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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Overdrive Networks and Settlements

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The Founding of Municipalities by Date Phil Ethington
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1. Overdrive Networks and Settlements

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Reader's Guide Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 is a large work about a very large and very old region. It is composed of hundreds of elemental units: in multiple genres, textual and visual. These basic units are organized using the Scalar digital publishing platform, in Scalar's elemental unit, the "page." Each page in Ghost Metropolis belongs also to a "path," and each also has "tag" relationships to other pages. The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modelled on the metropolis itself. Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of mapping. Those three dimensions are 1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors; 2) our visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures; and 3) the cartographic, which is a special, spatial medium that visualizes the topography of human action. Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative, no prioritized themes inherent in a region. Should we tell political, social, economic, cultural, private or public cultural stories with any greater priority or order? I have chosen to tell my stories without regard for conventional priorities. My parallel "paths" travel through the spacetime of global Los Angeles chronologically, but not always from the same beginning or destination. Because all human action takes and makes place, the the past is the set of all places made by everyone who lived in or passed through the Los Angeles Basin. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. Readers may follow my maps along both textual and visual paths. Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives. As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published mostly not. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together. Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos. Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present; it can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life; it can be read between subject areas on the same chronological period, in chronosections. The forty-two textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five narrative paths: Manna From Hell; etc. It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives.
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000 (Researched and written in collaboration with Julia Park, Dowell Myers, and William Frey.) “Los Angeles” is a massive conurbation, numbering, in 2006, 17.8 million residents in its widest definition as the Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA). For consistency over a long historical period, we chose the County of Los Angeles as a reasonable boundary for “the metropolis.” The most populous county in the United States, Los Angeles County population numbered nearly 10 million in 2000 and contained 89 incorporated cities. The City of Los Angeles, with 3.8 million residents, is the largest of these. The second largest is Long Beach, with about half a million. The median city size in 2000 (represented by Rosemead) was about 55,000. The average size was 87,000. The City of Los Angeles is effectively fragmented into at least four distinctive territories: San Fernando Valley, which is separated from the rest of the city by the Santa Monica Mountains, the central city area (from Downtown through “South Central”; the “West Side,” an unofficial area that includes the coastal communities and Westwood and Brentwood (near UCLA) and the Los Angeles Harbor, connected to the rest by the “Shoestring Strip.” This municipal space is simply too attenuated and irregular to treat as comparable with the rest of the municipalities of the County, so we broke it into the fifteen Los Angeles city council districts as they stood in 2000. These council districts, averaging 250,000 in population, are each larger than any other city in the county except Long Beach (460,000, coordinates P-38). The shapes and scale of the Los Angeles City council districts, however, are very similar to those of the municipalities. Motion cartography visualizes the founding of all 88 Los Angeles County municipalities. The other challenge that we face when trying to describe and analyze Los Angeles in geostatistical terms, is that about one million Angelenos live in unincorporated County territories. Some of these spaces, like East Los Angeles, closely resemble municipalities. Others are just tiny fragments within and between the incorporated cities. Only some of these are listed as “census designated places” (CDP) by the Bureau of the Census, so they are missed by analyses using that designation. After refining our GIS map of incorporated places, unincorporated places, and LA City Council Districts, we then excluded all spaces with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants (except Malibu, population 5,308, because of its symbolic importance). In the indexed Municipal Spaces of Los Angeles County map, the fifteen LA City Council Districts are indicated as “LA1, LA 2, etc.” The other 77 incorporated municipalities included in the dataset are listed in order of their date of incorporation. Unincorporated municipal places (N=17), governed and serviced by the County of Los Angeles (counties are the highest level of municipality in California), are indicated as “Co 1, Co 2,” etc. The total of these municipal places is 109. The municipal scale is of particular importance, therefore, for mediating between the neighborhood (as represented statistically by census tracts or block groups) and the metropolis (as represented by counties or CMSAs). Perhaps most importantly, the municipality is the most directly responsible authority for the protection and policing of civil rights and freedoms. Historically, with its enormous powers over policing, zoning, regulation and licensing, the municipality has also been the most culpable authority in the creation and reproduction of unjust segregation, as the SCLC’s city-by-city protest strategy of the 1960s illustrates.