Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 4

            This week I decided to comment on a fellow classmate’s blog. The blog post was about a student’s trip from UCLA to Manhattan Beach via Sepulveda Boulevard. The blog post depicts and details nearly every aspect of the student’s trip, ranging from cleanliness of the city to the width of the road to the types of buildings, stores and homes in the surrounding area. This is the comment I left on the student’s page:

            I really enjoyed reading your blog especially because I am very familiar with Sepulveda Boulevard, which made it easier to picture everything your blog illustrates. To your credit, however, your strong and detailed description of your surroundings would draw in readers with no previous exposure to Sepulveda. I also liked that you noted when entering new municipalities, as it allows your readers to more easily apply class concepts to your trip. Finally, I found the way you kept track of and described the number of lanes open to drivers as you progressed down Sepulveda Boulevard to be incredibly clever. While I’m not entirely sure if it can be applied to a class concept, it is nevertheless a very unique way of observing your surroundings and something I will certainly make use of in my future blog posts.

            The one suggestion I must make, however, is to apply your trip to class concepts in a more blatant way. For example, seeing as you were detailing some of the obvious differences between the different cities you passed through, it seems appropriate that you apply Robert E. Park’s theory that, “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.” While there may or may not be evidence to support his belief, it seems to be a good starting place when applying class concepts to your trips. Alternatively, since you were keeping track of the economic culture of each city, both in terms of municipal quality and economic foundation, it seems appropriate to apply the idea of the post-metropolis that was covered in class. Because it appears that you noticed the differences in economic strategy between each city, that is whether the city was largely occupied by businesses in the information sector or businesses based around the idea of consumerism, such as shopping centers, perhaps you could discuss the way this differentiation relates to the concepts of decentralization and automobility that are the hallmarks of the post-metropolis city which Los Angeles embodies. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog and I hope these suggestions help with your future posts. Happy blogging!

Blogging Social Difference in LA: Week 3

     For this week’s blog post I decided to take a car trip from the perceived center of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, Downtown LA to it’s the eastern edge of its periphery, Ontario California, about 40 miles away. I decided to take this trip to examine to what extent Los Angeles represents the post-metropolis concept of modern cities rather than the previous concentric ring model. In addition to the drive, I made several stops in a few different municipalities along the way to obtain more in-depth understanding of both the larger Los Angeles area and its individual parts. While I made several short stops, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and Claremont best represented the post-metropolis idea. The concentric ring model states that the main city has a designated political, cultural and economic center marked most notably by the presence of a manufacturing district. Surrounding this center are a series of rings that describe both the residents and quality of life within each specific ring. The first, most immediate, ring is characterized by a zone in transition or the slums, which are poorly maintained and unsanitary areas that house the poor, but only, in theory, until the residents can move out into the next ring. This next ring houses the working class, those that are likely to work in the manufacturing district at the city’s hub. While the residents within this ring are better off than those in the zone of transition, the housing and sanitation in this ring is often sub-par. Finally, the outer ring of the concentric ring model is composed of more expensive houses, improved sanitation and inhabited by the relatively affluent. On the other side of the coin, the post-metropolis, which has emerged relatively recently largely in response to the automobile, is characterized by decentralization, an enhanced sense of individualism and a web of specialized ‘centers” that are all accessible by automobile. While it is had been proposed that Los Angeles is strictly a post-metropolis city, I decided to explore some of Los Angeles’ suburbs to see if the concentric ring model was in anyway present. 
     While driving through the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, I found that while there are several impoverished areas surrounding downtown Los Angeles that are, in turn, immediately surrounded by more affluent areas, there was a striking lack of consistency, something should have been observable had Los Angeles followed the concentric ring model. This was most easily seen in a comparison between Rancho Cucamonga and neighboring Ontario. While Ontario is further from downtown Los Angeles then many other, more affluent communities, it was characterized by a manufacturing economy and several impoverished areas. Rancho Cucamonga, on the other hand, directly neighbored Ontario, but was notably cleaner and had an economy built on shopping centers and other forms of quasi-tourism. Had the concentric ring model been an accurate representation of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, cities such as Ontario would be located closer to downtown LA. Instead it is clear that the Los Angeles region is best described as a post-metropolis community, defined by a differentiation between its individual municipalities. 

This is seen in Ontario, which can be identified as a manufacturing “center” within Los Angeles, Rancho Cucamonga, which can be seen as a consumerist shopping “center” within Los Angeles and even Claremont, which is most easily identified as a college town within Los Angeles. The presence of these small, specialized “centers,” which are obviously easily connected by automobile, further proves Robert E Park’s theory that the city is made up of small touching, but never interpenetrating, circles. Who knows where I’ll be next week, but stay tuned to find out!

