A Geology of Vision

If—like most Angelenos—you only ever drive by, you might never notice him slouching at the top of the stairs descending from the southeastern edge of Olvera Street, that counterfeit heart of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula. Day after day, a club-grade speaker by his side blasts ’90s R&B at the loveless scene below: the mission moderne Union Station—built atop the buried Tongva village of Yaanga, now a living cenotaph to passenger rail in California—and its wasted forecourt longing to unite with the pueblo’s central plaza but for the heavily trafficked Alameda Street. Should you, however, approach on foot or on a bike, you’d be sure to hear him first; then, your eyes would trail the luscious sound to his exact spot. Passing through this artery day after day in a rhythm closer to the languid tracks he plays, you might develop a habit of stopping at the foot of those stairs to savor the sweet ambiance even if the traffic lights are letting you through; you might find your body giving in to the beat, sensing perhaps a different city rising from this hard-time troubadour and the motley crew of drifters who pause to feed on the vibe the way pigeons flock to statues and breadcrumbs.

Ordinary people’s knack for bending public space to their needs is a phenomenon that caught the fancy of Los Angeles urbanists over the last decade of the twentieth century, outlined in John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski’s concept of “everyday urbanism.” But back in 1933, when Olvera Street was a brand-new attraction and Union Station only lines on paper, Anton Wagner, a young German doctoral student equipped with the apparatus of German geography, would have been primed for loftier subjects to pursue. Hitler had just ascended to the post of chancellor in Berlin when Wagner was about to bring his fieldwork in Los Angeles to a close: a frenzied six months of archival research, interviews, and conversations, and—most importantly—walks through a vastly distended, already car-dependent city-landscape.

The resulting study, originally published in German in 1935, was finally made available to international readerships in late 2022, in a fluid translation by Timothy Grundy, meticulously edited by Edward Dimendberg. The first geographic monograph about the city and a striking early exemplar of transdisciplinary urban studies, Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California was largely overlooked upon its rerelease, possibly owing to the material’s apparent controversy as indicated by a disclaimer on the colophon page. Protofascist inclinations may offend the sensibilities of the contemporary liberal reader, but they also lend the work an acute relevance, its subtext resonating louder by the day, even after its much-delayed arrival.

“To perceive differences within the homogenous elements of the cultivated and inhabited urban landscape, I eschewed the common means of transportation, the automobile, and explored the entire area on foot,” Wagner writes in the introduction. Indeed: Traversing Los Angeles unshielded by the shell and the speed of the car sets you up for a visceral experience of surprising intensity and range. “I closely engaged with people of different ages, occupations, social positions, and origins,” he claims; “I gathered oral narratives from people who seemed reliable and whom I encountered on my walks in different neighborhoods.” Whatever diversity of urban experience Wagner may have witnessed, whatever testimonies he may have collected, it’s all subsumed in an omniscient narrator’s voice. In that narrative, there is little place for figures outside of dominant social groups, much less for an appreciation of those who in the eyes of the Western European scholar lack significance. No doubt, Wagner channels his era’s academic habitus along with the bias of his own positionality; to read him reflexively, then, means to engage with his treatise not as a product of its historical context, but a refraction of our own.

Born into a bourgeois family of wine merchants from Frankfurt, Wagner had arrived in Los Angeles in the wake of an earlier, thwarted ambition to immigrate to California. On his previous travels and sojourns in the Americas he had discovered something of a naturalist streak in himself. Temporarily setting his mind to geographic scholarship—his biography bears witness to a peripatetic life and a restless intellect that ultimately embraced business and trade—he chose the anomalous, booming metropolis as his subject of study. “The emergent cultural forces of the far West manifest themselves with the greatest variety in the Southern Californian landscape,” he argues, adding that his own scholarly attempt constitutes the first “developmental geography that focuses on a typical American metropolis.” With these two statements, planted early on, Wagner sets the terms and criteria for an inquiry that is as productive in our present as it was ninety years ago.

