ng has involved tearing down the old to make way for the new. The idea was to make "rational" choices to improve the city and make it more modern. But the trouble with the rationality of this type was that the practices of everyday life preempted the modernist logics that underlay it" (Dear 81). What that means is that the plans for making Los Angeles modern had a life of their own. They did not take enough account of the impact that this kind of planning would have on the quality of life of the people who were already there. Thus the people would not have a definite connection to the unfolding Los Angeles as a whole. They would be confined to their own communities:
[A]s the modern public expanded, it shattered into a multitude of fragments speaking incommensurable private languages. Thus fragmented, modernity loses much of its capacity to organize and give meaning to people's lives (Dear 81-2).
Thus Davis makes the point that the environmental beauty of th
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