ot doomsayers on the issue. Instead, they advocate a communications as well as public-use perspective, to make analysis of urban decay--which may include pathological communication--complex instead of simply critical of communication that does not take place within advocates' ideas of urban diversity rules. For example, children face certain issues of safety and security in accessible public spaces that adults do not. One study of urban children's use of California cities included a part on East Los Angeles. Even though some Latino children liked to study at the library because it was a safe place, budget priorities of Los Angeles were not aimed at library creation or creating protected spaces for regular youth (Meucci and Redmond 141; 143ff). Instead, the budget went for putting youth offenders in jail.
The history of development in Los Angeles is that resi dential housing tracts for people who were not wealthy were also segregated from tracts for the wealthy. As a practical matter, this allowed the most beautiful areas of the Los Angeles Basin to be reserved for wealthy residential sites. Davis sums up this process by saying that as early as the 1900s, "the once arcadian landscape of the Los Angeles River was transformed into a sewer for the city's expanding industrial district" (Davis 161).
Davis backs up his points by reference to rejection of city planning according landscape architecture principles fostered by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Harland Bartholomew (Davis 161), in favor of commercial-needs planning in the city environment. But these needs did not take the long view of life in the city in the way that they should have. As a result, Los Angeles is an example of a "landscape of modernity" (Dear 77). But what that really means is that Los Angeles is also a city that does not reflect its long history. That is because of the approach to urban development and urban planning. Again and again in Los Angeles, urban planni...