Aerial Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the Bay

photo credit: ExperiencingLA.com

Aerial Los Angeles: flying out to LAX a few months back, I grabbed a couple photos out the window via my phone.

Lower left is Pacific Palisades. Following the coast south, where it starts to become urban, is Santa Monica. The buildings along Wilshire Blvd can be seen as they snake their way up through Brentwood, Westwood Village, around Century City, through Beverly Hills, Hancock Park, Koreatown, and into downtown Los Angeles.

photo credit: ExperiencingLA.com

From this angle, Hollywood is directly north of Pacific Palisades, about two thirds up the photo. The little white dot in the hills is the Hollywood Sign. Malibu begins at the very lower left. In the distance are the San Gabriel Mountains. As an aside, 40 years ago smog would have made this photograph virtually impossible. Today, of greater concern is traffic congestion.

Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and downtown Los Angeles. Thanks to the entertainment industry, the influence that this swath of land has on the rest of the planet is incredible.

I like this quote from urban planning expert Dan Rosenfeld from this weekend's Los Angeles Times:

"We live in the greatest concentration of human talent in the history of the world. We spawn popular culture — film, fashion, food, even finance — for the entire planet. Further, we are the urban laboratory for the future world. Solutions to megacity challenges such as water scarcity, recycling, mobility, diversity and income inequality — those solutions will be invented and tested here. L.A. can be messy, crowded and hard to manage, but it's a good place to be relevant."

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