Los Angeles: From Shantytown to Global Powerhouse - Essay Sample

Introduction

In the Journey Beyond the Stars, Sawhney presents Los Angeles as a city that was once a shantytown. Located on the outskirts of the manifest destiny of America, the city is now leading the country into the Pacific era. The cultural, digital, and financial dominance over other cities remains unchallenged amid globalization. It was the first city to be connected with electricity, experience economic booms and busts, and a global center for film, e-commerce, science, and manufacturing sectors. The city is a definition of the world’s future cities (Sawhney 1). This paper gives a summary of the essay, Journey Beyond the Stars.

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The author of the essay describes Los Angeles paradoxically. On the one hand, the city is depicted as the capital of the developed world, i.e., the First World. On the other hand, it is presented as a Third World Metropolis (Sawhney 1). The essay chapters describe the official status of the city and its environs. It is considered to be among the most multicultural cities globally. Also, it is a major metropolis that shows the wealth extremes and the inequalities embedded in socioeconomic factors. It is a land of the homeless with costly houses and camps for the homeless side by side. Some of the communities found in the city with great wealth include Bel Air, Malibu, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood. Some areas are inhabited by immigrants who are struggling to get by. The author provides the reader with a clear picture of the mix of poverty and wealth extremes.

The people in Los Angeles include citizens of America and foreigners that depict the city differently depending on how the mass media influence them, business, short visits, experiences in travel, and Hollywood films. Those brainwashed by the movies depict the city virtually as a right place where people can go to attain the American Dream. According to the author, the American Dream is a reality that is experienced and lost in the city. It seems nearly an impossibility for some residents, but this will depend on how the individual defines it. Foreigners with a desire to achieve the dream come to the city, but what they face is a long process of documentation and discrimination just to become the citizens (Sawhney 2).

From another view, the city is seen as the most global. It can adapt to the changes caused by globalization. Advertisement and marketing are at the core of the forces driving the city. The city is good at selling itself to the outside world through e-commerce, advertisements, promotions, and marketing. The city has put up signs of neighborhoods for a long time, but there are none (Sawhney 7).

In most cases, the city is presented as an actual fabric with vast networks of freeways, and a homogeneous tract of many mini-malls and housing. However, its landscape offers the reality that the author likens to cracked asphalt. There are many opposing forces in the city, i.e., good and evil, discrimination and hatred, and the vast inequalities between wealth and poverty—the citizens in the city experience both the reality and the unreality. The opposing forces create the stories of class conflict, historical discrimination, and the facts of the conflicts between and within races (Sawhney 5).

The author describes the city as being more international than any other metropolis in the western world. It has an earthly desire that allows it to grow into its neighborhoods and the peripheral areas, and at the same time, it is claiming political independence. It lacks demarcations that would differentiate its borders. The limits are sustained by its planners, the social class structure, and zoning agreements, but this matter is of no meaning to many. The city is described as something precious, a commodity that should be sold to the American people just like any other product (Sawhney 5).

As indicated earlier, the author depicts the city as having two sides (Sawhney 5). There is the positive side majorly characterized by high social class and wealth and the negative side, which has all the evils and inequalities. Some of the horrors in the city include police brutality. The town also destroyed its natural environment at its growth due to unregulated growth both industrially and as an urban center. It is also characterized by crime, which is at its extreme. Despite its ability to move with globalization, the city’s economy is insecure, socially polarized, and unequal in a radical way. These factors are probably the causes of other evils like crime. Most people, especially foreigners, are no able to secure employment opportunities. It is a city that is obsessed with conducting background checks, personality tests, and drug tests for such opportunities to be offered. This makes it hard for many people to benefit. Hence, they remain below the poverty line.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the city has been between the extremes of utopia and dystopia for a long time. The common ground of the town remains to be religion as the city depicts all the aspects that may be addressed by it. The perceptions about the city are believed to be influenced by both God and Satan. It experiences the extremes of the wrath of nature as it is lost between the American Holocaust and the American Dream (Sawhney 13). Therefore, the city is a place that combines both reality and unreality.

Work Cited

Sawhney, Deepak Narang. "Journey Beyond the Stars." Unmasking LA. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002. 1-20.