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Consuming landscape, consuming machine: state, capital, and outdoor advertising in Los Angeles
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Consuming landscape, consuming machine: state, capital, and outdoor advertising in Los Angeles
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CONSUMING LANDSCAPE, CONSUMING MACHINE:
STATE, CAPITAL, AND OUTDOOR ADVERTISING IN LOS ANGELES
by
Elisabeth Jane Sedano
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the field of
GEOGRAPHY
© 2014 Elisabeth J. Sedano
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my advisor John Wilson and committee members Tridib Banerjee
and Jefferey Sellers for their ideas and advice throughout this project. I am indebted to
Dan Goldberg, Kaveh Shahabi, and Su Jin Lee for their technical support in the creation
and analysis of the Billboard Map website. I am grateful to Christine Pelisek, Karen
Kemp, and Michael Bostrom, who each inspired different aspects of this study. Finally, I
would like to thank each of my interviewees, especially Dennis Hathaway and Kevin
Keller, who were so generous with their time and willing to share their knowledge and
experience on behalf of this project.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. ii
List of Tables ...................................................................................................................... v
List of Figures.................................................................................................................... vi
List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................viii
Chapter One: Outdoor Advertising and the Consuming Landscape of Los Angeles ......... 1
Literature Review and Theoretical Model .............................................................. 5
Critical Urban Theory................................................................................. 5
Cities and Marxist Thought ............................................................ 5
Public Space in Capitalist Society .................................................. 7
State, Capital, and Cities............................................................... 10
Information Theory and Communication Theory..................................... 13
Historicizing Los Angeles......................................................................... 16
The Consuming Landscape and the Consuming Machine........................ 24
Project Description................................................................................................ 27
Chapter Two: The Legal Landscape of Billboards in Los Angeles Following the 2002
Sign Laws.......................................................................................................................... 31
The Regulation of Outdoor Advertising in the United States............................... 36
The Legal History of Los Angeles’s 2002 Sign Laws.......................................... 41
Laws, Litigation, and the Consuming Machine.................................................... 60
Chapter Three: The History and Findings of Los Angeles's Billboard Inventory ............ 64
The History of the OSSPIP Program .................................................................... 67
The City Delays Restarting OSSPIP......................................................... 67
The City Restarts OSSPIP ........................................................................ 69
Efforts to Make the Results of OSSPIP Public......................................... 73
The Findings of the OSSPIP Inventory ................................................................ 80
Explaining the Consuming Landscape.................................................................. 87
Conclusions......................................................................................................... 102
Chapter Four: The Approval of the Wilshire Grand Redevelopment Project ................ 106
The Wilshire Grand Permitting Process ............................................................. 110
The Planning Department ....................................................................... 112
The Planning Commission...................................................................... 117
The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee... 124
The City Council..................................................................................... 130
Planning and the Growth Machine in Los Angeles ............................................ 133
iv
Chapter Five: Neogeography, Volunteered Geographic Information, and the Billboard
Map ................................................................................................................................. 142
Literature Review................................................................................................ 145
Neogeography and VGI .......................................................................... 145
Volunteered Geographic Information..................................................... 148
Spatial Data Quality and Volunteered Geographic Information............. 152
Google Street View................................................................................. 157
Inside the Billboard Map .................................................................................... 159
Methods............................................................................................................... 165
Results................................................................................................................. 169
Positional Accuracy ................................................................................ 169
Attribute Accuracy.................................................................................. 171
Other Spatial Data Quality Factors......................................................... 175
Discussion and Conclusions ............................................................................... 176
Chapter Six: The Emancipatory Potential of Neogeography: Learning From the
Billboard Map ................................................................................................................. 181
Public Space and Los Angeles............................................................................ 182
