In the United States Geography is not really a booming profession. There is no US Department of Geography; most colleges and universities do not support the academic discipline of geography, and the American Association of Geographers boasts a membership of only 9,000 souls. Comparatively, the American Medical Association counts nearly 100 times that many doctors among its members, and there are 1.4 million organized teamsters. Nonetheless, we need to work with the land every day, and therefore many people who do not call themselves geographers do the work of studying, defining, and changing the surface of our planet.

In cities, urban planners, engineers, architects, developers, environmentalists, politicians, activists and contractors take up the banner of geography to various effect. Over the last century, these urban geographers have increasingly relied on the idea of "the site" as a major organizing framework through which to discuss development. A site is located on a map, and usually it is shaded white. It is an open space, empty and available for building, the future place of development. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find a site in the physical world, and even harder in a city because there actually aren't any empty spaces available. In cities people have built homes, businesses, neighborhoods, and factories. They've reshaped rivers, routed highways through the air, and kept some land unbuilt through a combination of sloth and care. Mapping a site into the plan of a city is an imperial act, similar to drawing a map and labeling the continents THE NEW WORLD or THE DARK CONTINENT. It requires forgetting, ignoring, destroying, and erasing people's homes and other evidence of their work on the land.

When urban geographers work with sites on maps instead of working with people who live in the real-world space occupied by those sites, they tend to create unjust and unsuccessful projects. People cannot thrive in places that geographers have replaced with imperialist thoughts, and places, buildings and cities fair as do the residents of those places. I offer a sketch of one neighborhood in Los Angeles as evidence in support of this claim.



The first row of pictures shows three maps of the same area, just east of the Los Angeles River and north of First Street. Figure one is a parcel map, hand-drawn during the Second World War, showing land use in a neighborhood of Mexican and Russian immigrants called the Flats. Los Angeles' post-war geographers designated this neighborhood first a slum, then a site, and built a large and utopian housing project upon it in 1943 (figure 2). First Street strikes diagonally across the bottom right corner of the photograph. The third representation was shot sometime between 1998 and 2004. It shows the same area with only two buildings remaining from the 1943 photograph, the structure between Las Vegas and 1st, west of Clarence, and the school complex in the center of the project. It is a site prepared for development.



The second row of photos shows more detail of the housing built in this neighborhood. At the far left are houses from the original Flats neighborhood. At center is the utopian dream of Aliso Village, built in 1943. The right image was produced on August 27, 2005 and shows the just finished homes in the new Pueblo del Sol development.

The pictures of the Flats, Aliso Village and the Pueblo del Sol highlight the architectural differences between the housing projects of the 1940s and the first decade of our new millennium. Aliso Village's apartment houses with shared halls and communal paseos belie the designers' excitement with Modern aesthetics and their trust in architecture as an agent of social equality. Pueblo del Sol offers just shy of 500 units of individual housing, for sale and rental, each with its own faux Mediterranean feel and individual driveway required by participants in the Los Angeles Freeway culture.

The architectural styles hint at some of the political and economic changes in housing development over the last 60 years. Aliso Village was one of the first publicly funded housing projects completed in Los Angeles. It was part of a wave of utopian optimism in the power of Modern architecture and rational social planning to solve cultural ills and end the poverty that swept over the United States as the depression gave way to a booming war economy, but before a fear of communism and pressure from private developers squashed any public works that smacked of anti-business socialism. Pueblo del Sol on the other hand, was constructed by McCormick Baron and Salazar, the nation's self described "leading for-profit developer of economically integrated urban neighborhoods." Salazar, Baron and McCormick are as excited about their innovative financing strategies as they are about architecture and social structure. The business model of the development is steeped in the current ideal of liberal market economy, and the architecture reflects that in stand alone houses for individual families.

Nevertheless, the new project remains fundamentally a rehash of the old. Just as they did with the Flats, public officials, in concert with development contractors, identified Aliso Village as an unacceptable neighborhood inhabited by poor immigrants. They mapped the area -- they made it a "site" for new housing -- and then razed the old buildings to begin anew. The urban geographers of this millennium are inspired to work by the similar hopeful motivations as two generations past. However, they seem to have learned the wrong lessons from their grandparents' errors. Aliso village didn't fail because of its aesthetics or its funding source. It failed because it was built on a site, emptied and conquered, rather than on land inhabited and shaped by people who lived there. Pueblo del Sol begins its course with a hopeful, even utopian outlook, but without an awareness of the geographic and cultural heritage that would truly make it a good place to live.


Images and ideas for this short essay were gathered from google maps, Elizbeth Krakow's camera, and Dana Cuff's book, Provisional Cities.

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