Tài liệu Hazardous Metropolis Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles doc

[...]... solely an engineering problem G&S Typesetters PDF proof 01-C2797 9/10/03 7:41 AM Page 11 ch apter 1 City of a Thousand Rivers The Emergence of an Urban Ecosystem, 1884 –1914 a terrible and grand old river In the winter of 1884, the Los Angeles Express complained that the usually trickling Los Angeles River had turned into a “terrible and grand old river.” 1 By early February, three months of rain had so... consequences of building a city on a floodplain During the next two decades, however, southern Californians invested much in constructing a hazardous metropolis in the path of the floods Despite the claims of the chamber of commerce and others about the abundant blessings that the physical environment had bestowed on Los Angeles, nature did not do this without humanity’s helping hand In transforming southern... water’s journey through los angeles The Sky Much of the water that passes through Los Angeles begins its journey above the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains, north of the metropolitan plain and only fifty miles from the sea Rainfall is unpredictable there A rise of a few degrees in water temperature off the Peruvian coast can triple the annual rainfall in Los Angeles, and Alaskan air-pressure... urbanization worldwide Increasingly we humans live in these sorts of landscapes We need to understand them In particular, we need to understand that urban ecosystems are not merely transitory systems Historically, conventional wisdom in Los Angeles and elsewhere has treated these sorts of landscapes as oddities—worlds in transition from the messiness of nature to the clean predictability and regularity of... disorder In recognition of these complicated boundaries and the complex of problems they pose, the U.S National Science Foundation in 1997 invited urban proposals for its Long Term Ecological Research Program, which had been funding comparable long-term studies of wildlands since 1979 The NSF, with its growing interest in urban ecology, is implicitly responding to half a century of massive urbanization... 1 Geographical features of the Los Angeles Basin The metropolitan area that is the subject of this study is bounded on the east and west by the borders of Los Angeles County Mountains as high as ten thousand feet in elevation crown the area on the north, and several lower ranges of hills partition the inland San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys from a broad coastal plain that slopes gently to the Pacific... Page 10 10 Prologue and incorporates all the disorder of the rest of nature Successful flood control requires not only measuring rainfall, debris bulk, and concrete strength, but also considering politics, economics, social relations, and cultural values and understanding how these unquantifiable factors interact with the technical aspects of the problem.19 In short, flood control in Los Angeles is much more... stories of both Los Angeles in particular and urban ecological structure in general begin in the water Water flows downhill That much is simple From there, however, things get more complicated Laboratory studies show that even in a G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00a-C2797-PRO 9/10/03 7:41 AM Page 3 Water in Los Angeles 3 pipe, such factors as velocity, volume, gradient, obstacles to flow, and shape and roughness... lived in Los Angeles for fifty-three years, complained in 1914, “The people that are coming in here in these later days think that the old-timers do not know anything of the floods.” 13 The primary hindrance to the spread of flood knowledge, however, was ethnic prejudice In 1825, when the Los Angeles River changed directions, California had been part of Mexico Decades later, stories of the great inundations... Page 17 City of a Thousand Rivers 17 Germains to associate such stories with a quaint and colorful Spanish and Mexican past that had little relevance to their own lives in the dry, booming present Thus the arrangement of both knowledge and power in Los Angeles created a society in which the people with the most in uence over the production of culture had the least understanding of the region’s environmental . Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Orsi, Jared, 1970 – Hazardous metropolis : flooding and urban ecology in Los Angeles / Jared Orsi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical. Typesetters PDF proof Hazardous Metropolis Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles Jared Orsi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley . Los Angeles . London 00-C2797-FM