Why is LA so awesome ? An introduction

Mike Davis's essays did a lot of damages to our collective consciousness about Los Angeles over the last decade, unfairly turning it into the most famous exemple of urban Hell and disqualifying it as a potential source of inspiration for future urban planning.

In France, his writings are the most well known references on the subject, and its very rare to hear alternative voices or references about Los Angeles, like Reyner Banham for exemple, an architecture critic, who praised the qualities of LA in a great book  : Los Angeles, the architecture of four ecologies (1971) and several videos : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlZ0NbC-YDo

Mike Davis earned a bit of authority as an academic, but those popular essays don't respect any scientific criteria, they are simply his opinions, his restrictive opinions about Los Angeles.

It is not relevant to have choosen LA to denounce what's bad about every occidental city (the dependance to automobile, the urban sprawl, the pollution, the out-of-law suburbs, the gap between rich and poor quarters) because gigantism is not the issue : problems are the same, even worst, in much smaller cities. 

It is also very unfair and unprofessional of Mike Davis to remain silent about what is completely unique and special about Los Angeles, and never mentionned all the qualities that others cities don't have and desperately try to create : 
- an embodied relationship between a very active industry and an urban life that actually makes the city works as an economic and urban system   (see future post Why is LA so awesome ?  Part I - The industry)
- successful exemples of interactions between houses, Nature and infrastructures generating an unmatched life quality in any cities of comparable size  (see future post Why is LA so awesome ?  Part II - Echo Park)
- An incredibly rich and diverse architecture (hispanic history, cheap californian pavillons to the best exemples of modern architecture mouvment (Richard Neutra, etc)) (see future post Why is LA so awesome ?  Part III- Houses)

In order to show that the nature of the defects described by Mike Davis are in no way specific to LA,  here is a comparaison of a few caracteristics with the city of Marseille, which is not in the US but in the south of France (metropolitain area of around 2 millions people, same sunny climate, similar geographical position between moutains and sea).

AP