Week 1 - Introduction

Welcome to my blog for Geography 151: Cities and Social Differences.

My name is Catherine Formusa and I'm a 3rd year Global Studies Major at UCLA. After visiting Shanghai, China in a study abroad program this past July, I found myself particularly interested in the title of this class, "Cities and Social Differences." Surprisingly, I found many similarities between Shanghai and Los Angeles in terms of the cities' layouts - there were towns on the outskirts of the city, different neighborhoods inside the city, and a downtown main business center with most of the large buildings. Despite the many differences between life in Shanghai and Los Angeles, the fact that the city had the same type of organizational regions fascinated me. I wanted to learn more about cities and the regions in and around them and this class seemed to be the perfect way to accomplish that.

Although I don't believe I have a firm grasp of the term, I understand social difference to define the relationship between people's geographical location and their way of life. When people from one neighborhood in LA (say, Beverly Hills) are compared to another (Inglewood), there are many social differences in economic status, behavior, attitude, and culture despite their close proximity to one another. Through this blog I intend to explore these social differences by traveling once a week to a different area of the LA metropolitan area and documenting my thoughts and experiences here.

As a student from Tampa, Florida, I'm particularly excited to start exploring LA. Although I've had a car for 2 years on campus, I still feel that there are many places I haven't been and/or spent enough time in to really see the entire area. I'm looking forward to everything about traveling around Los Angeles in the next 10 weeks (well, except maybe the traffic).