Though he had experienced the explosive growth of Berlin and other metropolitan regions after the delayed onset of industrial modernity in Germany, Wagner was boggled by the spatial imprint and visual signature of Los Angeles: “A never-ending mass of houses extends across the landscape, as if dropped from a set of giant building blocks”; “At the center of this immeasurable sea of houses and large villas rise the multistoried buildings of the urban core”; “insatiable Los Angeles pushes its way to the sea and the hills and reaches the coast in four different places.” From these initial observations that evoke Los Angeles before the freeway system further augmented its polynucleated form, Wagner goes on to delaminate the metropolitan region into historical deposits of cultural landscape.

The German school of regional geography enabled Wagner to bring a multiplicity of disciplinary lenses into an integrated frame of analysis. After establishing, in a brief “Overview of the Landscape,” a natural setting unconducive to a large urban settlement, Wagner captures the problem of Los Angeles in three questions that inform his methodology—I paraphrase: How could a metropolis develop here? Why at such a rapid rate? Why so widely spaced? Arguing that the very speed and variability of Los Angeles’s growth command a focus on “sweeping changes, movements, and forces,” he begins with a section simply titled “Nature” and an elaborate account of the faulting tectonics of Southern California and the Los Angeles basin. It’s a suggestive opener, drawing up a hyperkinetic terrain that both contradicts and mirrors the latter-day emergence of the unlikely metropolis. Anything but inanimate, geology is the conditioning factor in the successive human interventions in the landscape that Wagner parses chronologically, from the Indigenous settlements to Mission San Gabriel’s founding in 1771 and all the way through the 1930s conurbation. The final section is a crafty blend of economic geography and urban morphology, in which Wagner makes his most contentious claims concerning the “Life and Forms of Appearance of the Contemporary Landscape.”

Wagner’s writing compacts an impressive scope of information, forging ahead in frank and, sometimes, circumstantial prose punctuated with pithy postulations, entirely free from theoretical metanarrative. He views the city-landscape through a structuring lens that seeks patterns and orders the elements of the built environment into neat categories, his keenness on social power dynamics and vectors of urban formation spiking as he enters the modern era. He ponders a grid that hardly takes notice of the topography, then goes on to retrace how railroad, streetcar, and automobile went hand in hand with the land subdivision business in driving waves of reckless booms and busts while overriding environmental constraints. “The urban plan [becomes] a function of the city’s artificial growth,” he infers. He deconstructs how primitive technoecologies, enabled by opportunism and speculative reason (call it “entrepreneurialism”), unleash new economies: The railroad arrives to help proliferate landscapes of citrus cultivation, the global ascent of the local film industry serves to promote migration to Southern California, and the real estate industry initiates tourism as a showroom technology—an analog precursor of immersive environments, as it were, that offered a simulation of California living to prospective out-of-city buyers.

From the diffusion of oil derricks and billboards he makes out what one today might call the architecture of the territory. “The billboard underscores the incomplete aspects of the cityscape,” he notes. Way ahead of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, he identifies “fantastically shaped,” “grotesque,” “flamboyant” commercial typologies as the alien offspring of motorized traffic. He complains about LA’s lack of urbanity, even as he is fascinated by the transparent trickery of the “stage-set cities” he saw being built at vertiginous rates of velocity and risk—not unlike Buster Keaton’s contemporaneous meditations on the precarity of progress, similarly realized at the bare threshold of illusion. Wagner’s impressions of oil fields and tank farms in particular presage turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood depictions of dystopia, mired as they are in tropes of local, manufactured physiography. “This landscape of oil derricks is temporary. A generation from today it may be gone” has a prophetic because unsentimental ring to it.