Public Participation GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information .................. 185
The Billboard Map.............................................................................................. 191
The Billboard Map: Learning from the Community........................................... 196
References....................................................................................................................... 205
Secondary Sources.............................................................................................. 205
City of Los Angeles Code Sections .................................................................... 220
City of Los Angeles Council Motions ................................................................ 221
City of Los Angeles Department Reports........................................................... 221
City of Los Angeles Ordinances......................................................................... 222
California Case Law ........................................................................................... 222
California Statutes and Regulations.................................................................... 223
Federal Case Law................................................................................................ 223
Federal Laws and Code Sections ........................................................................ 223
Other State Case Law.......................................................................................... 224
Interviews............................................................................................................ 224
v
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Columns of information in OSSPIP inventory .................................................. 80
Table 2. Unpermitted and permitted but noncompliant signs in OSSPIP........................ 83
Table 3. Analysis of OSSPIP’s “Permitted” and “Presumed Lawful” designations ....... 86
Table 4. Distance between web points and corresponding field data points ................. 170
Table 5. Parcel analysis of web and corresponding field data points, counted by number
of parcels between web and field data points .................................................. 172
Table 6. Analysis of address accuracy of web entries ................................................... 174
Table 7. Block accuracy of web entry points................................................................. 178
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. A typical pole billboard sign structure.............................................................. 3
Figure 2. Billboard at corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, circa 1920.. 17
Figure 3. Metro Lights signs .......................................................................................... 44
Figure 4. Art illegally posted by SkyTag owner Michael McNeilly, later replaced by an
advertisement .................................................................................................. 50
Figure 5. Permitted supergraphic in Hollywood Sign Use District of Los Angeles ...... 51
Figure 6. Digital billboards erected pursuant to the City of Los Angeles's legal
settlement with CBS and Clear Channel......................................................... 52
Figure 7. OSSPIP Field Survey Inspection Form (front) ............................................... 70
Figure 8. OSSPIP Field Survey Inspection Form (back) ............................................... 71
Figure 9. All OSSPIP Entries, Projected on Satellite Imagery ...................................... 82
Figure 10. Map of unpermitted and noncompliant signs in OSSPIP ............................... 84
Figure 11. Parcel map of Los Angeles by land use zoning category ............................... 88
Figure 12. Map of OSSPIP Entries Identified by Parcel Zoning ..................................... 89
Figure 13. Map of Los Angeles roadways ....................................................................... 91
Figure 14. Map of OSSPIP entries categorized by road type........................................... 92
Figure 15. 1950s image of the Hotel Statler, which became the Wilshire Grand.......... 108
Figure 16. The Wilshire Grand hotel, circa 2009........................................................... 109
Figure 17. Planning Department's proposed vertical sign zone levels for the Wilshire
Grand Redevelopment Project ...................................................................... 115
Figure 18. Renderings of the proposed Wilshire Grand redevelopment project
purportedly highlighting the lighting requests.............................................. 123
Figure 19. Rendering of the proposed Wilshire Grand redevelopment project with
decorative lighting on towers........................................................................ 138
Figure 20. Screen capture of home page of Billboard Map website .............................. 161
Figure 21. Billboard Map pop-up window for sign entry .............................................. 162
vii
Figure 22. Location of Entries in the Billboard Map ..................................................... 166
Figure 23. Sample image showing four layers of data loaded in ArcMap..................... 168
Figure 24. Sample image with lines connecting web and field data points in ArcMap. 169
Figure 25. Sample image of ArcMap with web point separated from corresponding field
data point by one parcel ................................................................................ 171
Figure 26. Map showing distribution of Billboard Map entries and signs in OSSPIP .. 180
Figure 27. Bus stop sign................................................................................................. 199
Figure 28. Bus ad............................................................................................................ 199
Figure 29. Temporary Construction Wall sign............................................................... 199
Figure 30. Sign Permitted as On-Site, Displaying Off-Site Ads.................................... 200
Figure 31. Ad Painted on the Sidewalk.......................................................................... 200
viii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
API Application Programming Interface
CBS CBS Outdoor Inc.
