ancient cities

Las Vegas at night, from the top of the Luxor hotel on the Strip.
Source: Erin Monacelli.
in attracting the creative class that other cities
across the world have found essential to sustain
economic growth. Despite Las Vegas’s proven
viability to date as an economic force, many of its
less attractive statistics are usually played down,
and the reality of a city of low-paid workers
working antisocial hours is masked, along with
issues to do with the precarious situation regarding
air pollution, energy consumption, water supply,
underage and compulsive gambling, lack of
affordable housing, male homelessness, degradation
of the desert environment, and underinvestment
in community benefits.
Urban Theory Research
The scholarly community has of late been turning
its attention toward addressing these pressing
topical issues and, in the process, reflecting on the
role of Las Vegas within urban theory. Academic
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assessment of Las Vegas has in fact been continuous
ever since the publication in 1972 of Learning
from Las Vegas (LFLV) by Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour. Their book was
reputedly inspired by reading an essay by Tom
Wolfe, quirkily titled “Las Vegas (What?) Las
Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!”
in which, according to Douglass and Raento,
Wolfe “captures the essence of the city’s postwar
reinvention of itself and its metamorphosis into a
true gaming destination.”
The Original Study
LFLV is the culmination of the fieldwork of a
group of architecture students from Yale University
and contains essays, diagrams, and analysis of Las
Vegas as they found it at the end of the 1960s.
Their interest was in understanding how a commercial
strip was organized, how it worked