Paradigm City

by Tony Chavira

What’s the difference between a hamlet, a village and a town? Or A town and a city? A city and a mega-city? A mega-city and a county?

When people originally said the word “hamlet,” they were actually developing a distinction between religious districts. Hamlets were tiny villages that didn’t have their own churches, and instead you had to go into larger, formal “villages” to pray, which were distinctly called villages because they had their own parishes. Villages were considered patently smaller than “towns” because towns had municipal leadership. There were no mayors in villages; they were considered more like collectives plus a church or two. Towns also tended to have one or two commercial centers (even if they were open-air markets), where people could congregate. These commercial centers were probably the reason local municipalities were developed in towns instead of villages or hamlets: you need order to maintain safety in the market.

The traditional difference between a town and a city is less distinct, though. Appropriately, the term “city” also originally referred to a religious community, one controlled by a bishop ordained by the king to rule over a borough (although, in old-timey days, the term borough actually meant fort). In other words, cities were the humble abodes of Battle Bishops. Today, we see “boroughs” only as components of a city. When you say things like “downtown” or “going into town,” you’re probably thinking of one of two things, though: the economic center of your area (which reflects the original definition of the word town) or the nearby city, because it is the economic center. But when you get right down to it, a city is different from a town because it’s much more populated. When we think of towns, we tend to imagine communities no larger than a few thousand people. Cities can be anything from the tens of thousands into the millions. Therein lies the distinction between what we would call a city versus what we’d consider a mega-city: cities can have a population up to 9,999,999 and megacities are 10 million people or more.

So far there are 18 mega-cities in the world, with the largest being greater Tokyo with a population of 34 million people ... about 4 million more than there are living in the entire country of Iraq. And we still feel comfortable calling it a city. Just like Buenos Aires with its measly three million residents, or Omaha with its pathetic 440,000. If you include greater Los Angeles into the mix when you refer to the “city of Los Angeles,” we have about 18 million people living here, and therefore can constitute a mega-city.

Counties are more interestingly defined though, since they were meant as a way for one local official (a count, appropriately enough) to rule over a series of towns, villages, hamlets, and whatever else was handed down from their parents. From that definition, we have determined that counties are collections of cities that fall under the jurisdiction of a wider, regional municipality.

I find it interesting that we have essentially developed fictitious distinctions to divide our municipalities, based on weird historical paradigms. For example, what dictates that the city of New York has five boroughs, instead of New York being a county and the boroughs each being its own city? The fact that each had their own forts at one point? Who has the right to say that Echo Park isn’t a town when its population is half the size of Omaha's? In fact, who has the right, knowing that the population of South Los Angeles is almost 521,000, to say that it isn’t a city unto itself? It’s bigger than the cities of San Bernardino and Irvine combined and somehow still isn’t considered one.

In some ways, we’ve arbitrarily elevated the positions of politicians—such as our playboy Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or any of our county supervisors—based on almost whimsical understandings of how our community should be organized. Facing a gigantic budgetary shortfall and problems with the misalignment of city departments and city services, it would be helpful (I think) to stop for a moment and question the fundamental organization of Los Angeles, its villages, boroughs, city and county. Certain economic models may be better fit for a smaller or larger organization, based on their needs and roles of the communities inside whatever we call “L.A.” For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District may not need to be its current size in order to run effectively. This may mean that a series of smaller organizations may be better suited to represent (and allocate funding for) our schools, or it may mean that a much larger and more broadly organized system will be required. Los Angeles Public Works may be better suited to spread its influence and structure throughout the county, similarly to how the Los Angeles County Fire Department did. The Los Angeles Mayor’s office, on the other hand, may be better suited to a smaller domain to limit the expansive scope of the office’s influence.

Dense urban areas, in general, have a lot of good stuff going for them in comparison to smaller, less populated regions. Wages are 30% higher in cities of 1.5 million people or larger, and significantly less greenhouse gas per person is emitted in urban areas than in rural ones. But cities per se are utterly arbitrary distinctions for urban space. Zipf’s Law, in terms of urban planning as discussed recently in the New York Times Economix blog, argues (simply) that, for instance, the largest city in America will have twice as many people as the second largest, and four times as many at the fourth largest. Although this doesn’t hold true all the time, it’s pretty close when considering California: Los Angeles, with its 4 million residents, is more than twice the size of the second largest city, San Diego (which has 1.4 million residents), more than three times the size of San Jose (just over one million), and more than four times the size of San Francisco (roughly 856,000.

But Zipf’s Law is totally contingent on the arbitrary edges of the cities. If Los Angeles were physically and municipally cut in half, Zipf’s Law would simply be wrong. And yet, our collective minds have been tricked into thinking that the dense urban population and municipal organization we deal with every day somehow dictates the limits of our counties, cities, towns, villages or hamlets.

How drastically would things change if we partitioned Los Angeles into halves? Fourths? Twelfths? Or eliminated the city government altogether and submitted to a county or regional board of supervisors under the assumption that we’re living in a mega-city? I guess it would all depend on which size and scope you consider the paradigm.

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