You and I aren't fools. We keep our eyes open. We follow the news. But the region where we live is so huge and complex. And changing so quickly. With short deadlines and tight budgets, most of what the media packages as "news" is not -- just old caricatures recycled with new names. Southern California is romanticized, demonized and satirized, because Southern California stereotypes make for great entertainment.
As amusement, this works. But half truths, myths and stereotypes make it virtually impossible to talk seriously about our region's future. Imagine trying to raise a child if all you had to go on was a video of the Hollywood movie, "Parenthood." The movie makes you laugh, it makes you cry. But it's useless for helping you figure out how to manage your family budget or what to do when your baby wakes up crying in the middle of the night.
That's our position as citizens, voters and taxpayers. Clueless. Not a problem -- if "Southern California" was just a soap opera. Or if we lived in a monarchy. But it's not and we don't.
Driving one rainy day from his home in Ventura County through "suburb after suburb, shopping center after shopping center and tract after tract," journalist and planner Bill Fulton began a journey of discovery that led him to write an extraordinary book called "The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles." He calls it "an amalgamation of political science, history, sociology and urban planning" aimed at "telling good stories and ferreting out their meaning." With a passion for accuracy and depth, he illuminates overlooked parts of the landscape, like the seventy-foot tall mountain of freeway debris dumped across the street from homes on a quiet street in Huntington Park. He sheds revealing new light on familiar stories like the Orange County bankruptcy. Uncovering the hidden social fault lines beneath the surface of Southern California, Fulton's book is a rich portrait of a giant metropolis in transition, a practical guidebook for understanding where we really are and how we got here.
"It is not surprising," Fulton writes in the introduction, "that when Los Angeles finally grew so vast as to be unfathomable even to those who lived there -- when the gap between the illusion of a spacious suburban lifestyle and the daily reality of a massive metropolis could no longer be papered over with dreams -- the growth machine began to collapse under its own weight. Happy suburbanites turned angry about traffic jams and high taxes, reducing their tolerance for more suburbs. Struggling inner cities began to rise up against decades of neglect. Farmers and environmentalists protested the loss of open land. In short, the formula that had built Los Angeles so quickly no longer worked."
"While the growth consensus has collapsed," Fulton continues, "no new paradigm has emerged to take its place." While we continue to assume that Southern California will grow bigger, hardly anyone imagines life will be better. There will certainly be a future for the nation's largest urban area and the world's twelfth largest economy. But will it be one we want to live in
?Only if we make it so. The quest begins when "we redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region," Fulton writes. "We can no longer afford to be suburbanites, no matter where we live. We must instead, learn once again to become citizens of this metropolis, no matter how reluctant a metropolis it may be." Where to start? Go to your local library or bookstore and read this book.
Rick Cole
Urbanist and ex-Mayor of Pasaden
