Intro

"Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city." 

This famous quote by Dorothy Parker appears again and again when the City of Angels is discussed. Just like it’s missing a city center and instead sprawls for miles and miles of neighborhoods and edge cities, Los Angeles is also difficult to grasp in a theoretical approach. The sheer size of Los Angeles with an area of 1,300 km² for the city and 10,570 km² for the county and a population of 3,8 million, respectively almost 10 million people makes it difficult to offer generalized statements about or themes of the place and its inhabitants. 

"L.A. Times" Map - The Neighborhoods 

As historian Robert Fishman said, "Los Angeles was [...] the first truly suburban metropolis, in wich the suburbs became the city and suburban life was made available to a much greater portion of the city's residents."¹ 

"Moving day in the Southland, 1952. A posed picture for LIFE magazine illustrates the rapid suburbanization of Southern California in the early 1950s."²

Since it's "The Entertainment Capital of the World“, these developements in Los Angeles have been broadcasted via tv and cinema to the rest of the United States and the world.  Consequently, Los Angeles has functioned as a model for various other cities' planning in the last century.

Inseperable from the rapid spread of the suburbs is the car culture in Los Angeles that made leaving the city center possible in the first place. 
But in the last decades the disatvantages of a city's population being scattered all over the suburbs and relying heavily on their car, from segregation by race and class to pollution, has been recognized and Los Angeles needs to find new ways to deal with these issues.

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1 Culvers, Lawrence: The Frontier of Leisure. Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America. New York. 2010. p. 56.
2  LIFE