ancient cities

438 Las Vegas, Nevada
spatially and temporally, and where its popular
appeal lay. By their account, it is clear than in
1972, Las Vegas was already embarking on an
amelioration of its tawdry urban environment, and
LFLV is thus not unlike Walter Benjamin’s work
on the Paris arcades, capturing an era that was in
danger of being replaced by a new incarnation.
Sarfatti Larson reminds us that LFLV represented
“a shocking comparison of private and
public spaces in eighteenth-century Rome with the
Las Vegas strip.” Albert Pope, author of Ladders,
qualifies arguments expressed within LFLV favoring
chaotic urban form by suggesting that the authors
overlooked a significant contradiction: Both the
Strip and Fremont Street were in fact ordered
around a linear armature, and despite the messy
vitality of the discrete pieces of Las Vegas’s urban
form, this linearity served to unify and regulate
the city’s development.
Whatever reading is applied, there is no doubt
that LFLV showed that as a place Las Vegas
required a different mode of inquiry regarding
how its urban landscape functioned compared to
other twentieth-century places. A 2004 book on
Design-based Planning for Communities goes as
far as to suggest that Learning from Las Vegas
represents “an important event in the demolition
of modernist urban theory, it created room for the
development of new ways of thinking about urbanism
in America.” Jon Goodbun allows an even
more direct influence, establishing the place rather
than the book about the place as the instrument of
change: “Las Vegas represents the rejection of
modernism.”
Paradigm or Pariah
It is profoundly fascinating that Las Vegas
could, as an object of study, have been responsible
for prompting a wholesale shift within planning
and urban design, a shift that has since given
rise to Traditional Neighborhood Development
(TND), Transit-Oriented Development (TOD),
and other new urbanist concepts, especially given
the lack of focus on public transportation in Las
Vegas (the monorail system is still only partially
built). Las Vegas is often held up simultaneously as
a paradigm and a pariah in urban design terms.
Reyner Banham registered how “so much has been
written about that city as an image of fear, loathing,
bad taste, depravity, cultural emptiness and all the
rest that the simple truth behind it can no longer
be seen . . . [namely] a true oasis.” Hal Rothman
argues that Las Vegas is now in the process of
switching from pariah to paradigm, in the sense that
Las Vegas is no longer exceptional in the American
urban landscape but wholly consistent with other
places functioning as tourist destinations.
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who was a
student at the time LFLV came out, and was taken
with its premise, instigated a second look at the
city with a bunch of East Coast students, this time
from Harvard University. Koolhaas claims in his
book, Project on the City, that “Las Vegas is one
of the few cities to become paradigmatic twice in
thirty years: from a city at the point of becoming
virtual in 1972, to an almost irrevocably substantial
condition in 2000.”
In terms of benchmarking current practice, Las
Vegas thus represents a changeable and problematic
irritant to urban theorists, one that was consequently
either belittled or ignored. Writing in
the Architectural Review in 1962, Lewis Mumford
saw Las Vegas as an example of “roadtown,” and
as such was an “anti-city,” constituting an “incoherent
and purposeless urbanoid nonentity, which
dribbles over the devastated landscape.” From the
later vantage point of 1993, Alan Hess explains
that “Las Vegas was largely incomprehensible to
eastern architecture critics, but being ignored
allowed it time to gestate as a city before it was
noticed at all.” Hess claimed that “Las Vegas is
not an ideal urban model, but it is well worth
considering as American urbanism gropes towards
a new definition and a new form,” especially
given that most American cities are in a state of
adolescence. At that time, the urban village concept
was only just “emerging from the primal
suburban soup,” where by contrast, the Las Vegas
Strip, although “no older than many such
suburbs, has been changing and remodelling
since . . . 1941.”
The case for ignoring Las Vegas did not end
with the publication of LFLV, however: witness
the fact that despite Fredric Jameson declaring
Learning from Las Vegas to be the canonical text
of postmodernism, Nan Ellin, for example, in
Postmodern Urbanism, does not discuss Las
Vegas once, yet her book evolves an entire narrative
about the relationship between cities and