Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 6

"What recession??"

For this blog I used simplymap.com to research the next location I would visit.  It took me a while to learn how to navigate the website, but finally I was able to research income levels.  I chose to locate areas with population density correlating to household income of $200,000 and over from the 2010 census.  I found it odd that the legend mapped from only 5% all the way to 100%, but I was still able to get the results I needed.

Holmby Park is a beautiful park with a large grass area, a cement path and trees lining the outskirts, and a playground centered in the middle of Beverly Hills.  While the park itself was aesthetically pleasing, the surrounding properties were what really caught my eye.  The properties outlining the park were lavish mansions, with fancy gated front yards.  It was easy to see why simply maps designated the area with a high average income level.  

As I was observing the park and the surrounding area I found a strong correlation between this area and the Marxian ideals we discussed this week in lecture.  In Marxian viewpoint, the city is a tool used by the upper class to produce surplus value, reproduce labor, and legitimize capitalism.  The concept "the city is a site of cultural ideology that legitimizes capitalism" can be directly applied to this location.  In the center of Beverly Hills, a popular tourism destination as well as a city lining some of the most popular commuter traffic routes, it displays the benefits of capitalism.  It works as a "social control" to give the laborers a goal or dream to work towards.  

After spending an afternoon at the park and noticing a racial profile of mostly white with a smaller amount of HIspanic, Asian, and African Americans, my racial observations may be aligned with that of Massey and Denton's in the their article, "The Continuing Causes of Segregation".  Massey and Denton suggest that the still-existing racial segregation in American cities is attributed to race and not class.  They believe that the causes of the continuing significance of race is because whites have no yet come to terms with open housing in practice and only in principle. Desegregation only occurs in metro areas where racial mixing does not reach a high percentage.  Thus, they conclude that race is a powerful determinant of segregation in residential areas.  

While Massy and Denton present a very good argument, I believe that class plays more of a role than race in this particular example of Beverly Hills and segregation.  In a city as diverse as Los Angeles, the income level, as seen through simply maps, segregates class differences.  


-Britt