Term Papers On To what extent is LA a utopian or dystopian city?

Los Angeles (and more generally, the Southern California region) has long been the quintessential destination for migrants in search of the American Dream. No sooner had the state been incorporated into the union, promoters and boosters heralded Southern California’s promise as a salubrious Mediterranean haven. Developers built health spas and vacation resorts. Utopians founded experimental colonies. And massive numbers of Americans flocked to Los Angeles lured by the prospect of citrus groves, mild weather and cheap land. They continued to arrive throughout the 20th century, in hopes of striking it rich, finding stardom in Hollywood, and acquiring new personal identities. But they also came in search of the most basic elements of the American Dream: a good job and a home of one’s own, to achieve a greater measure of social justice and upward mobility, and to live in a healthy environment.
Ironically, the place sold to millions as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was in fact an arid place plagued by earthquakes, landslides, fires and floods. Moreover, many Angelenos found not the American Dream but the American Nightmare: racism, unemployment and poverty. Yet despite its image as hazy and hazardous, quirky and exceptional, shallow and vain, Los Angeles continues to draw people from around the world in search of a better way of life. In the process they wound up defining and redefining the American Dream for the rest of the nation.
From the railroad to the radio, from telegraph to television, Americans have greeted new communication technologies with both open arms and contentious scowls, heralding at once utopian dreams and dystopian fears.

A society described as Utopian has the capability of sounding like the greatest of societies, but yet at the same time as the most comprimising. Websters Dictionary describes a utopia as “a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions.” This should mean that the people of this society are at peace and content with the lives they lead. Yet, the dictionary goes on to also describe this society as “an impractical scheme for social improvement.” Why is this? Is it really impossible to realistically theorize a “perfect” society? In addition, if this sort of society was to be so impossible, what sort of world do we live in today? A dystopian society? Which is described as “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.” What does this say about the people that make up our society? Are we really fearful people, numb to the idea of respect and individuality? Or is the the price we pay for a society where anything goes, giving up complete and total happiness and peace. In our world today, we can, generally, express ourselves and have the choice to respect or not to respect eachother.
A true utopian society should be one that everyone can survive happily in. Yet, the definition does not include that. If one is to describe a utopian society as “impractical” then it is impractical for everyone to be happy. Some would say that the balance of happiness and sorrow is what makes happiness possible. This would therefore mean that the reason we have some (very little) equality in our world today is due to the fact that we have inequality. It is true that the definition for inequality would not exist without that of equality, but what stops people from respecting, honoring and letting other people live their own lives?
In our society today, it may seem like we have the freedom to do as we please. But yet, it is still within certain boundaries. We may go where we please, as long as we can pay to get in. Especially in L.A City, those without money and without a place to go, are criminalized for such “crimes” as loitering. With money, we can afford the luxuries of life, going out in the evening to a nine dollar and fifty cent movie showing, eat dinner at a decent diner for two for at least ten dollars and transportation fare at three dollars round trip, at the bare minimum, you are already up to thirty six dollars to go out to a movie and dinner. What if one does not have that money?
We may travel wherever we want and get away with whatever we want, as long as we have the money to do so. In our society today, one may even control government decisions through donations of money to candidates, as well as pay the most expensive of lawyers to get aquitted of criminal offenses. But at the same time, we have that freedom to work for what we get. We have the freedom to be able to afford these luxuries, and to strive for perfection.
Is it the responsibility of the rich to feed the poor? Do the rights of the individual protect those with money from having to deal with those who are “less fortunate”? It is in no way fair to either party to mandate control over a persons assests. Yet, today there is no sense of security for many people, whose jobs, at times, seem to hang by a thread. With big corporate factories, employing thousands of people across the country closing, many have lost job opportunities, as these billion-dollar operations move to less developed countries. Moving enables the corporations to spend less money on space and workers, generally employing workers at way below minimum wage in America. So, while people have the freedom of opportunity to work where they want, many jobs have little or no security.
Many have said that in todays society, we are lucky to have advanced technology, opportunity and a prosperous economy. All these things are positive or negative, depending on the person you ask. In todays market, rich and poor have been pitted against eachother, as class and gender have always been. Is there a solution to this problem? Is it possible to make a part of society care enough about beings other than themselves, to see that the only reason that they are powerful is because they have stepped all over others? Or will this society remain utopian for some, but dystopian for most?

