The Right Way to Think About Los Angeles

Read: In defense of Los Angeles

To call L.A. a city doesn’t account for its game of thrones, the ways that county supervisors, city-council members, and eccentric billionaires tug at power. Metropolis doesn’t consider our countryside and endless townships. The idea that L.A. County is a collection of villages and suburbs doesn’t do justice to a place that’s bigger than 40 U.S. states in population, bigger economically than almost all of them. And yet L.A. is simultaneously too dense with city centers to be dismissed as a single sprawl. A heteropolis, meaning a place that loves difference, may seem right at times, considering L.A.’s openness to foreign cultures and strange ideas. But L.A. is a closed place, too. Privatized neighborhoods bristle with security features. A sizable gap continues to widen between the wealthy in their towers (the hills) and the workers in the fields (the flats).

I began to crisscross the freeways, interviewing dozens of people across the Southland, in an effort to pin down the nature of the place. The best way to conceptualize Los Angeles, all my research told me, was as a version of the city-state.

Dividing the world into countries is only a few centuries old, whereas the city-state dates back to the beginning of recorded history. The formal definition of a city-state is a sovereign metropolis and its surrounding territory: a city that functions as the center of political, economic, and cultural life for a body of people tied together by geography and trade, a landscape and its resources. Mesopotamia and the Tigris. Istanbul and the Bosphorus. Corinth, Sparta, the Mueang of Southeast Asia. Perhaps best known are the city-states that thrived in Italy prior to its unification: Renaissance strongholds including Florence, Venice, and Milan. Contemporary versions are Singapore and Monaco; an argument could be made for Dubai or Abu Dhabi, even Vatican City. The model mostly fell away during the rise of nations, but distress caused by globalization, manifesting in everything from Brexit to the climate crisis, suggests some appetite for more localized control, and room for the city-state’s return.

Los Angeles fits the city-state frame well, certainly better than it does a lot of other possibilities—if we update the model a bit. In 2010, Forbes suggested that if the criteria for a place to be considered a city-state were modernized for the 21st century, certain global capitals might qualify thanks to a few key features: a big port to sustain trade; investors from overseas; money laundering; international museums worth visiting; multiple languages spoken in good restaurants serving alcohol; and an ambition to host the World Cup.

California: Images of the Golden State

Greater L.A. has shipping covered: The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the country’s busiest. It checks off illegal cash flow, too. In 2014, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert E. Dugdale called L.A. the epicenter of narco-dollar money laundering; during the coronavirus pandemic, federal agents seized more than $1 million after shutdowns disrupted systems used by drug-trafficking groups. Whole swaths of the city are owned by investors from Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, who find L.A. a safer place to invest than back home. The museums have become some of the world’s finest; same for its restaurants. Finally, Los Angeles is scheduled to be one of several cities in North America to feature World Cup matches in 2026, and the Olympics will arrive in 2028, making L.A. the first American city to host the summer games three times.