CEQA California Environmental Quality Act
CRA Community Redevelopment Agency
DFD Design for Development
EIR Environmental Impact Report
GIS Geographic Information System
GPS Global Positioning System
GSV Google Street View
HBA Highway Beautification Act
LADBS Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety
LAR-IAC Los Angeles Regional Imagery Acquisition Consortium
OAAA Outdoor Advertising Association of America
OSM OpenStreetMap
OSSPIP Off-Site Sign Periodic Inspection Program
PLUM Planning and Land Use Management Committee
PPGIS Public Participation Geographic Information Systems
PRA Public Records Act
SUD Sign Use District
VGI Volunteered Geographic Information
1
CHAPTER ONE: OUTDOOR ADVERTISING AND THE CONSUMING
LANDSCAPE OF LOS ANGELES
To outdoor advertisers, Los Angeles is, “the largest outdoor advertising market in the
United States” (JCDecaux 2002). To community activists, the city is “ground zero of
billboard blight” (M. Ashburn 2011, personal communication). In 2002, the City of Los
Angeles made two important steps toward regulating billboards. The city banned new
billboards, and it began an inventory of billboards within city limits. Ten years later, new
billboards continued to go up across the city while the billboard inventory had not been
released. This project stems from a simple question: what happened?
Outdoor advertising is an extremely lucrative, and an extremely political,
business. Analysts estimate that one digital billboard in Los Angeles can bring in
$128,000 per month to its owner (Pelisek 2008). The industry’s drive to increase capital
exists alongside the financial difficulties of local government. Cities must provide basic
services to residents, but their revenue sources are unstable at best (Judd and Swanstrom
2012). A key source of revenue is sales tax, and politicians seek development to grow the
local economy, for both jobs and future sales tax (Stone 1993). This is where outdoor
advertising and city government collide. Developers push for outdoor advertising in
development agreements, and city officials approve signage packages because they desire
development. Outdoor advertisers have influence in city hall because they offer ad space
to politicians during elections, they have the funds to lobby and to litigate any
governmental action they do not support, and they can offer the carrot of future sales tax
2
as a result of a commercialized landscape. This financial backdrop makes regulation of
outdoor advertising politically and economically complicated for cities.
Los Angeles has a landscape of suburban sprawl designed for automobile travel,
and it is the home of the entertainment industry — factors that led to a density of
billboards greater than other cities (Gudis 2004). The semi-urban structure of Los
Angeles’s development was perfect for a landscape of billboards. The outdoor advertising
industry arrived in earnest in Los Angeles in the 1910s. The number of electric signs
jumped from 33 to 7,000 in the decade between 1912 and 1922. The city could also then
claim the largest outdoor advertisement in the country: the “Hollywoodland” sign, which
could be seen from a distance of eight miles (Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981). As new
subdivisions were laid out, the boulevards that surrounded them were dotted with
billboards. For example, the 2.3 mile stretch of Los Feliz Boulevard from Western
Avenue to what is now the 5 highway was packed with 49 billboards (D. Seligman,
personal communication, December 2, 2012). The spread of billboards across the city
occurred as new boulevards were laid out, etching the very structure of the growing city
with signs.
In 2002, the City of Los Angeles enacted a law banning the erection of new “off-
site” signs
1
, signs that advertise a product or service not available on the same site (1
L.A.M.C. 4.4 § 14.4.4(B)(11)). The typical off-site sign is a pole billboard, but the
designation as off-site can include any sign type, including supergraphics or mural signs
1
The Los Angeles Municipal Code defines an off-site sign as: “A sign that displays any
message directing attention to a business, product, service, profession, commodity,
activity, event, person, institution or any other commercial message, which is generally
conducted, sold, manufactured, produced, offered or occurs elsewhere than on the
premises where the sign is located” (1 L.A.M.C. 4.4 § 14.4.2).
3
(Figure 1). Along with the ban, the City Council passed the Off-Site Sign Periodic
Inspection Program (OSSPIP), which charged the city’s Department of
Figure 1. A typical pole billboard sign structure
Building and Safety (LADBS) with creating the city’s first comprehensive inventory of
existing off-site signs (IX L.A.M.C. 1 § 91.6205.18), the idea being that in order to
effectively regulate billboards, the city would need to know the extent of billboards that
already existed and their permitting status. The sign ban was passed with an exception
mechanism built in: the package of new laws included an ordinance that created a zoning
mechanism called Sign Use Districts (SUD),by which the city was authorized to create
specially zoned districts wherein new off-site or supergraphic signs would be permitted.
