The City That Never Walks: Understanding Los Angeles

The City That Never Walks: Understanding Los Angeles

A Giant Among Cities

Imagine you could look down at the United States from way up high in the clouds, like a superhero with incredible zoom-in vision. You would see thousands of cities scattered across the country like pieces on a giant board game. Most of these cities would look pretty similar to each other—tall buildings clustered together in the center, with neighborhoods spreading out in neat squares and rectangles around them. New York would look like a forest of skyscrapers pressing against each other. Chicago would show you its famous downtown towers. Boston would reveal its compact, winding streets that follow old cow paths from hundreds of years ago.

But then, if you looked a little further west, something completely different would catch your eye. Along the Pacific Coast, where the ocean meets the land, you would spot something enormous—a city so big it doesn't even look like a single city at all. It looks more like a thousand tiny towns all stitched together with ribbons of roads and highways. Welcome to Los Angeles, the city that never walks.

Los Angeles is not just big. It's超大—that's the Chinese word for "super huge," by the way! Los Angeles is so massive that if you tried to drive from one end to the other on a clear day with no traffic (and traffic is something we'll talk about a lot in this book), it would take you nearly four hours. Four hours! That's longer than most movies. That's longer than a basketball game plus halftime plus all the timeouts. You could drive for four hours in most cities and cross through five or six different cities along the way. But in Los Angeles, you're still just getting from one neighborhood to another.

The official name for this giant collection of communities is the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The word "metropolitan" comes from a Greek word that originally meant "mother city," and it refers to a large city together with all the smaller cities and towns that have grown up around it. The Los Angeles metropolitan area includes not just the city of Los Angeles itself, but also places like Long Beach, Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Monica, Glendale, and dozens of other cities and neighborhoods that have all merged together into one giant urban blob.

Measuring a Monster: How Big Is Big?

Let's talk numbers, because numbers help us understand just how special Los Angeles really is. The entire city of Los Angeles covers about 503 square miles of land. A square mile is an area that would be a perfect square if each side was one mile long. Think of a football field—that's about one acre, and 640 acres fit into one square mile. So 503 square miles means a lot of football fields stacked side by side.

Now, here comes the really fun comparison. The entire country of England could fit inside Los Angeles more than twice! England covers about 50,000 square miles, and Los Angeles is only 503 square miles, so that's not quite right. But let's try London instead. London, the capital of England and one of the biggest cities in all of Europe, covers about 607 square miles. That's actually slightly larger than the city of Los Angeles. But here's where things get interesting—London's population of about 9 million people is squeezed into those 607 square miles, creating a dense, walkable city where you can throw a pebble and hit three different neighborhoods.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, is home to nearly 4 million people in that same amount of space, but it feels nothing like London. In London, you can walk from one interesting neighborhood to another. In Los Angeles, you need a car to go anywhere. That's because London built up—tall buildings, underground trains, double-decker buses—while Los Angeles spread out—low buildings, wide highways, and more roads than you could possibly count.

If you were to place the entire city of London inside Los Angeles, it would stretch from the beach on the west side all the way to the mountains on the east side, and you'd still have room left over. You could fit Manhattan—the tiny island that makes up part of New York City—inside Los Angeles more than twenty times. Twenty Manhattans! That might be hard to picture, so let's try something else.

Imagine you have a pan of brownies baking in your oven. If you bake them in a normal-sized pan, you get a nice, thick square of brownie that you can cut into nine equal pieces. But what if you poured that same batter into a giant sheet pan the size of your entire kitchen? The brownie would spread out so thin that you'd have to cut it into hundreds of tiny pieces, and each piece would be barely a bite. That's what happened with Los Angeles. The city spread itself so thin over the land that getting from one piece to another takes a car, a bus, or a very long walk.

Natural Boundaries: Why LA Couldn't Grow Up

So why did Los Angeles end up spreading out instead of growing up like New York or Chicago? The answer lies in geography—the natural features of the land that surrounded the city and told it where it could and couldn't grow. Understanding geography is one of the most important skills for understanding how cities work, and Los Angeles has one of the most dramatic geographical settings of any city in the world.

To the west of Los Angeles lies the Pacific Ocean, the largest and deepest ocean on Earth. The Pacific is so big that you could fit all of the world's continents inside it and still have room left over. For thousands of years, the ocean has been creating the coastline of California, eroding cliffs, building beaches, and shaping the land. When Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by Spanish explorers (we'll learn more about that exciting history in Chapter 3), the ocean was a barrier that the city simply couldn't cross. You can't build houses underwater (unless you're an octopus, and humans haven't figured out how to do that yet).

But the ocean was only one boundary. To the north and east of Los Angeles, enormous mountains rise up like giant walls blocking the city's path. The Santa Monica Mountains cut through the heart of the Los Angeles area, creating a natural divider between the coastal areas and the San Fernando Valley. Further north and east, the San Gabriel Mountains reach toward the sky, their peaks often covered with snow in the winter months. These mountains weren't just difficult to build on—they were dangerous. Steep cliffs, loose rocks, flash floods, and forest fires made the mountain slopes extremely challenging for builders and planners to work with.

Then, to the south and southeast, lay the desert. Now, you might think that deserts are just empty, flat wastelands, but they're actually much more complicated than that. The desert areas around Los Angeles are hot, dry, and receive very little rain. Building a city in the desert means dealing with water shortages, extreme summer temperatures that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and soil that isn't always suitable for construction. While people have certainly built cities in deserts (Las Vegas is a famous example), it requires a lot of extra work, money, and infrastructure to make desert living possible.

Here's a simple way to understand it. Imagine you're playing a game where you can expand your kingdom in any direction you want. But there are some directions where you're not allowed to go. If the ocean is to your west, you can't expand that way at all. If the mountains are to your north and east, they're really hard to climb over or build around. If the desert is to your south, you can go there, but it costs a lot of resources to make it work. What would you do? You would expand in the only directions that are easy and cheap—in this case, to the northwest and southwest, spreading out horizontally across the plains instead of vertically into the mountains.

That's exactly what Los Angeles did. For more than 150 years, the city spread out and out and out, filling in every available flat space between the oce