-pressed to show you the edge of Southern California on a map. Except for the occasionally division-by-freeway, it’s hard to tell where Los Angeles stops and places like Culver City, Monterey Park and El Segundo start. This might seem like a non-issue to southern Californians, but it’s a big thing for people who don’t live here and try to figure our place out. Especially if they come from cities like Paris, Rome, Shanghai and Mumbai. The difference between these places and our conglomerated cesspool of cities is that Southern California has no real boundaries.

That’s a recent phenomenon too. When you think about your home, you tend to use words like “your castle,” “your domain,” and “your place of rest.” Outside its walls may be madness and chaos, but inside only serenity and peace. Or vice versa. There’s a distinct line that divides one set of sensations from the other, and as much as we say we want our homes to flow from indoors to outdoors organically, we still need a distinct indoor area. Anything will do: a screen door, a concrete wall, a white picket fence, a chain link fence, a stoop ... even a foyer is a buffer between being inside someone’s house and really being inside someone’s house.

We want our neighborhoods to have limits too. We don’t want to go very far to get to a store or a bunch of restaurants. We want a movie theater just a few minutes away. We want an end to our journey in sight. We’re no different from people who came before us: church spires weren’t high so God could see them from his space station; they were meant to be signals medieval townsfolk could use to determine how far away stuff was. These are such ubiquitous concepts that video game designers use them to help players move through levels: add limits to where your character can go and set up landmarks. Give your space edges and the player will enjoy the game more.

I’m not saying that we should apply the rules of video games to how we interact with our cities (though I may in the future), but history has shown us that simply adding boundaries can dramatically improve cities and their public spaces. Americans already know that great urban spaces have boundaries. Manhattan is an island. Boston has the Charles River. Chicago aligns itself to a river and ends at a lake. Miami Beach is sandwiched by the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay.

But Los Angeles is a desert with no limits except the desert’s edge. And Planners who don’t care about how much or little suburbia we endure proclaim that this provides us with unlimited space for expansion. Flat land is a sign from the Celestial Lords of City Development that Southern California is fated to expand forever (or at least until we merge with Phoenix).

But that’s dumb. There are plenty of places in the world with nothing limiting their outward expansion that still found ways to define their city boundaries. Paris and London, although placed along the Seine and Thames respectively, are on flat areas ripe for endless expansion. Yet the renowned French and British countrysides are no more than an hour drive from the center of each city. New Delhi expands and contracts from a booming city center to a physical city edge: the city literally stops when you get to the parks and national monuments.

A famous urban planning example is Chartres in France, which is completely surrounded by flat farmland. But consider what kinds of towns we see in the middle of American nowhere. An amalgamation of truck stops littered around a Wal-Mart, Dairy Queen and McDonald’s every 80 miles? In Chartres, the famous cathedral spikes upward and the charming town radiates from it. If you were on a long haul through the French countryside and ended up in Chartres, you could park on the edge of town, walk around for a while, have a nice dinner with the locals, check out the cool architecture, and head out knowing you’ve been to a unique place.

So why does France get to have places like these and we don’t? Because Americans have systematically given up on the idea of town centers and boundaries. Without centers and borders, anything can be anywhere. A McDonald’s/gas station combo can be planted into the middle of an idyllic scene, ruining it. A main street can be a ten lane highway sprinkled with fast food joints. A Wal-Mart parking lot can expand outward for a mile. When you believe that America has unlimited space, you implicitly believe that no space is really valuable. We don’t need a boundary, and we don’t need a center, even if those are the most fundamental ingredients to nice places.

Los Angeles River

The sad part is that Southern California used to have boundaries. Chavez Ravine had hilly limits on both sides. South L.A. built southward from the west side of the L.A. river to Long Beach and stopped. Orange groves filled Orange County and were bordered by beaches, hills and mountains. The whole San Fernando Valley, from Burbank to Woodland Hills, was fertile farmland that stopped at the valley’s edges. Our cities all had edges once, and when you traveled around you would stop being in one place and start being in another. Built places and non-built ones both had identifiable histories too: everyone knew where the first settlers came to Los Angeles, where the Gabrielino natives once lived, and where the river historically flooded. Echo Park had lofts, Los Feliz had townhouses, Pasadena had mansions ... and everyone knew the reasons why.

To top it off, when you drive away from your neighborhood to get things, you don’t invest in your community. We’ve all heard, “I live in Highland Park, but I shop in Pasadena and take my kids to school in La Cañada,” or “We live in Venice, but we hang out in Culver City and work in Santa Monica.” So which place wins? When there’s only so much money to go around, which place ends up getting it? Eventually money that could be spent beautifying and upgrading your neighborhood dries up, while places like Beverly Hills and West Hollywood end up with endless streams of dollars. But who do Chartres, Paris and London compete with locally? Because these places have distinct boundaries, the answer is no one.

Today, no one’s sure exactly where the center of anything in Southern California is. Downtown Los Angeles, downtown Long Beach, Santa Monica, Laguna Beach, and Old Town Pasadena are about as good as it gets. No surprise, each of these areas has identifiable edges and some kind of center. No surprise, since there are so few of these places, we’ve decided to artificially manufacture more of them. And now we have The Grove, The Americana and Downtown Disney.

When study after study has shown that people prefer urban spaces that feel like rooms, it’s no wonder these contrived town squares are so popular. Yes, it’ll be difficult to develop enclosed, room-like urban spaces across Southern California (and later, all of America), but how else are we supposed to tell where we are? A small town in Arizona feels like a small town in Texas feels like a small town in Minnesota feels like a small town in Idaho. They all have Wal-Marts and Dairy Queens and McDonald’s and gas stations, all built the same way. When there are no boundaries, nothing is sacred and nothing is preserved; your city has no charm, no culture, and no natural environment. When there are no boundaries, there is no difference between here and there.

Driving west from Arizona or south from San Francisco, how are you supposed to know when the city of Los Angeles begins? When the signs on the freeway say so? More important, when do you finally feel like you’re in Los Angeles? I know people who’ve lived here for years and still aren’t sure.

And how do you determine when you’ve entered places like Manchester, New Hampshire or Omaha, Nebraska or Boise, Idaho? When there’s a higher frequency of McMansions and suburban developments? Where, exactly, do these places begin or end? Where do we draw the lines?

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.