The rationale for sign districts was that off-site signage was more appropriate in some
parts of the city than others, so in certain commercial centers new signage should be
allowed. The sign districts would only be allowed within areas that were already
4
designated as “regional” or “regional commercial” centers, as defined in the General Plan
of the City of Los Angeles (2002), of which there are 21 across the city.
Almost immediately, outdoor advertising companies challenged these laws in
court. Their legal claims were bolstered by the city’s own contradictory actions. While
banning new billboards, the city approved a contract to allow off-site signs on street
furniture at bus stops and kiosks around the city. The city approved massive new
supergraphic signs, spanning entire building walls. It allowed two of the three largest
outdoor advertisers in the city to convert hundreds of traditional billboards into digital
billboards. Courts saw these actions as so contradictory as to render the city’s new
regulations unconstitutional. The success of the initial legal challengers inspired a wave
of lawsuits against the city and more brazen challenges to the laws as advertisers put up
new signs in violation of the laws and without city approval. This project describes and
analyzes the back-and-forth movements in legislative, judicial, and community settings
and their effects on the city’s landscape.
The project also explores the potential of using an on-line, publicly created map
of billboards to counter the spread of advertising in the urban landscape. This aspect of
the project, called the Billboard Map, taps into the collective knowledge of Los Angeles
residents to catalogue billboards in the city. Until very recently, the City of Los Angeles
did not possess an inventory of billboards within its boundaries. This project was initially
envisioned as a public map to enhance the state’s knowledge of and regulation over
billboards. However, the research shifted once I learned that the city had completed its
inventory of billboards under the OSSPIP program but was refusing to release it publicly.
I was inspired to study the political economy of billboards in Los Angeles, and I began to
5
envision the Billboard Map less as a means to tap into the public to aid the state than as a
tool for public use to engage with their environment and each other in an effort to gain
power over the urban landscape.
Literature Review and Theoretical Model
This dissertation makes a two-fold argument about Los Angeles. First, I argue that
the landscape of Los Angeles can be theorized as a consuming landscape: it is cityspace
geared toward creating consumers. Second, I argue that this landscape is maintained by
coordinated efforts of state and private sector elites that can be described as a consuming
machine: it is a form of a “growth machine” (Molotch 1976) that works to grow off-site
advertising in the cityscape. I derived this model from an analysis of the ideas of critical
urban theory and information theory in the context of the physical, political and legal
landscape of Los Angeles.
Critical Urban Theory
Cities and Marxist Thought
Critical urban theory analyzes the city form in capitalist society (Brenner 2009b).
The most important and the most basic description of marxist geography is that capitalist
space is urban space (Scott 2008). From the earliest turns of the Industrial Revolution,
our world has concentrated with ever-increasing rates into cities. Even with the advent of
the communications revolution and its “annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1939/1973,
539), our concentration in cityspace grows. Critical urban theorists, from the vantages of
different disciplines including political science, sociology and geography, seek to
6
uncover the relationship between capitalism and the urban form. This work is based on
the notion that space is not a universal, neutral container of human life; instead, space is a
constantly changing process and product of social life (Lefebvre 1974/1991). Building on
this is one of the key ideas that this literature has put forward: cities are not just the
product of capitalist society; cities make the growth of capitalism possible as much as
capitalist society makes cities possible. The concentration of resources and capital,
consumers and workers, skillsets and connections, that congeal in cities underwrite the
growth of capitalism (Harvey 1973).
The global capitalist system manifests in different places in different ways, but
each smaller scale manifestation will necessarily exhibit certain tendencies. One of these
structural characteristics is the dynamism of the system (Schiller 2006). Capitalist
economies are constantly growing, moving, changing: capital needs to grow in order to
sustain itself. A system in equilibrium is a system in decline (Swyngedouw 2000).
A capitalist society is based on the circulation of capital, organized as an
inter-linked network of production, exchange and consumption processes
with the socially accepted goal of profit-making as its driving force. … Such
successful circulation of capital is predicated upon the organization in space
and the movement over space of money, commodities, and labor. In the
process, concrete geographies (of production, consumption, and
communication) are actively produced (Swyngedouw 2000, 47).
