Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 10

     With only one blog post remaining in the quarter, I came to the troubling realization that I have neither been to a location I am not at least somewhat familiar with, nor have I utilized Simply Maps (LINK). Under the pressure to combine these two aspects into a single blog post, coupled with the stresses of this week’s impending midterm and the fact that Neo-Liberalism confuses me beyond words forced me to take the easy way out this week. To elaborate, for this week’s blog post, I decided to stay near UCLA and travel to Beverly Hills, a location I had only ridden the bus through for a previous blog post, to explore the presence, or lack thereof, of the hallmarks of the post-metropolis. Specifically, I used Simply Map’s distribution of clothing and accessory sales along with clothing and accessory consumption to observe the presence and effects of hyper-consumerism, cosmopolitanism, decentralization, multi-centrality and automobility. While I doubt a girl traveling to Beverly Hills to study shopping trends was exactly what Professor Wilford had in mind for our blog post visits, the previously complained about culmination of stressors more or less forced me into a corner. For this reason, I will do my best to elaborate and conceptualize my observations to mitigate this blog post’s adventurous and exploratory shortcomings. Without further adieu…

     As stated above, this week I explored Beverly Hills for the first time, which is simultaneously surprising, since I consider myself to be quite the fashionista, and completely expected, since I barely have enough money to park on Rodeo Drive. Anyways, I ultimately chose Beverly Hills after screwing around on Simply Maps for awhile. After countless tedious minutes of exploring the many variables that you can adjust on the website, I found a combination of two that reflected an embodied a class concept, or, depending on how you look at it, several class concepts. The variables I chose to explore and compare were the distribution of clothing and accessory sales in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area crossed with the data on clothing and accessory consumption in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Although these concepts may seem relatively random, they do in fact relate rather directly to concepts covered in lecture. Specifically, these concepts relate to the idea of the post-metropolis. Before all you readers get too impressed that I was somehow able to relate a map of Los Angeles with the type of city that Los Angeles embodies, give me a chance to elaborate further on the subject.

     Let me start off by describing the map, or the parts that are relevant to my point at least. The main points of the map I would like to draw attention to are the facts that both the heavy concentrations of sales and consumption are scattered, but in differentiated way that eliminates potential confounding variables, such as geographic or political barriers, and the fact that neither sales nor consumption match up perfectly across both maps. These are relevant because they all directly speak to the hallmarks of the post-metropolis. First, the fact that there are so many concentrations of clothing and accessory stores in such a relatively small area speaks to the increased sense of consumerism and cosmopolitanism discussed by Kling, Olin and Poster in their book, Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II. Second, the fact that these sales centers, and consumption centers are so distributed speaks to the decentralized, and multi-centralized aspects of the post-metropolis. Thirdly, the fact that these sales centers are strategically situated around relatively affluent areas, as made obvious by the fact that they spend a lot of money on clothing and accessories, speaks to the emergence of the information economy. Finally, the fact that these areas are so widely distributed reinforces the post-metropolis’ dependency on the automobile.

     Now, on to my trip itself. Like a typical touristy first-timer in Beverly Hills I spent the majority of my time window shopping on Rodeo Drive. I say window shopping both because I can not afford anything in the Rodeo Drive stores and because there were several stores that would not even let me in, which is a microcosm of restricting physical access, but that is beyond the scope of this post. While the decentralization and multi-centration was obvious throughout the area, as car dealerships were located together, as were clothing scores, department stores and supermarkets and the residential areas, the most obvious hallmarks of the post-metropolis was the overwhelming presence of consumerism and cosmopolitanism. While consumerism in Beverly Hills is such an obvious observation it does not even warrant an explanation, I was not prepared for the near-strictly cosmopolitan nature of this consumerism. This cosmopolitan nature was seen in both the city and the city’s residents/visitors. In terms of the city itself, there was an alarming large amount of foreign brand stores, whether it is clothing or automobiles. To that same extent, the visitors/residents of the city were also dressed in expensive international brands and drove almost strictly expensive foreign cars. I saw a Bugatti parked on the street! 

      Even though I picked a nearby safe location and wrote about somewhat obvious observations and concepts, I still feel that I gained a deeper understanding of the Los Angeles area by (finally) visiting Beverly Hills, which is, hopefully, the point of these blog posts.

     I’d like to close by saying, and I am not sucking up for a better grade, that I actually enjoyed doing these blog posts week in and week out. While most students would be thrilled on the weeks that they did not have to leave UCLA and could simply comment on another’s blog, I found those week’s to be somewhat boring and disappointing. I hope all my readers, yes all 2 of you, enjoyed this project as much as I did.