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 2

     With minimal homework and no midterms to study for this past weekend, I decided to make my first trip for this blog, the most time consuming trip, a bus trip through Los Angeles along its famous Sunset Boulevard. With only Emile Durkheim’s concept of division of labor to connect my observations to, I made sure to pay special attention not only to the surrounding environment, but also to the environment within the bus’ doors. Perhaps I would be best served, at this point, to introduce Emile Durkheim’s concept of division of labor to my readers. In a nutshell, Durkheim believed that as societies became more materially dense, that is, the population increased, problems arose from overpopulation and under availability of resources. In response to these issues, citizens within these modernizing cities adopted an idea of job specification, or the division of labor, in order to make living in such a “materially dense” area more efficient. To this extent, this division of labor serves a practical, functional purpose. Durkheim believed, however, that this original functional state is replaced by a state of class inequality when this job specification creates a society that is too differentiated to be unified by a common culture. 

     With the obligatory introduction to Durkheim’s concept of division of labor completed, it is time to turn to my actual trip. On Friday, October 5^th, I took the 2/302 bus from UCLA’s Strathmore/Gayley station all the way to Downtown Los Angeles and back, a trip that took a collective 4 hours and passed through a variety of cities, ranging from Beverly Hills to Echo Park. While the areas I passed through certainly represented the concepts of inequality and social difference, it was the people that boarded the bus that best epitomized both Robert E. Park’s and Emile Durkheim’s views. First, let me start with the surrounding area. While class difference was relatively easy to identify in the different cities I visited, as roads were smoother and cleaner in Beverly Hills than they were in Echo Park or even Hollywood, the most blatant example of social difference I encountered was through the Los Angeles Department of Transportation itself. In a city, county and even state where citizens rely heavily on personal automobiles as their primary means of transportation, it is a widely held view that public transportation is used primarily by those who cannot afford their own vehicle. It appears that the Department of Transportation designed their bus routes with this view in mind, as not only did the route have far fewer stops in the affluent regions of the route, such as Beverly Hills, but the driver seemed surprised when people on the bus requested a stop or when there were riders at these stops waiting to board. While this may be a very limited sample to base such a conclusion, I could not help but notice that neither the Department of Transportation, nor its employees, seem to expect many riders to travel to or from the more affluent parts of town. Finally, I will move within the bus’ doors. While there were several riders that embodied the idea of class differences stemming from the division of labor, as the majority of riders were blue-collar construction workers, gardeners and other manual laborers, the most striking example of social inequality as it relates to job specification came from a comparison between two riders. On my way to Downtown LA, I noticed a maid board the bus in Beverly Hills and later get off in the Echo Park area. It was clear that she felt very comfortable on the bus, as she had a bus pass, knew the driver by name and initiated conversations with other riders throughout her trip. On my return trip to UCLA, I noticed a male rider, in an expensive looking suit, board the bus, presumably, after work. I noticed that the rider paid in cash, kept his head down upon entering and walked to the back of the bus looking ashamed and embarrassed. At first I did not think much of it, as he seemed like just another quiet, semi-depressed looking passenger. That view changed when we approached the Beverly Hills area, as he sprung from his seat, smashed the “request a stop” button with his fist and darted to the doors in an impatient manor. As he stepped off the bus, he turned to a man who was sitting by the door, smiled and said, “The Benz is in the shop.” This is a striking example of how division of labor can lead to class differences, as the rider with the low-paying, low-prestige job had no issue taking the bus, while the rider with the high-paying, high prestige job was not only clearly embarrassed to be on a bus, but felt he had to justify his riding to the other passengers. In summation, my trip down Sunset Boulevard embodied Durkheim’s claim that job specification can lead to class inequality while simultaneously strengthening Robert E Park’s view that the modern city is merely a collection of touching, but never interpenetrating entities.

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 1

For many years I was part of a Girl Scout troop that would regularly volunteer with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Although I spent countless years volunteering with the foundation, my experience was marked by a single, defining moment. I entered the third floor of St. Jude’s Research Hospital where I met two young boys, both the same age, with the same life-threatening disease that was in the same stage, and with the same survival rate. The only things differentiating these boys were 4.4 miles and the city limits separating Claremont, an upscale, affluent college town, from Pomona, a poverty-stricken, dilapidated town. Shortly after meeting them, I asked the boys what their wishes were and received surprisingly diverse answers. The boy from Claremont asked for another Nintendo 64, so that he could play from his hospital bed, while the boy from Pomona asked that his mother receive more flexible work hours so she could go to his soccer games upon his recovery. Beyond the obvious question of how just a few miles could serve as the defining boundary between such economically diverse neighborhoods, this story left me wondering, even at such an early age, how two boys, nearly identical in every way, could be so fundamentally different. This blog was born out of my desire to answer these, and hopefully other similar questions, as well as to contribute to my research on the psychological debate of nature vs. nurture. More than that, this blog was created to document social difference within the regions of Los Angeles through my eyes, a UCLA student. Over the next 10 weeks, I will be exploring the different parts of LA, ranging from the high-class, elitist yacht clubs to the crime-ridden streets of skid row, describing not only my experiences, but my perception of how the different areas of the city interact with the themes of social inequality and social difference. While I will be addressing a plethora of themes and concepts throughout my next 9 posts, the basis of each post will be around a central concept proposed by Robert E. Park, who stated that, “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.” Although I’m sure that I will find evidence that conflict with this statement, I believe this statement to be true and assert that any evidence to the contrary is merely the exception, not the rule.