The tendency towards growth is dogged by the related contradictory tendency
towards stagnation. When an industry maxes out its potential market, a firm reaches
monopolistic levels of market share, or prices reach the level that consumers are able to
pay, what had been successful growth will stall out and begin to shrink. The result is a
crisis in the capitalist system. Because capitalism’s structural tendencies are inherently
contradictory, the system will experience crisis on a cyclical basis. Harvey (1975) cites
7
geographic expansion as one of capitalism’s solutions to crisis. Capital moves between
nations, cities, and neighborhoods as a mechanism of growth. When geographic barriers
exist, infrastructure will be built to expand markets, bring in new pools of labor to the
capitalist system, or access new resources. Yet the infrastructure that underwrites growth
in one period will limit growth in the future. Its physical existence on the landscape
circumscribes future use of the land and tends to shoehorn future projects and growth into
existing structures. Thus the tendency of growth is mirrored by the contradictory
tendency of stasis.
Public Space in Capitalist Society
It is impossible to conceive of public space in our capitalist culture apart from the
concept of private property (Smith and Low 2006). Private property informs our
conception of public space, and even more, the rights and privileges associated with
private property seep into the public realm. The amount and quality of “publicness” can
vary within public spaces (Ercan 2010), and scholars have found that the publicness of
public space is in decline due to privatization (Davis 1990). The quality of urban public
space is inherently tied to the political economy of cities, and the privatization of public
space has taken different forms over the last thirty years as cities increasingly have been
tied into a global economy (Christopherson 1994). To maintain their coffers, cities tap
into capital’s unending search for growth. The 1980s saw the rise of public-private
partnerships to redevelop civic centers in cities around the world (see Greenberg 2008;
Luna-Garcia 2008; and Zukin 1995), while in the 1990s urban entrepreneurial efforts
shifted to developing single, large-scale entertainment destinations such as stadiums,
8
arenas, and shopping centers (Sheller 2008). Urban public spaces are now spaces of
consumption, truly available only to consumers (Fernandes 2004). They are often
adorned with logos and designed to sell visitors not just commodities but to sell them on
a particular, sanitized version of publicness (Banerjee 2001). This “Disneyfication”
(Sorkin 1992, 228) of public space, called such based on the faux urban scene of
Disney’s “Main Street,” is seen in urban redevelopment projects such as Los Angeles’s
“The Grove” (Scott 2008).
As the state has ceded public space to privatization and consumption, it has
increased the regulation of these hybridized spaces (Fyfe and Bannister 1998; Low and
Smith 2006). Security guards, cameras, gates and lighting are de rigueur aspects of these
new public spaces (Davis 1992). The increasing regulation is often made in the name of
the public, but not all are welcome: those who stray from the bourgeois, consuming
public are regulated out of public space. Public parks frequented by homeless people,
such as Berkeley’s People’s Park, have been deemed unsafe to the public and therefore
subject to increased police presence (Mitchell 2003). Commercial centers have been
purged of teenagers who gather to socialize and skate (Rogers 2010). Laws against
loitering and panhandling have been enforced against homeless people in revitalized
downtown spaces and commercial strips (Mitchell 1997; Collins and Blomley 2003;
Doherty et al. 2008). In some cases, the state has farmed out its regulation of public space
to private entities. Municipalities have granted regulatory control over public streets and
plazas to corporate landowners (Kayden 2000) and quasi-public entities such as business
improvement districts (Briffault 1999) to maintain a comfortable atmosphere for
consumption. The heightened regulation of urban public spaces has spread from the
9
Global North to the Global South: in Ecuador, indigenous beggars and street vendors
have been swept out of public spaces that they have traditionally worked as a component
of urban renewal projects (Swanson 2007). Around the globe, the effect on urban public
spaces is the same: “the development and management of safe, clean spaces for the fluent
exchange of capital and the orderly flow of commerce” (Rogers 2010, 53).
These studies of the changing manifestations of public space tend to focus on
single sites or areas: a public park, a large-scale development project, a commercial strip.
The underlying idea of public space in these studies is as an individual site within the
overarching realm of the city, a place in which the public at large intentionally gathers.
