Travelogue: Southern California

This is America at its dreamiest – and the disaggregated post-industrial city in its elemental form. Like any good dream it comes in fits and starts: Los Angeles, the capital of Now truly is the densest metropolitan area in the U.S. It’s not density in one spot (like the Great railroad cites) that overwhelms here; it’s the shear scale of the thing. A uniform grain of city stretching mile after mile after mile after mile across the horizon never stopping for a breath except where the topography forces it to – or where it dies into the ocean. The truly deceptive thing about the L.A. basin is its sheer ordinariness; nothing stands out so much – not even what passes for “downtown,” but add it all up and it sums to the world’s richest country’s second largest city. Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, and even Wichita in their heart-of-hearts want to become L.A.

Orange County, on the other hand, is the future. The other terminus of the DFW-OC Fundamentalism Shuttle is life in reaction to what they’re doing up “the five.” Here it’s all hills, flora, and topography. Single-family houses, garden apartments, fire stations, and even big box stores step up and down the slopes visible to each other yet separated by leisurely, serpentine roadways drawn from cabriolet fantasy. The development pattern, crushed between the desert and idyllic shore, is more biology lab than Daniel Burnham: carved-out clusters of suburbia connect to each other with narrow dendrite-like fibers, all set amidst hills and cactus and chaparral that forms the gesso between the glass-walled exclusive subdivisions. Nature as stage set.

New Urbanism beware – you can’t compete with “lifestyle.”

(more about the natives of paradise later . . . . . )