Hello again! I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving!
Because I ate so much stuffing and pumpkin pie over the weekend, I am spending
most of my time at the gym this week so I decided to comment on another one of
my classmate’s blogs. The blog post, done by a student named Amy, discussed the
way in which she used an online mapping website to look at different
neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. I liked that Amy’s blog included an
external source (the map), as the visual aspect supplements and personalizes
the blog post. I think that if she directly visited a neighborhood in one of
the maps she posted, it would have made the blog post even more personal and
added more depth to the analysis portion of her blog posts, which were minimal
if not absent. Also, if she visited a location she could have detailed specific
aspects of a neighborhood that relates to social difference and ideas covered
in class, such as the presence of bum proof benches, social access, consumerism,
or automobility. This is the comment I left on Amy’s page:
Let me start off by saying that I loved several aspects of
your blog post. I loved the way your vivid writing style draws the reader in
and I especially loved the way you incorporated a map into your post. With that
being said, I feel that there are a few suggestions I could make that would
help in your future blog posts. Firstly, make sure you are actually visiting
the locations that you are talking about. Secondly, the most important aspect
of these blog posts is relating a Los Angeles location to a class concept. Now
that we are approaching the end of the quarter, there are seemingly countless
concepts to choose from that we have discussed in depth (and occasionally ad
nauseum) in class. The concept that I believe is the most visible in cities
that I have personal visited is the carceral enclaves of the post-metropolis.
Carceral enclaves is a fancy way of saying parts of the cities are walled off
to the undesirable public. There are many examples that we can see in cities in
the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area that embody these carceral enclaves. Physical
access is one way that cities restrict access to those that they deem to be
undesirable. For example, gated communities are very common in cities where
people want to differentiate themselves from others they deem to be inferior. Some
gated communities do not even have physical gates, but rather they rely on the
symbolic nature of gated communities to keep these undesirables out. Central to
the idea of restricting physical access is the concept of automobility, which
is a critical aspect of the post-metropolis. Because there are still many
people who rely on the public transportation system, certain cities take
advantage of this fact and restricts the extent to which public transportation penetrates
the city. Finally, the existence of bum proof benches is a final aspect of restricting
social and physical access. Bum proof benches are benches that are made in such
a way that someone cannot lay down without it being extremely uncomfortable
that way “bums” cannot sleep there because they are undesirable to the public. These
ways that cities restrict social and physical access are amongst the easiest to
identify while visiting a location.
Another class concept that I believe fits in the cities of
Los Angeles is the concept of decentralization. The post-metropolis, or the 4th
urban revolution, broke away from cities being strictly centralized like in the
3rd urban revolution. An example of how Los Angeles is decentralized
is the way that there are patches of mini-centralization, such as the centralized
locations of car dealerships. In a centralized city, like Chicago and
Manchester, there would not be these patches, but rather everything from
manufacturing centers to family owned business would be found in the middle or
the center of the city.
Finally, a class concept that is easily seen is the absence
of factories and manufacturing centers in modern cities such as Los Angeles,
which is indicative of the rise in the information economy.
Hopefully these suggestions make you future blog posts easier.
Happy Blogging!
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