This idea is in line with the traditional yet idealized conception of public space as a
shared, egalitarian space for public debate or dissent (Madanipour 2010). Yet these
gathering sites are not the extent of public space in cities. The streets and sidewalks that
surround these individual sites of public gathering and that allow travel to different parts
of the city comprise a network of shared cityspace and are an important component of
urban public space. A portion of recent work on urban public space directs a scholarly
focus to the streets and sidewalks of cityspace (see Fyfe 1998). Mitchell (2003) studies
the public sidewalks of a commercial district that becomes effectively closed to homeless
residents under heightened regulation. Davis (1990) and Landman (2010) describe the
closing of formerly publicly accessible streets to create gated residential communities.
Harvey’s (2006) analysis of the spatial reorganization of Second Empire Paris is
especially pertinent to this study of advertising in cityspace, for it reveals the seeping
effect of privatization on the public space of streets and sidewalks. Thousands of
buildings were razed to lay down straight, wide boulevards and structures built according
10
strict aesthetic guidelines of expensive materials. The prices of the rebuilt districts forced
working-class people into neighborhoods that had not been revamped. The new
boulevards were lined with bourgeois cafes and shops, whose expensive goods, well-
dressed clientele, and sumptuous aesthetics spilled onto the street, creating a hybrid
public-private space that clearly spoke to which “public” was invited.
Only recently has urban geography begun to turn its critical lens towards outdoor
advertising and its role in the privatization of public space. Iveson (2012) identifies
entrepreneurial state practices in partnerships between local governments and global
advertising corporations that allow the firms to maintain bus shelters and kiosks adorned
with ads in exchange for sharing a cut of the profits with the local government, and he
considers the re-democratization of public space that has been so commodified by the
state.
State, Capital, and Cities
The state plays a vital role in maintaining the capitalist economy. On the one
hand, the state sets up the legal framework that allows the capitalist system to take root
and encourages it to thrive. Indeed, the birth of the capitalist system 300 ago was made
possible by the state as the English government made interventions in the economy that
allowed the consolidation of capital and encouraged the growth of wage labor (Appleby
2010). The state works as the partner of capital by taking actions at the behest of industry
to prime the economy for capital’s advance. On the other hand, the state will institute
regulations that keep accumulation of capital in check, which serve to appease non-elites
and avoid crisis. The state appears progressive and community-minded when it keeps
11
corporate excesses in check in the short term, but such actions benefit capital in the long
term by keeping labor content enough to be unwilling to revolt and by staving off the
crises that result from excessive growth (Harvey 1975). To ensure its ability to act, the
state must have legitimacy within the populace. The state acquires legitimacy in two
ways. First, it must appear neutral, and second, it must make the interests of capital
appear to be in the general interest (Harvey 1976). With its legitimacy in place, the state
plays a key role in maintaining capital’s advance and pushing it forward into new parts of
society.
While the accounts of the state and cityspace by Harvey and others provides a
structural account of the role of capital, a more agent-based account is provided by the
growth machine thesis. Molotch (1976) argued that governmental and business interests
coincide in their individual drives to grow, and he described their concatenated efforts as
a “growth machine.” Growth here is a broad concept, encompassing population,
economy, infrastructure, and construction. The iconic example of the growth machine is
real estate development, wherein a proactive private sector profits by building out
cityspace in part by engaging government agencies (Logan and Molotch 1987). Molotch
(1976) argued that a city can be seen as an aggregate of competing land interests that play
out on different levels, from individual intersections and blocks, to neighborhoods and
commercial centers. Given that land is a limited resource, Molotch argues that potential
developers aim to influence governmental powers to shape the conditions of development
in ways that benefit their interests. Molotch argues that organizing the conditions of
growth is the most important aspect of local government. The day-to-day decision-
making by urban elites that determines how the city’s limited resources are distributed –
12
which often goes on behind closed doors – is paramount. A “rentier” class including
developers, realtors, builders and auxiliary players, who directly benefit from land
exchange and development is the core of the growth machine (Logan and Molotch 1987).