Los Angeles, the perpetual bad boy or the dystopian city of American urban areas, enjoyed an unexpected flourish of intellectual respectability around 1971, when the iconoclastic English design critic Reyner Banham briefly settled among the palms and produced a slim but spirited paean of praise. Since then, however, the standing of L.A. among people who write about urban civilizations has slumped. Mike Davis’s 1990 polemic, City of Quartz, the best if most venomously leftist history of L.A. published in this decade, caustically accused the region of trashing its potential. Now comes William Fulton’s The Reluctant Metropolis. Though lacking Davis’s vitriol, it presents L.A. in a similar light: as a region unwilling to organize itself to attack monumental civic problems such as the ruin of the South Central ghetto and the heedless destruction of the landscape.
Fulton weaves together an enormous range of facts from the past two decades about who’s fought whom, what the sources of contention have been, and how events have unfolded. Because his antennae are keen to unintended consequences, and because he’s been trained in planning as well as journalism, conservatives should not be surprised to find the Ventura-based writer attributing dismaying results to Proposition 13, the 1978 tax-cutting ballot measure that took a big chunk of revenue away from the local governmental establishment.
By reducing property-tax collections, Proposition 13 has caused municipalities to focus much of their attention on how to capture money from other sources, particularly sales taxes. Fulton traces how the fight for sales-tax revenue among three Ventura County communities—Oxnard, Ventura, and Camarillo—led them to turn farmland along Highway 101 into a retail stretch he dubs “Sales Tax Canyon.” As he notes, “a single one-hundred-thousand-square-foot Price Club might generate $600,000 to $700,000 a year in sales tax.” In the aftermath of Proposition 13, cash-hungry municipalities neither plan well, says Fulton, nor do they let the market dictate where development will occur; instead, they give developers sweetheart deals. He acerbically observes that “a retail store is a city’s best cash crop.”
Proposition 13 is one part of the evidence supporting Fulton’s central thesis: that the Southern California “growth machine,” which for decades liberally spent public funds on the freeway network and other infrastructure projects aimed at facilitating profitable consumption of land, has begun to collapse in recent years. Yes, governments will help underwrite developments that are expected to generate net tax surpluses, such as hotels and shopping complexes. But the old practice of using governmental resources to help spread houses, schools, and other tax-draining development across every grove and foothill won’t fly anymore. Those who already own houses and other developed properties don’t want to pay to subsidize construction at the region’s fringe. When residential development does take place, a larger portion of its cost ends up being borne by developers and new-home buyers. According to Fulton’s research L.A is a dystopian city.
Fulton’s other main point is that Southern Californians refuse to take seriously the interconnectedness of the whole region. When parents in South Central L.A., alarmed by neighborhood dangers, sent their adolescent children to live with relatives in safer outlying territories, the kids introduced gang violence to the distant locales. Ultimately, there is no escaping the ills of the metropolis.
Fulton contends that L.A. suffers from a refusal to take responsibility for a metropolis and urban landscape that we ought to think is ours. But this demands an explanation of how the populace of an area the size of Connecticut would fulfill such a large and nebulous duty. Presumably Fulton is advocating some institutional arrangement, yet his portrayal of the organizations that have actually exercised some regional authority is anything but flattering. Even granting that a few smaller metro areas—most notably Portland, Oregon—have used regional government effectively, it is not clear that L.A., with its individualistic aspirations, its many divisions, and its huge size, could do the same.
In the aftermath of the 1992 riots, it was common for the national press to lament that establishment forces were not doing enough to revive South Central. Yet Fulton’s stories illustrate—perhaps unwittingly—just how difficult it is for those who do not live in a particular place to help that place or its people. Community organizations in Greater L.A. and elsewhere, he notes, focus mainly on enlarging the supply of affordable housing. Yet it has not been proven that affordable (i.e., subsidized) housing is what’s most needed. In fact, Fulton tells how the middle-class black homeowners of South Central opposed affordable-housing developments proposed by those who intended to do good, because it would come at the expense of existing homeowners.

William Fulton deals with the contemporary culmination of the processes that the magnetic agglomeration of communities throughout metropolitan Los Angeles.

Fulton concludes by examining the consequences of the growth machine’s future. The closing of the frontier would require a reorientation of American perspectives of the world, the metropolitan frontier likewise is closing.
The time-honored response to a place that has been over-developed is simply to pull up stakes, move on, and create a new place. As can be seen in the history of Los Angeles, this is not a sustainable future. Retreating into their suburban cocoons and disassociating themselves from the metropolis, the residents of Los Angeles are reluctant to engage in the pursuit of a common urban life and envision a positive future.

Fulton’s book, due to its contemporary nature, is more journalistic than scholastic. It is well-referenced: academic works are used to provide historical foundation; while newspaper articles, personal interviews, planning agency reports, etc., account for the bulk of the current material.

The fear is that the increasing economic and political tensions associated with this development strengthens xenophobic systems of surveillance and discipline. This can be seen, for example, in the city’s massive incarceration rate and in the systemic corruption and brutality of its justice system. This fear is particularly palpable in a city whose entertainment industry not only covers over these threats but also works to distract the rest of the world from similar threats.
The hope, however, is that the city’s internal third worlds will bring new life and creativity to the city, resisting the xenophobic machinations pitted against them. The citizens of internal third worlds carry the histories of their people’s racial upheavals, religious persecutions, and the enchantment of their traditions. At the same time, they are confronted by the systemic devaluation of these histories and traditions, and in many cases by the negation of their American civic identities. Los Angeles is the site from which the eruptions of a lost past meet the uncertainties of an increasingly threatening present. This project exposes the racial, economic, and social inequalities that are present in Los Angeles and, in turn, documents growing micropolitical resistances to these often violent hierarchies.

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