Taking Los Angeles Apart: Some Fragments of a Critical Human Geography

Abstract

This essay, is a presentation of a succession of brief, tentative, and often incongruous readings of the human geography of contemporary Los Angeles, an urban region of both telling uniqueness and compelling generalizability. Viewed as a comprehensive whole, Los Angeles brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges's perplexing encounter with The Aleph, “the only place on earth where all places are”, a limitless space of simultaneity and contradiction, impossible to describe in ordinary language. Extraordinary language is accordingly experimented with in describing Los Angeles as a place where everything seems to ‘come together’ in evocative fragments, Abstractions and concreteness are combined in verbal tours of the peripheral and central landscapes of Los Angeles, critical travelogs aimed at restructuring how we look at, interpret, and theorize the spatiality and historicity of contemporary urban society, how we read the urban con-text.