City of Angels

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the nature of the City of the Angels looking at a very mixed bag of primary sources about the nature of commerce and the city. The paper also looks at how the city has been defined by the nature of 20th century and now 21st century capitalism. It also looks at the way the suburb has been defined by capitalism and the ways in which Los Angeles as a city that cannot exist or be understood in isolation, has also been defined by the economics of suburbs and by the ways in which the bright promise of a city on the edge of the continent becomes so easily tarnished.

From the Paper:

"We may borrow an opening line of a famous Russian novel and bend it to our own purposes, we might say that while every city is unhappy in its own ways, every suburb is unhappy in precisely the same way. This aphorism that we have just coined may help us to understand the history of the city of Los Angeles " although the history of this great American city is in fact one of the most difficult of all urban histories to write. It is difficult to talk about the nature of this city because it is not exactly a city " if one's model of a city is a place like New York City that is. But it is also a difficult city to define and to describe if one is attempting to describe it as a suburb. For while in the popular imagination Los Angeles may be nothing more than a suburb (although one imagines that its reputation for being a suburb is one based, again, in East Coast sensibilities), it is not in fact a classic bedroom community. Los Angeles is both suburb and city, both Dream Factory and home, a city of significant and fascinating contradictions."

More papers on City of Angels:

• Book Review # 96465 : "City of Angels?"
• Comparison Essay # 116142 : "The City of Los Angeles"
• Analytical Essay # 114825 : "Fortress Los Angeles" from "City of Quartz"

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