Within this snapshot of an ever-emergent city-landscape as laid open by Wagner, an attentive reader will note that what constitutes the urban ground is defined as much by the culturally sanctioned—or, rather, class-specific—imaginary as by the virtual horizons of technology. With the elites unburdened by any collective recognition of, or responsibility for, generational inheritance, land is readily turned over to shifting paradigms of mobility. Such a regime of development requires an urban form that is modular and elastic, where blocks of shifty entrepreneurial schemes can be fitted and refitted at will. And behind these dynamics, Wagner locates the agency of a few cultural groups. Gradually and unmistakably, the text mounts a racialized narrative of regional development, all the while sounding sacrosanct concepts of German philosophy.

In his German subtitle, Wagner entwined culturally resonant terms for becoming (Werden), life (Leben), and Gestalt; the corresponding “Development, Life, and Structure” in translation doesn’t reach the depths prodded by the original. In Wagner’s treatment, the industrious “spirit” of Los Angeles and its “structure” are mutually bound in a state of becoming. In the acoustic space of the German history of ideas, Geist (spirit) and Gestalt rumble, profound and inextricably interlinked. In the philosophical discourse as well as in cultural debates of the German modern era, the notion of a general consciousness (Geist) is linked with an image of a figure emerging from an undifferentiated background (Gestalt). Or to put it in geographic terms: a cultural landscape arising as distinct from its physical setting, or a city rising from its hinterland. In interwar Germany, the idea of Gestalt as applied to a territory—signifying a whole that emerges from a union between the landscape and its inhabitants—was heavily politicized. Having borne the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the loss of all its colonial projects, Germany had shifted, in the years leading up to Wagner’s publication, its predatory gaze to its “internal others” while brewing dreams of territorial expansion. Dimendberg’s commentary on the German and specifically Kiel school of regional geography where Wagner was in training, offers illuminating pointers in this regard.

It is fair to presume, then, that in the “life and structure” of Los Angeles, Wagner grapples with a chimera of colonial desire. He overstates the enterprise of European immigrants, Germans above all, as the key to making a semiarid landscape habitable and prosperous, while dismissing “inferior foreigners”—Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, Jews—at the moment when Jews, Roma, and Slavs were subject to victimization by the National Socialist regime and shouldered the blame for all manner of undesirable trends in the German economy, society, and culture. Amid this galloping cultural climate, Wagner the geographer constructs a synecdoche of the fatherland, effectively casting white settlers as a stand-in for the nation-state’s claim to territory. Wagner does not merely racialize urban space, as Dimendberg points out; at the edge of the New World, in settler-colonial space-time, he installs a hierarchy of nations.

Small wonder, then, that in the urban studies of Los Angeles that appeared in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century, Wagner figures as a phantom, at best. Reyner Banham signals his awareness of Wagner’s work in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), without referencing any of it. Mike Davis, in City of Quartz (1990), devotes a mere couple lines to Wagner’s book, ambiguously hailing it as “a monument of old-fashioned Teutonic scholarship” while deriding its “pseudo-scientism.” Judged as a piece of urban geography, Wagner’s Los Angeles comes into relief as an earnest, but contaminated attempt: ambitiously proportioned, smeared thick with dark idealism, in deathly entanglement with the root structures of ideology.

To my mind, Wagner’s most prescient contribution lies in a stacking of representational spaces, which in itself models how a keen attention to a landscape vibrant with latency can engender a transcendent way of seeing the city—a geology of vision, if you like—and, ideally, makes room not just for disparate types of information but also multiple ways of knowing. Seamlessly synthesizing a wealth of data—in deceivingly simple hand-drawn maps that reveal how the urban topography was carved up, and in dizzyingly detailed narrative—Wagner assembled something like an Urtext of the agglomeration and, with that, a challenge for this blueprint to be continually revised.

Laboring through Wagner’s script, I found flipping back and forth between his sequential framings more generative than any single storyline he works out in obsessive detail. Processing the discrete frames of action that Wagner lays out one by one only to reveal how they interact—from Earth systems and Native, ecological rationalities of settlement to the colonial-capitalist propensity for extractive schemes—my mind keeps them loosely overlaid, like translucent sheets. Pinched together, they open telescopic views through time, as concrete and telling as a core sample. Once released, the blur of collocated events recedes into a layering of human and nonhuman agencies. In Wagner’s hands, an entrenched geographic methodology performs as a high-dimensional composite, evincing a late modern conception of the urban ground. It is in this sense that Wagner’s “map,” in conjuring a landscape whose potential is never fully defined or exhausted by the ebb and flow of surface phenomena, not merely alters the territory it describes, but also expands the scope, tools, and agents of its future iterations.

