Introduction
This essay compares the urban divisions of Downtown Los Angeles, an American metropolis, with Le Marais in Paris, a historic European district, to explore how cities are made and remade through spatial and historical analysis. Drawing on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) and Spiro Kostof’s The City Assembled (1992), the analysis focuses on edges, infrastructure, public places, and sacred spaces, informed by concepts of high modernist planning and urban morphology. The purpose is to identify drivers of remaking, such as governance, policy, and cultural shifts, while examining connectivity, streets, and hidden maps like zoning or infrastructure. By mapping these elements comparatively, the essay highlights similarities and differences in how materiality, wealth, ethnicity, and ecology shape urban fabrics. Key points include the secularisation of sacred spaces, the role of highways in creating edges, and implications for sustainability in remaking the metropolis.
Selection of Urban Districts and Historical Context
Downtown Los Angeles, as a district in a modern American metropolis, exemplifies rapid 20th-century remaking driven by industrial growth, automotive culture, and urban renewal policies. Founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, it evolved into a sprawling grid influenced by high modernist ideals critiqued by Scott (1998), where state legibility prioritised efficiency over organic forms. In contrast, Le Marais in Paris represents an older European fabric with roots in medieval times, remade during the 19th-century Haussmann renovations, which imposed boulevards and rational planning akin to Scott’s authoritarian modernism (Scott, 1998, Chapter 2).
Historically, Downtown LA’s remaking involved displacement through freeway construction in the 1950s, fragmenting neighbourhoods along ethnic and class lines (Avila, 2014). Le Marais, once a aristocratic quarter, faced decline post-Revolution but was revitalised in the 1960s through preservation policies, maintaining its medieval street patterns while adapting to modern uses (Kostof, 1992, Chapter 2). These districts allow comparison of remaking drivers: economic booms in LA versus cultural heritage in Paris. Using Google Earth, edges in Downtown LA are defined by freeways like the I-10 and I-110, creating hard barriers, while Le Marais’s boundaries follow the Seine River and historic walls, with softer topographic transitions.
Mapping Edges, Infrastructure, and Connectivity
Mapping on Google Earth reveals stark differences in edges and connectivity. In Downtown LA, edges are dominated by infrastructure such as the Harbor Freeway (I-110), which acts as a seam dividing the district from adjacent areas like South LA, historically influenced by redlining policies that segregated communities based on race and ethnicity (Rothstein, 2017). These highways, built in the mid-20th century, prioritise high-speed movement but fragment pedestrian connectivity, aligning with Scott’s critique of state-imposed legibility that erases local complexities (Scott, 1998, Chapter 3). Public places like Pershing Square serve as gathering nodes but are often isolated by surrounding traffic.
In Le Marais, edges are more organic, shaped by topography and the River Seine, with streets like Rue de Rivoli providing permeable boundaries. Historic maps from the 18th century, such as the Turgot map of Paris (1739), show continuity in morphology, overlaid comparatively at the same scale with modern LA maps to highlight LA’s grid expansion versus Paris’s radial evolution. Connectivity in Le Marais relies on a dense network of narrow streets and metro lines, fostering walkability, whereas Downtown LA’s infrastructure emphasises cars and trucks, with limited transit like the Metro Rail. Kostof (1992, Chapter 4) notes streets as principal public spaces; in LA, they facilitate drainage and power but prioritise vehicular flow, creating seams rather than integrations.
Hypotheses on drivers suggest governance in LA favoured economic efficiency, leading to freeway locations along low-income areas, while Paris’s policies preserved historical fabric for tourism and sustainability. Both show hidden maps: LA’s zoning enforces invisible edges through commercial-residential divides, and Paris reveals ecological layers like buried streams influencing medieval layouts.
Public Places, Sacred Spaces, and Streets
Public places in both districts underscore remaking processes. In Downtown LA, Grand Park functions as a core gathering node, redesigned in 2012 to connect civic buildings, yet it contends with homelessness and underuse, reflecting Scott’s (1998, Chapter 2) ideas on legibility disrupting social fabrics. Streets like Broadway, historically vibrant, now mix commercial uses but are disrupted by highways, limiting their role as connective structures beyond movement.
Le Marais boasts Place des Vosges, a 17th-century square that serves multiple functions: gathering, recreation, and cultural events, embodying Kostof’s (1992, Chapter 3) view of public places as urban hearts. Its streets, such as Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, retain medieval characters for pedestrian movement and drainage, contrasting LA’s wider, car-oriented avenues.
Regarding sacred spaces, Kostof (1992) emphasises temples and temenoi as defining urban character. In Le Marais, the Temple du Marais (a Protestant church) and historic synagogues maintain sacred cores, though secularisation has repurposed some for cultural uses, with edges redescribed by 19th-century policies favouring public access. In Downtown LA, sacred areas like the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels replaced older sites, but secular culture has largely erased temenoi, driven by economic redevelopment; changes at the core (e.g., urban renewal) preceded edge transformations, influenced by wealth and ethnicity rather than materiality alone.
Comparative overlays show LA’s edges transformed by infrastructure, while Paris’s evolved organically. Movement in LA is car-dominated, creating edges via freeways, whereas Paris supports multimodal transit, with ecological maps (e.g., Seine hydrology) hidden but influential.
Drivers of Change and Cross-Cutting Issues
Drivers of creation and change differ notably. In Downtown LA, infrastructure like freeways stemmed from post-war policies promoting automobility, rooted in racial segregation and economic priorities (Avila, 2014). Redlining maps reveal hidden edges based on ethnicity, while environmental justice issues, such as pollution from highways, affect district identity. Scott (1998, Chapter 3) critiques this high modernism for ignoring local knowledge, leading to fragmented spaces.
In Le Marais, remaking was driven by cultural preservation post-1960s, with Haussmann’s earlier interventions creating boulevards for control and hygiene (Scott, 1998, Chapter 2). Hidden maps include jurisdictional patterns of ownership, visible in the district’s gentrified built fabric compared to surrounding areas. Warfare history, like the Revolution, marked its identity, distancing from aristocratic pasts through renaming.
Cross-cutting issues like infrastructure change impact both: LA’s freeways disrupt ecology, while Paris addresses sustainability through bike lanes. Causality involves wealth (gentrification in both), ethnicity (segregation in LA), and ecology (topography in Paris), but not exclusively; policy decisions, such as zoning, create invisible edges. Public places relate to cultural identity, with LA’s parks addressing environmental disruption roots in industrial expansion.
Conclusion
In summary, comparing Downtown Los Angeles and Le Marais illuminates how edges, public places, and sacred spaces drive urban remaking, with LA’s high modernist infrastructure creating rigid divisions and Paris preserving organic fabrics amid secular shifts. Drivers like policy, economy, and ethnicity shape these, revealing hidden maps of inequality and ecology. Implications for (re)making the metropolis suggest balancing legibility with local sustainability, as critiqued by Scott (1998), to foster inclusive connectivity. This analysis underscores the need for historical awareness in urban planning, potentially informing contemporary redesigns toward equity.
(Word count: 1,128 including references)
References
- Avila, E. (2014) The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. University of Minnesota Press.
- Kostof, S. (1992) The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History. Thames & Hudson.
- Rothstein, R. (2017) The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing.
- Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
