Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1964, 1930s, 1910, 1849,
"Planning in Los Angeles? . . . for this has always been a planned city; Lieutenant Ord's survey map of 1849 is also a plan for further development, and . . . a historical report to the Mayor in 1964. . . .
". . . the proposal that the city shall develop much as it has . . . clusters of towers in a sea of single family dwellings." p. 137
"(1910) an appropriation of $100 . . . for the Planning Committee; . .
" . . . planning . . . is one of those admired facets of the the established Liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles (whatever pockets of conventional good planning may have been created by local pockets of conventional liberal thinking)." pp. 138-139
"Conventional standards of planning do not work in Los Angeles, . . . effective planning to the mechanisms that have already given the city its present character: the infrastructure to giant agencies like the Division of Highways and the Metropolitan Water District and their like; the intermediate levels of management to the subdivision and zoning ordinances; the detail decisions to local and private initiatives; with ad hoc interventions by city, State and pressure-groups formed to agitate over matters of clear and present need. . . . " p. 139
"This is not to claim that any of these mechanisms is any more perfect than any other human institution, or works more than averagely well . . . Bending the zoning regulations is reckoned to be a bigger area of graft than the vice industry, since changes in zoning directly affect land-values and thus impinge on the oldest Angeleno method of turning a fast buck. . .
"Outside the administrative area of the City of Los Angeles itself, the other communities . . . have their own views on the meaning and purpose of zoning practices, and in some cases they have drafted them, and employed them, to reinforce local town planning [in order to] remain exclusive . . . " p. 141
"So recreational living tends to become another synonym for the social 'turf' system of closed communities; systematic planning remains the creation of privileged enclaves. Less frequently it has meant the creation of underprivileged enclaves, since much of the residential planning of the late thirties, for instance, was intended to create tidy places to dispose of socially untidy people, the lower working classes as understood in the political dogma of the time . . . Within a couple more years, with the war about to break out, this kind of residential planning became a matter of urgency to house the influx of new industrial workers. pp. 145 and 146.