[1] Local institutions of government and those of the economy supply the key context for any discussion of segregation, immigrant/migrant integration, and minority empowerment. A wealth of research, including Logan and Molotch’s classic study has shown how the demographics and built environment of urban places are powerfully shaped by the policies of a complex array of municipal, private, and cultural institutions operating at the municipal level.[2] Historical studies by John Mollenkopf (1983), Becky Nicolaides (1999), Tom Sugrue (1996), Robert Self (2005), Matthew Lassiter (2008), have established beyond doubt that sub-metropolitan urban places are the primary source of policies that shape the social composition of cities and suburbs, including patterns in “segregation” or “integration.”[3] Urban economists have also shown, however, that municipal places have strong regional interdependencies.[4] Diversity Dimension The degree of municipal diversity varies tremendously across the metropolis. In 2000, for example, forty-two (42) municipal spaces had diversity index scores of 1.0 or higher. Topping the list for that year with a diversity index score of 1.33 was City of Gardena (2000 pop. 55,109; Fig. 1a: M-33), with the following distribution: 12% White, 32% Hispanic, 28% Asian, and 27% Black. The least diverse of the 109 municipal places in our metropolitan sample, with a Diversity Index score of 0.16, was the unincorporated area known as “East LA,” the historic heart of the Mexican-American community. East LA (2000 pop. 125,803, Fig. 1b: P-25) was 2% White, 0.2% Black, 1% Asian, and 97% Hispanic. Indeed, the thirteen least diverse municipal places in 2000 had overwhelming Hispanic majorities. Also at the bottom of the diversity list, however, were several beach cities with overwhelming White majorities, such as Manhattan Beach (2000 pop. 33,887 ; Fig 1a: K-34), with a population distribution that was 86% White, 1% Black, 7% Asian, and 5% Hispanic. At the median of the list for the diversity index was the City of Inglewood (2000 pop. 112,345; Fig 1a: L-28), which, with a diversity index of 0.92, was 4% White, 47% Black, 2% Asian, and 46% Hispanic. Also near the median were cities that illustrate the variation in these patterns. Far in the eastern suburbs, in the San Gabriel Valley, the City of Pomona (2000 pop. 133,547; Fig 1b: X-23), with a diversity index of .94, had a population that was 15% White, 9% Black, 6% Asian, and 69% Hispanic. The Isolation Dimension While the degree of diversity (H) is measured for each municipal space and ranked relative to the variation in diversity index scores across the entire metropolis, the isolation index (xP*x) is measured for each group separately for each of those 109 municipal spaces. Measuring the probability that members of a given group will have other members of their own group as neighbors within block groups (which are smaller than census tracts), a high score indicates high levels of isolation from other groups, and a low score indicates high exposure to other groups (low isolation). The isolation index, plotted on the y axis of our IDP scatter plot charts, is far more intuitive than the diversity index, because it is expressed as a percentage and ranges from 0% to 100%. Groups with greater than 50% isolation are “mostly” isolated (exposed mostly to members of their own group); those with less than 50% isolation are “mostly” exposed to other groups. Thus, the degree to which groups fall above and below the 50% mark provides an intuitively-attractive scale of segregation within each metropolitan place. While the 50% boundary is intuitive enough, investigators are free to choose more or less stringent standards of isolation. For this study of Los Angeles, we adopted a level of 50% as our boundary, which is less forgiving than the threshold of 60% used by Massey and Denton (1993). Our 50% boundary has the effect of classifying more groups as “isolated” than in Massey and Denton’s 1993 analysis. In recognition of this difference in judgment, we demarcate a gray zone on the IDP charts to represent the range between our chosen threshold and that of Massey and Denton. It is vitally important to bear in mind that the isolation index as we have implemented it (using block groups as the unit of analysis) varies independently (except at the asymptotes) of the diversity index. In other words, groups living in a highly diverse municipal place are not automatically highly exposed to other groups. To illustrate, let us return to the most diverse municipal place in all of Los Angeles County, the City of Gardena. There, in 2000, Whites (12% of the population) were very exposed to other groups, having only a 15% probability of living in the same block group as other Whites. Blacks (23% of the population), however, had a 49% chance of living in the same block group as other Blacks. Asians (32% of the population, and therefore the most numerous group in Gardena), had a 39% chance of living with other Asians, and Hispanics, at 32% of the population, had a 29% chance of having other Hispanics as neighbors in their block groups. The City of Carson (2000 pop. 90,957; Fig 2b: N-36) provides an excellent counter-example. The third most diverse city in Los Angeles County, Carson actually advertises itself as the “most diverse” city in the United States, with a remarkable overall balance of 13% White, 24% Black, 26% Asian, and 36% Hispanic. Blacks in Carson, however, were mostly isolated in 2000, having a 57% chance of having only other Blacks as block group neighbors. The other groups were mostly exposed to other groups, however, partially justifying Carson’s slogan. In other words, even the most diverse cities can also be segregated for some groups. [1] Garrow (1986). [2] Logan and Molotch (1987). [3] Dreier, Mollenkopf, Swanstrom (2001). [4] Pastor et al. (2000); Scott (*2002, *2009).