With our often dysfunctional politics and less than stellar economy, it is often hard to see Los Angeles as a model of much of anything. Yet viewed from the prism of urban history, this city and region have become very much the global trailblazer for a new and still-evolving form of urbanism.
Although suburb-dominated development predates Los Angeles’ early 20th century emergence, this region was arguably the first in the world to forge the horizontal metropolis. To some extent, this reflected the late emergence of the city, just as electric streetcars, and later automobiles, were becoming predominant forms of transportation.
Geography, specifically the wide breadth of the Los Angeles basin, further bolstered the conditions for this evolution. Yet our early role in creating a new urban form was not a result of happenstance L.A. became what it is, for both better and worse, largely through design and conscious calculation.
It helps to understand the conditions that existed around the turn of the last century to see why contemporary Los Angeles chose to go horizontal instead of vertical. The old, commercial capitals in Europe and elsewhere had been relatively livable places dominated by artisan businesses, great religious shrines, and government buildings. Yet by 1900 this model had been replaced by the much denser, more polluted model of the industrial city, first in Britain and later in Germany, Japan, Russia and here in the United States.
‘Nobler living’
Those coming here from the old centers of the east coast were well aware of the horrors associated with the industrial city, with its belching smokestacks and crime-infested slums. Not surprisingly, newcomers saw in bucolic Southern California the opportunity to create a more healthful urban form.
Before arriving in Los Angeles, one of the newcomers, Methodist preacher Dana Bartlett, had ministered in St. Louis, where the industrial reality served to scar souls. With its mild climate and spectacular scenery, Los Angeles, Bartlett hoped, could become “a place of inspiration for nobler living.”
In his 1907 book, “The Better City,” Bartlett laid out a vision for a planned “City Beautiful” that would offer easy access to beaches, meadows and mountains. Taking advantage of the wide open landscape, manufacturing plants would be “transferred” to the periphery, and housing for the working class spread out to avoid overcrowding. Rather than confined to stifling tenements, workers would live in neat, single-family homes.
Many of Los Angeles’ political and economic elites embraced this more sprawling notion of urbanism. In 1908, for example, Los Angeles created one the first urban zoning ordinances in the nation, one that encouraged development of numerous sub-centers, single-family homes and dispersed industrial development.
Initially Henry Huntington’s sprawling Pacific Electric railway helped make this pattern work. Later, the growing use of the automobile accelerated the creation of dispersed urban districts surrounded by sprawling housing tracts. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the national average and 10 times as likely as a Chicago resident. At the same time, L.A.’s downtown already was becoming less important as the region’s economic and social center.
To be sure, the usual motivations greed and hunger for power underpinned much of the city’s rapid centrifugal growth. But many among the region’s bureaucrats and developers also believed that they were creating a superior urban environment. In 1923, the director of city planning proudly proclaimed that Los Angeles had avoided “the mistakes which have happened in the growth of metropolitan areas of the east.” This brash new metropolis of the West, he claimed, would show “how it should be done.”
The local press, eager for new residents and readers, promoted such notions. The city had laid out its tracts and transit lines, boasted the editor of the Los Angeles Express, “in advance of the demands.” The prevalence of single-family residences, with their backyards, would transform the city into “the world’s symbol of all that was beautiful and healthful and inspiring.”
By the 1930s, large elements of this vision had been realized. Single-family residences accounted for 93 percent of the city’s residential buildings, almost twice the rate for Chicago. Sadly, it was also becoming obvious that L.A. would fail to achieve the ideals of its early visionaries. Turning aside an open-space plan devised by the landscape architecture firm of Olmsted and Vaux designers of open space in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago and Washington, D.C. the city was rapidly losing the small-town atmosphere so heavily promoted.
Los Angeles, however, cannot be easily dismissed as a failed experiment. Sprawling from the ocean to the deserts of San Bernardino and down the coast to San Diego, the region has provided for its many millions a “better city” experienced in individual neighborhoods, private homes and backyards.
In the late 20th century, the ranks of Angelenos swelled with a large number of immigrants, largely from Latin America and Asia. Like earlier generations, they bought homes, started businesses and built new lives in the region that allowed them to live a more autonomous urban way of life.
Through their success, and that of those who came before them, Los Angeles demonstrated the efficacy of a new model of urban growth dispersed, multi-centered and largely suburbanized.
This model can be seen virtually everywhere in America, most particularly in the “new L.A.s” around Phoenix, Las Vegas, Reno, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and even Washington, D.C. It can also be seen in the burgeoning suburbs and new business centers ringing Tokyo, Paris and London. The L.A. model is even being embraced, wherever possible, in developing countries from China to South Africa.
The next chapter of Los Angeles’ history will be how to build on this legacy, providing a true village-style quality of life. Trying to become a faux New York, or a sun-drenched Paris, is not our mission. Having developed the predominant global form of dispersed urbanity, Los Angeles needs to show how to make that model work.
*Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of the “The City: A Global History,” just published by Modern Library.
