1. To Search for the Elusive Everywhere
Taking Apart LA
To Search for the Elusive Everywhere

2. Babylon:
Of the First
Like Los Angeles, Babylon had a main hub from which it radiated. This was the temple palace. Cities for countless iterations afterward would follow the model of building around a sacred site.

3. Athens: Public Space in the ‘Polis’
The flowers of Western antiquity are often considered to be the Ancient Greek contributions to culture. Much of modern-day politics is traced and substantiated with precedences stretching back to Greco-Roman influence. Soja touches on the Latin word-roots that connect modern urbanism to the ideology of spatiality -- where the public life is held to be noble and lofty compared to the “idiotes” or private, rural citizens unconnected to the central power.

4. “But it also has been increasingly obscured from view,
imaginatively
mystified
in an environment
more specialized...
“But it also has been increasingly obscured from view,
The mystique of Los Angeles, which shares the same essential attributes that Sorkin identifies in Disneyland -- an anti-geography of “culture-space” -- is hard to pinpoint. People come here broke and stay broke. People are born here broke and stay broke. These are the masses, the private citizens -- a world away from LA’s elite. Production is high here because people are managed effectively. There is no conspiracy (though racism, sexism, human folly of all kinds lurk everywhere), power distributes itself according to the precepts of modern-day simulations of the sacred. In business, in media, in academia, in domestic life… the “panopticon” is the plethora.

5. The common conception of Los Angeles reflects its central nodes.

6. 60 Mile
Circle
LA’s 60 mile circle

7. Questions: Why does Soja include the description of the “Aleph”?
What is the significance of “centrality” to a city?
How does the concept of “LA” reflect its geography?