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Impact of Urban Sprawl in Los Angeles

The purpose of this research is to examine the complex impact of urban sprawl in Los Angeles on the quality of life in the city. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical background and context for making urban sprawl an issue in Southern California and then to discuss ways in which urban sprawl as a concept and as a fact of experience has influenced interaction between various political constituencies of the area as well as between human life and the physical environment.

The view of Davis in analyzing modern Los Angeles quality of life is this: In the twentieth century, Los Angeles began as a beautiful city, a Garden of Eden. But it became an unlivable city over the decades because of environmental damage. Davis cites work of sociologist William Whyte. He describes Whyte's vision of the city as an example of unplanned growth that "mess[ed] up [the] environment," resulting in "urban sprawl" (Davis 169). This is not, says Ewing, the same as the appearance of suburbs (107-8). Instead, urban sprawl was a matter of development policy by which city planners removed large public spaces and allowed commercial development in their place--mainly in lower-class city areas. This concept helped commercial interests increase wealth, but at the expense of lower-class public parks and other commonly shared spaces. Even supposed wilderness areas of Los Angeles are congested. The Los Angeles National Forest has 30 million visitors a year, the highest rate in the country (Hong and Marquis B1). But urban sprawl is even in evidence there, with "rushing waters drowned out by blaring radios" (Hong and Marquis B2), as well as graffiti, vandalism, and crowded or unusable picnic areas.

It has been noted that public administration experts that analyze the loss of public space are harshly critical of such alternatives to multicultural urban social encounter as cyberspace communication (Gumpert and Drucker 177). Gumpert and Drucker are n...

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Impact of Urban Sprawl in Los Angeles. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:32, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712060.html