Greg Hise

Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles

Los Angeles and history are not terms that couple easily in the popular imaginary or, for that matter, in the imagination of scholars who study American society and culture. Rather, accounts of this citys past evoke and at times emulate turn-of-the-century booster promotions intended to draw émigrés to a land of prosperity and progress, a place where the future would arrive first; that future focus has held an undue grip on our analysis of greater Los Angeles. If we were to resurrect the pueblo and re-examine the first decades of city building following the American conquest we would discover a border zone, a site and locale where people, resources, and ideas originating across the globe came together and in coming together, Tongva, Spaniards, Mexicans, Californios, Yankees, and others created a hybrid or metis city and culture. Within this border city, Anglos asserted their political, economic, and social capital and in doing so orchestrated and regulated the use and meaning of urban space through agencies and institutions of the local state. Social segregation (by race-ethnicity, income, gender) and functional segregation (zoning activities and assigning these to discrete districts) are signature aspects of American cities and Angelenos used both in a process of place-making and identity formation that defined space in the city. That history matters because all manner of metrics underscore the fact that space matters; where you live, which school district or council district you call home, which hospital an ambulance takes you to, all those lines on the map define the odds you will graduate high school, attend a university, or whether you will survive a heart attack.

Whither the Region? Periods and Periodicity in Planning History

The principal argument of this article is that for a century and more the region has been a significant scale for planning practice, for the provision of basic services, and more recently for citizen activism. Yet within planning history, attention to regions and regionalism has waxed and waned. When practitioners, historians, and social scientists have considered regions retrospectively, they have tended to view events and endeavors as episodic; they have assigned the region to particular moments or movements (a City Beautiful, the New Deal, a “new regionalism”), to discrete eras or decades (ecological regionalism, regional science), and to particular localities. Often those who study practice have seen regions when those they write about organized their efforts, framed their plans, implemented policies, and constituted these explicitly as regional in scale and scope. Because the attention of those who write planning history has been more periodic than comprehensive, scholars and practitioners who seek to understand the development over time of region as a concept, an ideal, and a space of analysis and intervention have turned to geography and allied disciplines for theory and empirics.

Teaching Planners History

Might students come to see the possibilities and limitations of planning as a profession and an avocation through their study of history? Might historians help students see planning as a ubiquitous and ongoing process that has shaped the present and will inform the future? Every planning report includes a history; it may be brief in scope, it may be implied or inferred, it may be potted. Planners can do better. Their histories ought to reveal the fact that multiple, competing paradigms are always in play; that those who preceded us grappled with issues similar to those that challenge us today; that they crafted policy, drew up plans, and struggled for justice to the best of their ability; that we build upon their success and failure; that all plans are compromised in implementation; and, perhaps most importantly, that humility and persistence have been and remain essential when you aspire to make change.

Identity and Social Distance in Los Angeles

Scholarship on Los Angeles is steeped in place promotion; how enterprisers, elected officials, and residents developed actual places remains largely unexamined. From 1850 forward members of a regional growth coalition intent on attracting émigrés broadcast images of an edenic landscape. However, contrary to their claims of natural advantage, historical analyses of place reveal the significance of race and social distance for city-building in Los Angeles. Histories of property and land use, of identity and social relations reveal location to be a good, something produced over time. Functional segregation—assigning zones for particular activities—and social segregation—the sorting of people in place by race-ethnicity, income, or gender—are signature aspects of American cities. The means and methods Angelenos have employed to articulate and maintain boundaries and zones in the urban landscape—through myth, popular culture, social reform initiatives, policy, and regulation—are the primary subject of this essay.