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Population flows led to the dominance of certain neighborhoods and populations. The city’s Westside Jewish population secured early economic and political power through its successes in suburban real estate, entertainment, and business. Thus, as the city attempted to expand its cultural prestige, the Westside and Downton areas garnered larger projects and more funding. The development of “corporate multiculturalism” and “municipal culture policy” created private-public artistic institutions but ignored community-based art centers and ethnic artists. Though the dominant classes identified such cultural institutions as valuable in terms of real estate ventures, their scope remains tied to specific sections of the city like the Westside. Davis laments the lack of an oppositional voice briefly pointing to rap and hip hop but acknowledging that aspects of itself remain problematic. He asks the question is any movement capable of avoiding assimilation by the dominant entertainment industry generally.
====Davis divides Los Angeles history into 3 Three Distinct Eras====
Dividing Los Angeles history into a tripartite periodization that organizes its past into 3 epochs 1) 1880-1940s 2) post- WWII, 3) 1970’s - present, Davis illustrates that the city’s power structure was increasingly fragmented. In contrast to other metropolitan areas, LA’s Jewish population secured power early in its history, eventually sharing it with new Irish arrivals until pushed out by the movement of WASPs from various parts of the country but especially the Midwest. Davis notes four thematic characteristics of the LA power structure. First, the elite system illustrated a porousness absent in many other city’s.
Minority populations often faced with a false choice between environmentalism and employment, chose to side with pro-growth forces on some occasions and with slow growth on others. The implicit exclusionary rhetoric of many homeowner’s associations complicated choices for minority communities who had been increasingly squeezed out of other neighborhoods by government development schemes that wanted to avoid crossing middle and upper-class white communities. The eventual emergence of NIMBYism serves as Davis concluding observation. The complexity of the issues means that determining specific class polarization around land use has proven nearly impossible. The appropriation of anti-elitist populist rhetoric by developers in opposition to NIMBYism further complicates the historical picture. Though the slow-growth movement proliferated, it did so in individualistic ways, each focusing on their own parochial interests. Ultimately, with the increased immigration of overseas peoples and capital, the struggle over land control became as much about determining what communities qualified as American as about actual political power over land development.
====Entitled Fortress LA====Entitled In the chapter entitled Fortress LA, Davis explores the construction of modern Los Angeles as an architectural prison. The destruction of “real” public space through nuanced planning and architectural schemes have established a “neo military” style that foregrounds surveillance efforts. Anti-pedestrian this new “suburban-like city” construction deviates from other metropolises, “In other cities, developers might have attempted to articulate the new skyscape and the old, exploiting the latter’s extraordinary inventory of theaters and historic buildings to create a gentrified history – a gaslight district, Faneuil Market … — as support to middle-class colonization. But Los Angeles’s developers viewed property values in the old Broadway core as irreversibly eroded by the area’s very centrality to public transport, and especially by its heavy use by Black and Mexican poor.” (230). Ultimately, this has created a racialized spatialization of the city. Davis even takes Frank Gehry to task arguing his work “clarifies the underlying relations of repression, surveillance, and exclusion that characterize the fragmented, paranoid spatiality towards which Los Angeles seems to aspire.” (238) The LAPD’s work with the local military aerospace industry has contributed to this siege mentality. The emergence of the Emergency Command Control Communications Systems (ECCCS) along with the LAPD’s own information gathering “has become the central neural system for he vast and separate, public and private, security operations taking place in Los Angeles.” (253) The pervasive effect of such developments has been the collapse of public space.
====The Catholic Church and Latinos====
