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).

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RECURRENT RIGHT WING NONSENSE

No later than this morning on the french national radio channel, a right wing essay writer was denunciating the abusive influence of islamic culture in some parts of our cities, that supposedly threatens our "french culture". 

The funny thing with right wing people is that they always use the same argument to compete with   oppressive signs of arabic culture such as women's veil : they bring out the best of french history from two hundred years ago. Its always about Racine, Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Revolution, the ideals, the great philosophers. 

They don't talk about the great culture of botox and fake breast, which would be the relevant exemples to compare arabic women condition to, not Voltaire or Diderot.

As it is completely legitimate to criticize oppressive tendancies in islamic culture, it should be done in a fair and relevant way, by opposing and comparing them to something comparable :  external visible signs that would illustrate french culture and women condition as it is today, not historic references of  something that doesn't exist anymore. Or if one could say that what our present time is somehow a product of Voltaire and Rousseau writings, there is a lot more factors that should be taken in consideration to define what "french culture" has become.

French culture of today is nothing to be proud of, as it is an unexciting mix of materialistic concerns and TV fame, people main cultural references being the most embarassing tv shows and hosts, and as for women (since their oppression by the veil seem to gather all the attention) we're so ahead of our time its amazing :  G-strings now available for 8 years old, the apology of being young and sexy, and probably more exemples of women destroyed and ridiculed by esthetic surgery than we have women in veil.

Don't see no Racine or Diderot anywhere.

It is absurd to focus on one oppressing sign (the veil) to dismiss arabic culture and compare it, not to our own deviances and oppressive signs of domination, but to the best exemples of our cultural history.

Right wing thinkers seem to be in denial of their own illusion about what french culture really is. 

Their incoherence doesn't just stop here : they can simultaneoulsy mention their atttachment to the XVIIIe century philosophers in order to disqualify islam and mention their attachement to our catholic tradition (as Sarkozy did), which doesnt make much sense as Voltaire and Diderot were precisely the ones who drove us free from the catholic system by doubting about God existence and the legitimacy of kings rights to rule....

In the end, my personal position is that the veil tradition doesnt threaten me or french women more than the underlying pressure for "being sexy". On the contrary it broadens the scale of choices. We can happily go from one extreme manifestion of male domination to an other.

Lucky us.

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