War and City

More than any other major city in the US and perhaps the world, Los Angeles has a central city irreversibly associated with its underclass: the ten thousand or so people who live in and around the blocks known as Skid Row. Around 2007, Dutch fashion photographer Désirée van Hoek visited the area and found herself captivated by the micro-neighborhood and its residents. Skid Row would become the title of her first photo book.

In a new volume titled Notes on Downtown: Los Angeles 2007–2022, van Hoek draws back to examine the spatial landscape of Downtown, with its vast parking garages; its cyber-noir tunnels; its fallow lots, worth their weight in gold ($600 per square foot); its luxury boutiques; its unrelenting sun and thin shade; and, inevitably, its people, many of whom make this harsh environment their home because they have nowhere else to go. She shows us these images, but she also employs text creatively to unravel their antecedents, exposing the political choices behind the built environment in an indirect and impressionistic fashion. Throughout, she takes both an expansive and neutral view of architecture, documenting the official and the makeshift alike and exploring the discipline’s ability to be marshaled in service of exclusion as well as communion.

A single image of Pershing Square, once a vibrant gathering space for queer and marginalized Angelenos, encapsulates those competing dynamics: we see the noonday sun beating against a designed-for-Instagram peach-colored surface, a curved bench chopped up by dividers meant to stop people from using it to sleep, and a lone man left to slumber upright, hat pulled over his eyes. The only relief from the unforgiving light is the shadow his own body creates. How have urban design, public policy, market forces, and gentrification conspired to shape this terrain, van Hoek asks, and is another way possible?

The book’s photos are organized loosely by category, in alphabetical order—“Art,” “Business,” “Cardboard,” the list goes on—with paragraph-long captions and longer interviews interspersed throughout. The latter feature experts working in a range of disciplines: there’s LA media and urban historian Norman Klein, known for his “antitours” of places that no longer exist; there’s Adrienne Brown, a scholar of Black cultural production in the twentieth century; there’s sociologist Sharon Zukin, whose new book discusses the impact of the tech sector on urban landscapes. Though the interviews add a great deal of historical and political context, it’s not always enough to decode what makes Downtown LA unique. For example, a photo of the twisted, reflective surfaces of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, on its own, may simply scan as an example of expensive development; if you’ve digested Mike Davis’s excoriation of the architect’s sinister inversions of communal space, or know that the hall is built on the bones of LA’s razed Bunker Hill neighborhood, it will resonate more deeply as a contribution to the erosion of public life Downtown. For readers not already familiar with these histories, one or two more interviews with a local historian or sociologist might have helped flesh out the propositions latent in the book’s images. As it is, van Hoek’s experts discuss gentrification not only in Los Angeles, but also in London, Amsterdam, and New York, providing a wide-ranging look at the overdetermined dynamics remaking our cities.

But is Los Angeles just another global metropolis in the throes of gentrification, or is there something place specific going on here? The city center possesses a curious admixture of architectural styles, and LA’s historic core is one of the best-preserved downtowns in the US. Beaux-arts masterpieces, grimy marble facades, defunct theaters, and derelict neon come together in an uncanny homage to another time—and an endless filmic backdrop, standing in for other cities and other decades. (In the “Road” section of the book, Van Hoek reveals, hilariously, how a vivid green bike lane was so loudly objected to by film industry types accustomed to shooting there that it was eventually repainted in a more subtle hue. The best metaphors are always those supplied by real life.) All this exists alongside the gleaming emptiness of banks, conference centers, international hotel chains: an entire landscape created for business travelers and utterly interchangeable with that of any other global city. Klein bemoans the hollowing-out of downtown with a caveat: “In my old man’s moment, I see it as a positive thing because my house in Highland Park is worth four times what I paid for it.” Et tu, Norman? Per California’s Proposition 13, Klein is still paying property taxes according to the value of his home when he purchased it—one of the single greatest factors in the state’s current housing crisis. Van Hoek lets that contradiction slip away, but a later interview with urban planner and Landscapes of Despair author Jennifer Wolch references the tax revolt movement that lead to Prop 13 in an oblique callback.

LA is ground zero for a particular militarized repression of the visible symptoms of wealth stratification that other cities are only just adopting. Perusing these photos, I thought of the sociologist Michel Agier’s essay “Between War and City,” which theorizes refugee camps as a novel urban hybrid caught within a perverse nexus of armed conflict and humanitarian action. The same dynamic is on display downtown: on one side, the violence of hyper inequality, rapid development, and the police; on the other, the missions and homeless services clustered around Skid Row—which, as Wolch explains, the city has intentionally confined to the area in a (failed) attempt to keep unhoused people from moving to other parts of the city. Like Agier’s sprawling encampments of the displaced, Downtown LA is somewhere between war and city; not for nothing did a visiting UN rapporteur compare Skid Row to a refugee camp in 2018. Van Hoek’s work beautifully captures these tensions in snapshots of police confrontation or a soup kitchen meal neatly laid out. At times, the carceral apparatus intrudes slyly: A closer look at a photo of a crosswalk in front of City Hall reveals a sheriff’s deputy in motion, to-go lunch dangling from one hand. In a particularly powerful series entitled “People,” van Hoek showcases a succession of torsos: different sorts of humans on their way to work or out for a stroll. A turn of the page offers the back of a policeman, his belt heavy with nightstick, pepper spray, radio, and the cuffed wrists of a man who looks homeless. On the next page, another man in handcuffs: shirtless, up against the wall. There are no police in this photo, but their trace remains.

The impressionistic relationship between text and image that prevails elsewhere is slightly undercut by the ABC conceit, which risks pinning down van Hoek’s photos with a single fixed label rather than letting them simmer with overlapping resonances. The meaning of these images is most convincing when it’s left to accrete by degrees. “Police,” for instance, is paltry shorthand for what one of its photos offers: Two LAPD vehicles parked stem-to-stern with twenty five–odd officers crowded around them, chatting or scrolling. With each additional view, more seem to appear from behind their colleagues, latent menace encoded in their inaction: looped plastic zip ties hanging from belts, riot helmets resting on the hoods of their SUVs. They must be waiting for a demonstration to approach. After a beat, a canopy of leaves above them draws the eye toward a realization: it’s a rare tree. Even as cops have a power to arrest, detain, and disperse that shapes everyone else’s experience of the urban landscape, they’re also subject to its privations. There’s never enough shade to go around.

“How do you create genuinely public spaces where everyone feels welcome?” the urban geographer Cody Hochstenbach asks in Notes on Downtown’s first interview. The question hangs in the air, souring as the book’s images accumulate. By the time we get to Dutch architect Hans Teerds’s essay at the close of the book, it is impossible to reach a conclusion different from the one the book has been hinting at the whole time: Downtown LA represents an intentional failure of the built environment to meet the needs of its citizens. Is there any hope? Van Hoek writes that the French firm Agence Ter is working on a makeover of Pershing Square, just in time for the 2028 Olympics. The agency’s proposal advances a principle of “radical flatness”; the visualizations online invoke an oasis of trees, water, shade, collective life. They’re standard, even lovely, mock-ups, but in this particular context, they read as ominous harbinger. There are, of course, no unhoused people photoshopped into these renderings. If the city gets its way, escalating its disappearances of the poor and indigent as it did in advance of the 1984 games, the fantasy of an urban Los Angeles shorn of its homeless population may become a disturbing reality.