In his fervent attempts to understand how different forces have inscribed themselves onto the Southern California landscape, Wagner captured much of that stack of forces that drive urbanization, in our contemporary understanding of that term. Around the turn of the millennium, urban geographers and sociologists began to articulate the paradoxical tendency of capitalism to devour land in exchange for contractions of space—a planetary pattern that Wagner was able to observe in interwar Los Angeles as if in a petri dish.

As for the photographs Wagner took on his walks—far exceeding the number of plates featured in the monograph—they pierce with precision through the cultural landscape of LA at a singular point in developmental time. Indexing deliberate stoppages and incisive angles, they condense urban history and inspire fabulations oncultural dynamics. A generation and a half after Wagner, LA-based artists who likely were unaware of his work produced new offshoots of this tactic, summoning mystic urban topologies by way of a camera ambulating through social space. Bas Jan Ader tracked a day’s walk into the night from an inland valley to the Pacific Ocean; James Welling wove enigmas out of quotidian architecture deformed by shadows, sunshine, and electric lighting; and Anthony Hernandez, shooting at eye level amid streams of pedestrians, captured collective agony in Downtown LA: parallel worlds, all equally true to the city’s Gestalt.

Wagner concludes with a toast to the audacious “spirit” of Los Angeles, praising coordinated private initiative, business acumen, and mobility—a term he uses to interlace capitalist aspiration, capital portability, and roadway connectivity—as the pillars of the Angeleno tradition. Wagner singles out Los Angeles as an instructive reference for urban development “even in our German fatherland,” and his glee over expansionist enterprise at the expense of everything else may well be the book’s most productive provocation when considered from the vantage point of our present. A contemporary application of a Wagnerian layered-optics methodology could turn out a wildly different set of conclusions, if the inevitably transdisciplinary practice of Länderkunde (literally, “study of the lands”) were to be grafted onto, say, a decolonial phenomenology of place. Between Wagner’s opening vision of Los Angeles as a theater of environmental contingencies and his ending on a politically stirring note, there is a usable framework, a trellis for an updated set of studies of the land to take hold. Clearly invested in the prospect of redemptive readings, Dimendberg points out how neutrally, almost in an ecological sense, Wagner employs a term that by the time his study was published had already been tarnished with genocidal connotations: Lebensraum.

I am writing these lines in early December 2023. Alive and militarized, if not called by its Germanic name, the notion of Lebensraum is ripe for reconstruction. Don’t we badly need capacious concepts that explicitly link life to land, that are neither falsely consigned to history nor exclusively enforced by biocidal politics? Concepts that can be wielded as tools to define and defend an human inalienable right to weave and inhabit place—and to dismantle, over time, design paradigms that divide and splinter? The current technocratic discourse around “nature-based solutions” or “blue-green infrastructure,” even the trope of “landscape urbanism” itself, presumes the capacity of landscape to stitch urbanized areas and populations together, promising everything from societal defragmentation to climate adaptation. They have no prospects unless adopted and enacted under some hospitable notion of accountability and belonging, some holding frame for living bonds between our individual bodies and the multitude, between ecology and place. In the absence of ethics that such frames encode, how do we imagine we’ll ever overcome social atomization and the extractivist and therefore expansionist operative system that cities run on? Nothing less than a project of regrounding and realignment along these lines, enlisting geographers and urbanists from all walks of life, is what it will take to revive the barely plausible future of Los Angeles, a city-landscape whose carrying capacity can only be restored through a radical reset: as a madly stratified, multiply alive test bed of the cosmopolitical.