ancient cities

not deter urban elites, including the owners of local
banks, utilities, newspapers, and railroads, from
promoting Los Angeles and Southern California as
ideal destinations for migrants to the western
United States. Creating Los Angeles as a place
required work to define its hot, dry weather as
something desirable rather than a breeding ground
for disease, a task achieved by referring to the climate
as Mediterranean. Similarly, the place was
imbued with a mystique associated with Spanish
and Mexican culture through associations with
Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a widely read
novel that romanticized Californio life.
Advertisements in national and international publications
touted the benefits of living in the Los
Angeles area, relying upon the images of oranges,
palm trees, snow­capped mountains, and ocean
surf that would become heavily identified with the
area.
Placemaking in Los Angeles also required physical
manipulations of space, most notably importing
fresh water from the Owens Valley via a
223­mile aqueduct. A public bond measure funded
construction of the aqueduct, and local elites
worked to promote public support for the project.
The owners of the Los Angeles Times were especially
well poised for this work, and the newspaper
vigorously promoted funding the aqueduct. In
turn, they benefited when an increased water supply
facilitated urban growth and increased newspaper
circulation. The owners of local companies
including the Times, a regional streetcar company
and electric utility, and several banks and title
companies also benefited directly when the aqueduct
allowed development of arid land in the San
Fernando Valley that they had purchased in anticipation
of the water’s delivery (the film Chinatown
dramatizes these events). Together, these efforts
helped transform a small city in a dry inland basin
into a growing metropolis known nationally and
internationally for its climate and quality of life.
Although pronounced growth has replaced these
associations with visions of traffic, poor air quality,
and crime, elites still work to create positive
impressions of Los Angeles.
While placemaking in Los Angeles is particularly
dramatic, the processes involved are similar to
those seen in other locales where elites seek
to increase the demand for land. These elites work
to alter land to make it more useful and desirable,
Placemaking
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often directing public funds toward these ends.
They work with boosters to ensure that the meanings
associated with places are positive and to
publicize the advantages of their place vis­à­vis
others. Chambers of commerce and economic
development bureaus often aid landowners and
other urban elites in these efforts.
Placemaking in Everyday Life
In addition to overt efforts to construct places,
the work of placemaking occurs more subtly and
routinely as individuals make their lives. We live,
work, and interact in places, and in doing so, we
make and remake those places. For instance, we
routinely alter places through direct action when
we build or remodel a home, contribute our labor
to a community park, or pick up litter in the street.
Just as important, we routinely construct and
reconstruct the meanings associated with places,
and these meanings in turn motivate how we act
toward places.
Language is a fundamental and routine tool for
placemaking. As we talk about places, they become
visible and comprehensible and thus distinct from
more abstract or meaningless spaces. Residents,
visitors, journalists, and others routinely describe
and evaluate places in terms that reflect and reinforce
popular understandings of a locale. Places
may be characterized in shorthand phrases that
capture salient demographic, geographic, or economic
aspects: for instance, college town, industrial
city, or mountain hamlet. Other descriptions
may be deeper and more complex, such as when
residents reflect on why they moved to a given
place or compare their own city to a seemingly
similar place nearby.
Scholars and artists take their own turns at narrative
placemaking as well. Consider the visions of
Chicago contained in Carl Sandburg’s poem
(stacker of wheat, player with railroads) or the
accounts of that city provided by Chicago School
sociologists (e.g., The Hobo, The Gold Coast and
the Slum, Black Metropolis). The position of their
authors has allowed these narratives the power
to endure and to continue shaping perceptions of
the city.
The work of narrative placemaking becomes
quite pronounced when places are perceived as
threatened with unwanted change, often from new