2012 Theses Master's

Examining the Completeness of Six Los Angeles Cities

Chang, Judy Y.

While Los Angeles provides an array of goods, services, and amenities across its expansive borders in a quintessentially polycentric manner, there continues to appear to be a lack of some of these "urban functions" in some of the densest parts of the city. This thesis serves to identify this mismatch, comparing a set of six southeast Los Angeles municipalities— whose population densities rival and sometimes exceed some of the nation's largest cities and a portion of Central Los Angeles of roughly the same area and density. While this study reveals that only in some cases do the southeast Los Angeles cities lack urban functions relative to the central city, they generally fall under "high-order" categories such as health care facilities and cultural centers. The study concludes with recommendations for increasing these high-order functions, which would at once grant cities a sense of identity and relieve cost- and time-burdens on residents who must continue traveling to a city center for high-order urban functions.