Ghost Metropolis is a mixed-media production that aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. Because the past is the landscape of what took place, Ghost Metropolis maps and visualizes at the same time that it narrates and analyzes the past.  Its principal ingredients are text, photography, and cartography.  It is a textual, visual history, and spatial history.

Ghost Metropolis is the culmination of a decade and a half of labor.  I first launched this project while a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 1997, with the ambitious goal of making the deep and complex past of a mighty global metropolis knowable, understandable, and visible.  As an interdisciplinary historian in the tradition Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, I knew that such a task would require the tools of several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Over the ensuing years, I wrote more than forty (40) historical essays about Los Angeles on a vide variety of topics, and these are woven together here.  I also produced hundreds of images and maps.  Most of this work clustered around my investigations of major topics, which now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita), urban development (Inscribing Los Angeles) petroleum politics (Manna From Hell) Hollywood (White Shadows); the rise of Nixon (Richard 37th); and racial segregation (Segregated Diversity). 

A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose.  Except for a few essays written in a social science idiom, it is free of theoretical terms.  Ghost Metropolis is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published throughout the project, as I have attempted to solve puzzles regarding the spatial and visual dimension of the human past.   But those theoretical writings are "groundwork," while the present work is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely. 

Click on "methods" at the top of any page to access detailed discussions of theory and methods on the wide range of approaches I used in creating this work.

Like other historians, I have labored countless hours in the archives and reading books and writing and re-writing theoretical, narrative and social scientific texts.  Unlike most historians, I have also labored countless hours making maps and photographs.  In cartography, those hours go into converting research into pictorial maps: analyzing the data and designing and producing the visualizations of human action in space and time, to persuade viewers, or to inform them, or just to recount what took place.  More than fifty of my own thematic maps appear throughout Ghost Metropolis, plus a series of reference maps in a visually layered form that I have invented, called "ghost maps."  I have also invented other tools for visualizing the complex metropolitan past, such as "Transections" and the "Isolation-Diversity Plot."

I also made hundreds of photographs and photomontages, working both with my own camera and with archival photographs.  My photography does not provide illustration nor decoration to a textual argument.  Photography, as I handle it in Ghost Metropolis, is an end in itself, a parallel genre to textuality.  Photography is powerfully enhanced with companion text, but in principle it can stand on its own. Photography is an instrument for seeing, knowing, and portraying the past. As a photorealist, I do claim that photography enables us literally to see the past...differently but no more clearly than with textuality or cartography or any other tool.  My strategy in Ghost Metropolis is to use as many tools as I can to make the almost-impossibly large and complex phenomenon of "Global Los Angeles" knowable and understandable and readable.

Thirdly, the platform in which Ghost Metropolis is now presented to you--Scalar--bears some introductory remarks.  Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form.  (Full disclosure: I am one of the PIs of the Mellon grants and one of developers of Scalar).  Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways.  It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels.  Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers.  But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper.  It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar.  All you need to do is follow your interests.

OUTTAKES: [Ghost Metropolis is not yet in its final form.  It is in a preliminary review form, using the web publishing platform Scalar. Portions of this work have been published or exhibited in many venues, but only in preparation for this final assembly of this 13,000-year history of a metropolitan region that shaped world history.  

For the quickest and most direct look at how a typical finished narrative essay looks, see "Crossroads of the LA Metropolis."

Because it is nearly unprecedented to submit a book-scale, research-based "monograph" as a multi-genre, multimedia web production by a historian who is also a photographer, cartographer, and co-creator of research software programs, I want the reviewers to read a few paragraphs of context.]

BELOW IS A COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS.  ALL ESSAYS ARE IN GHOST METROPOLIS, BUT ONLY THOSE WITH LINKS HAVE THE COMPANION NARRATIVES BUILT OUT.  Readers may access any of the essays, finished or not, via the Narrative Path pages.

           Inscribing the Boundaries of Power: The Production of Governing Spaces, 1781-2000

           The Boom of the 1920s: Industrial and Residential Groundwork

           From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Networks

           Making Democratic Spaces: A Visual Geography of Southern California Architectural Moderism, 1900s-1960s

           Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts

           Love with Strangers: The Los Angeles Counterculture and the Birth of an Art Capital

           Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill

           Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space

           Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Power

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