Take That Dubuque! (and NYC, Too)

At the Tate Modern in Merry Ol' London, an exhibit running through the 27th of August focuses on Global Cities.

Only one city in the United States makes the list, and it's not Dubuque (even though some cranky-pants columnist from Baghdad by the Bay used to call us Double Dubuque). It's not even Fargo. It's definitely not NYC.

Nope, it's Los Angeles, Co-Capital (with Tokyo) of the Pacific Rim and home to the 21st Century in all its Blade Runner-y glory (for ill and good). We aren't looking like we'll catch up to Ridley Scott's vision for this city (discussed by Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame in PM recently) by 2019, but the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-legal stew of rejects, foundlings, wealth, sparkle, and grime are all here presently (still no replicants that I know of, but I'm keeping my eyes open).

Judging from the bits at the Tate's website the L.A. focus (along with all the other cities) will be on inequities in wealth distribution, overcrowding, grime and all that rot. Hell on Earth here, yada-yada-yada. Funny how many Brits I bump into in the pubs hereabouts (lead article (pdf of the whole "e"dition at link) in our local free rag was Brits in Santa Monica this weekend)

So being grouped with London, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Tokyo, Istanbul, Cairo, Johannesburg and Shanghai may not exactly be a compliment, but I bet those folks in Chicago and New York City are still jealous anyway. Interesting that no other European cities (depending how you group Istanbul) made the list.

The ten cities they pick are all in the top 20 when measuring population of the metro area, Istanbul being the puny guy of the ten at "only' 11.3million while Tokyo outranks all population centers at a whopping 31million for the metro area, LA ranks 13th worldwide (though it's disputable as most folks include San Bernardino and Riverside as part of the Greater L.A. conglomeration which raises our total to 17.6million).

I know I live in a surprisingly dense place, but it doesn't feel dense, and here in Dogtown, it's actually pretty quiet at night, and relatively crime free. All this despite a population density in Santa Monica of over 10,000 per square mile residentially and far more than that during business hours (the city swells to about 200-250,000 folks during each work day), and on a hot summer weekend within the city limits you might find 500-750,000 people swarming across our little 8 square miles (with a majority of that in a 2 square mile strip along the beach). So regularly, I'm looking at population densities over 100,000 people per square mile in certain small districts in my home town, yet so far haven't been choked by the share weight of all those bodies (occasionally get choked by the shear presence of some of our 'sky-housed' residents, but that's a different story).

The population densities for all the places in the coastal communities of West Los Angeles are over 10,000, some approaching 20,000 (all except bucolic and pricey Malibu). Draw a 5 mile circle with my house as the center, and you are probably pushing between 600,000 to 750,000 people living around here, over 1,000,000 working (more people commute into the Westside than reside here, surprisingly), and some days 2,000,000 people milling about isn't out of the question.

And people complain about the 405 Fwy. It's amazing it ever moves at all. With all the density, living here is still pretty great. People don't associate density with L.A., they think sprawl, but a surprising number of folks are squeezed into all that horizontal space. Your city doesn't need to be all vertical like Manhattan or the center of Tokyo to be really dense.

Of all the places in the world where I could be within a 30 minute drive of 1 million people, L.A. is still my favorite.

[previously at Immodest Proposals on why NYC is so 20th Century and LA is 21st]

When the First Sentence Is Blatantly False, It's Hard to Credit the Rest of the Article

An influential American magazine has named London the global capital of the 21st century.

First off, New York magazine, influential?!?

Hardly, the articles referenced (but not linked) in the article I quote above cover a whole host of issues, and are the usual mix of vapid NYC-centric aging hipster drivel you'd expect from a glossy like New York Magazine.

The problem with all these articles is that they are looking from the top down. They examine the changing views within the financial and cultural 'elites'. But that's to be expected, publishing is a very top-down industry, and as they are presented in the media London and NYC are both very top-down cities. The little people just don't matter.

London is in deep trouble so long as they refuse to address the radical elements within their multi-culti stew. The 2012 Olympics, rather than a crowning glory for an international city on the rise, may be the moment that the facade is torn away and all the rot is exposed.

If you must find a "World Capital" for the 21st century, then look no farther than right here. Los Angeles is the future, in all its confusing sprawl, its uneasy and somewhat balkanized neighborhoods, its chasm between high and low, and its embrace of both. The fluidity with which you can move (even with the traffic jams) both in physical and conceptual spaces in Los Angeles is unmatched in NYC or London (or Paris, or Cairo, or Chicago, or Tokyo, or Shanghai, or any other pretender to the throne). We are unburdened by history in Los Angeles, and that's an important trait this century. Here we blur all the lines between ethnicity, culture, art, commerce, high, low, loud, quiet, nature and artifice.

I don't get the sense of other places being as organic or as artificial as Los Angeles. The sense of LA being something and being nothing at the exact same time isn't something you get from other cities, and this sense is a very 21st century phenomenon. LA was a placeless place before the idea of placelessness even started forming. The local Indians called this "valley of the smokes" and we are as ethereal and ill defined as that would suggest.

The next 100 years or so will be about placelessness physically combined with a sense of place virtually. The real "world capital" of the 21st century is on the internet, anyway. To talk about an old construct as quaint as a 'city' is so 19th century.

So NYC can envy London, while they both ignore Los Angeles, but in the end none of these places will be as relevant as the communities people build beyond the notion of physical space.

And really, if place doesn't matter, given the choice, wouldn't you rather the place that you spend your time physically be where you have 300 days of sunshine, the offspring of aspiring stars and starlets (people are prettier here, get used to it), and all the best cooks Mexico has to offer?