Week 3 - West Hollywood

This week I walked along a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood famous for its gay-friendly culture. The neighborhood has an overwhelming amount of gay pride, with rainbow flags hanging from sidewalk shops and median flagpoles. The American Apparel has rainbow lights underlining their sign and there is even a rainbow crosswalk. The street (Santa Monica Boulevard) has two lanes on each side and are lined with palm trees. The median is wide enough for a cleanly paved dirt walkway decorated with artistic sculptures. The sidewalks were well groomed along with the people walking them - mostly young men. Many of the pedestrians had pet dogs accompanying them and the coffee shops, bars, and restaurants lining Santa Monica Blvd. are all high-end dining and shopping options. After seeing several tour buses pass down the street, I noticed it sold as a popular tourist attraction. 

The gay district in West Hollywood completely contrasts the homosexual neighborhoods David Sibley describes in "Mapping the Pure and Defiled." Sibley claims that homosexual men and women are part of a minority that is discriminated against as "moral pollution" and therefore confined to an undesirable area of a city. While the gay district of West Hollywood is designated to one area specifically, it is a clean, wealthy and desirable neighborhood to live in. 

The area of Los Angeles fits the description of a post-metropolis city given in lecture much better than Sibley’s description. The radical individualism present in the gay district of West Hollywood created a segregated community connected with the rest of the city through decentralized transportation networks (some buses, but mostly personal cars). The importance of this decentralized transportation network is displayed in the wide 4-lane street with a large, decorated median. The area was certainly service-sector dominated as I saw no industrial factories or manufacturing companies but instead boutique shops, restaurants, bars and nightclubs there to cater to the wealthier population of Los Angeles. Just as Professor Wilford described post-metropolis cities in lecture, there was no body or overarching structure bringing this segregated community together with any other part of LA, but instead it was “connected through decentralized social institutions and decentralized transportation networks.”

Sibley said that  "urban society provides further visions of purity and pollution where the polluting are more likely to be social, and often spatially marginal minorities, like gays, prostitutes and homeless... media representations are mostly fictional, imaginary constructions, but they draw on the same stereotyped images of people and places which surface in social conflicts involving mainstream communities and 'deviant' minorities." However, if this is the case, how come so many tour buses came through this part of Santa Monica Boulevard and desired to see the "gay district" of West Hollywood? I believe that the gay district of West Hollywood is more an example of Sibley's conclusion: "Historically, at least within European capitalist societies, it is evident that the boundary of 'society' has shifted, embracing more of the population, with the class divide in particular becoming more elusive as a boundary marker." I was happy to see the social acceptance and economic success of a minority that was so largely discriminated against in the past.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gay-marriage-20121108,0,1260230.story << This article found in the L.A. times talks about the legalization of gay marriage in the United States after the November 2012 election. This article further confirms the acceptance of gays into the community and the decrease of social differences between people of different sexualities in modern times. 11/9/12

Week 2 - Chinatown

Chinatown of Los Angeles is a neighborhood known for its rich Chinese culture and history. Because it was home of the majority of the first generation Chinese migrants in Los Angeles during the 1900s, many people visit Chinatown to get a taste of the Chinese culture, architecture and way of life in America.

At first glance, I was disappointed by how Americanized and commercialized Chinatown was. The streets were labeled with ridiculously American names like "Bamboo Plaza" and "Mandarin Plaza" - certainly not what the local first generation Chinese immigrants had called them. As I walked around, I passed by families of caucasian tourists with their cameras and fanny packs, a group of elderly men and women walking into a building labeled "Chinese Historical Society of Southern California," and international eateries such as "Via Cafe" and "Wonder Bakery" that certainly were not Chinese. There were informational placards placed all around the city telling about the history of Chinese immigration in the area and although I did enjoy the amount of historical information provided, I felt that the entire area was artificially created to look Chinese without any true local Chinese people or culture surrounding the neighborhood.

Elderly Tourists

Chinese woman walking through more traditional part of Chinatown

It was only after I traveled past the areas labeled like Bamboo and Mandarin Plaza that I found the rich cultural diversity that I was looking for. Farther down the way there were shops and restaurants that reminded me much more of the ones I had seen while studying abroad in Shanghai - junk shops crowded with a plethora of random items for sale, fancy tea houses, fish markets with live fish for sale, and noodle and soup restaurants. For the first time since I arrived I saw Chinese men and women shopping alongside the tourists and conversing with one another in the streets. I even saw one group of men gambling with dice in the middle of the street exactly like they did at the back corner of our ENCU campus in Shanghai.

The major difference between this Chinatown and other Chinese cultural hotspots was the large latino influence present in the area. Most signs and advertisements provided spanish translations under them and I passed just as many Hispanic men and women as I did Asian. I think that because Los Angeles has a large Mexican as well as Asian population, they had both inhabited this neighborhood as a comfortable place that welcomed diversity.

Many of the signs in Chinatown provided Spanish Translations.

In Burgess's The Blackwell City Reader in Chapter 37, "The Growth of the City," he places Chinatown in the zone of deterioration as a part of the slums; "The slums are also crowded to over-flowing with immigrant colonies - The Ghetto, Little Sicily, Greek-Town, Chinatown - fascinatingly combining old world heritages and American adaptations."  Although the location of Chinatown in Los Angeles fits this description (about 5 minutes from downtown), I believe that it has economically outgrown the typical "slum." Whether the area owes it's increase in revenues to the tourism that the Americanized part of Chinatown brings in or through other ways, I would classify the Chinatown in Los Angeles as a neighborhood extremely safe and clean compared to other slums in a city's zone of deterioration.

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).