Cities Speak!

Barker's book breaks down six features that can describe cities:

• Plant life and ecology
• Power and surveillance
• Symbolic culture, suburbanization, and gentrification
• Postmodernism
• Information technology

It's hard to argue that each take responsibility for the reputation of a city. But what it forgets is the magnificence of cities as a whole. If a postmodernism is a language of a city, then cities are the signature of the human race.
Los Angeles, hate it or love it, beat it or root for it, is a city is among the most, if not the most unique city in the world. Modeled after no plan before it, Los Angeles city spans 498.3 square miles and connecting metropolitan areas including Ventura and Orange County make it one of the largest metropolitan cities ever. All superlatives aside comparing it to cities that are the most this or the best that Los Angeles space was created as the first "sprawling" city, utilizing the area east, west, north, and south before utilizing the space above that is verticality. Beginning in Europe, large cities' growth depended on high you could build. It wasn't until the 19th century that a skyscraper was built in New York to fully break the surface of a 4+ story building habitable to every day activities. Even now, when one looks at a picture of downtown L.A. it is noticeable to realize the lack of sky space utilized when comparing to other major cities like Chicago or New York therefore it is reasonable to question how space has been utilized efficiently and what differs in the citizens' respective time space geographies. How long it takes for a New Yorker to get to work compared to the two hour, ten mile drive on rush hour in the 405 of a working Los Angeles person is an example of the difference.

Look at all of that unused real estate

Within that shape of a city is its contents. What materials have structured its prominent buildings, what angles the rooftops take, and its physical geography relative to any point of the city speaks to what it took to create and sustain this particular city. One can predict the age of structure simply look at the materials and shape. What a city can say to an observer by sheer appearance is astounding.

Sometimes cities can be misleading

 Cities are the accumulation of all progress and accomplishment of us and those past. They are more than just of a stack of brick and steel. They speak, they grow, they change, they require maintenance and love, they are hated and adored, they label, they kill, they create wealth and house the poor. They contain the very organisms whose past fathers created them and will be around for as long as the human brain is alive.