Critics propose the work of the French school of regulation theory for providing a
theoretical framework to strengthen work on urban dynamics, such as the growth
machine model (Goodwin and Painter 1997). Indeed, it is argued, the failings of each
theory are compatible and the theories can bolster each other. Regulation theory focuses
on the non-economic political and cultural forces that serve to maintain the capitalist
economy (Goodwin 1999). “[I]t considers a wide range of institutional factors and social
forces directly and indirectly involved in capital accumulation … including institutions,
collective identities, shared visions, common rules, norms, conventions, networks,
procedures and modes of calculation” (Jessop 1997, 289). Regulationists posit the “mode
of regulation” as “the mode of capitalism which assures the compatibility between the
mode of production and the mode of consumption” (Jessop 1995, 327, n. 5). Accordingly,
he and other scholars suggest that ‘normalization’ and ‘regularization’ would have been a
more apt translation of the French term ‘régulation’ employed by its initial proponents.
Regulation theory is one attempt to answer the enduring question of why capitalism
endures when it is so mired by contradiction (Lauria,1997). It is criticized for taking an
overly abstract view in that it, “underestimates the importance of local actors and
organizations and thus cannot explain the concrete construction of regulatory
mechanisms” (Lauria 1997, 7-8). Thus the growth machine thesis and regulation theory
can productively come together in concrete studies of regulatory processes in play at
specific times and places.
13
Information Theory and Communication Theory
Shannon’s (1948) mathematical theory of information posits information as a
measurement of the uncertainty of data. This model allowed communication technologies
to greatly improve in the decades following World War II and for this growth to continue
through to the present. On a broader level, the mathematical theory of information
cemented the idea of information as immaterial; information is now conceived as a thing
that is capable of being stored and carried on paper, through wires, in hard drives and
brains, but is itself substance-less (Hayles 1999). While having no substance of its own,
information has great power: it has led to a massive yet mundane change in how people
work, while revolutionizing how we understand ourselves and our place in the universe.
“Information processing and programmed decision are the means by which [] material
processing is controlled in living systems, from macromolecules of DNA to the global
economy” (Beninger 1986, quoted in Bowker 1994). Bowker (1994) summarizes this as
the “everything is information” mythology.
Shannon’s theory of information was critiqued for treating information as
unrealistically inert. MacKay (1969) argued information could not be understood apart
from its meaning and context. One message could mean different things to different
receivers. Those in the mathematical context saw information as a thing; others saw it as
an action. It affects its recipients and inspires change, and it means different things to
different people. Information is therefore never inert but is ever-changing as it moves
within and between channels. Here, information theory aligns with the Marxian theory of
the commodity. Capitalist society sees commodities as inert objects, capable of being
bought and sold, but commodities should be read as processes that include all the
14
circumstances of their creation, offer for sale, and use by the consumer (Kopytoff 1986).
This way of thinking asks us to consider items that we may take for granted as a
combination of social, environmental, political and personal processes. Indeed, this is the
work of geography as well: It is a field that takes the spaces that people inhabit in their
day-to-day lives, questions how they came to be, and considers how they might be
changed.
A further elaboration in information theory posits information as part of a closed
system — a feedback loop that includes the sender and receiver of information in
addition to the information itself (Maturana and Varela 1973/1980). In this view, called
reflexivity, information not only has an effect on the recipient of a message — it has an
effect on the sender as well. Hayles (1999) likens this process to Escher’s hands drawing
themselves into existence. This idea can be broadened beyond single senders and
receivers of information to the whole society that creates the information. When means of
creating and transmitting information change, senders and receivers of information
themselves change, and societal shift occurs. Using terms such as knowledge economy
(Machlup 1962), information society (Umesao 1963)
2
, post-industrial society (Bell 1976),
and network society (Castells1996), scholars have identified a shift in how our society
conceives of and uses information.
Schiller (2006) ties this shift to processes of commodification. He argues that the
hopes of the failing global economy of the 1970s were pinned on the commodification of
information. The U.S. government’s role in growing information and communication
2
Umesao is generally credited with coining the term “information society,” but the
matter is subject to debate (Duff, Craig, and McNeill 1996).
15
technologies was key in its funding of research and development projects for the military
and space programs, enacting rules and laws underwriting the liberalization of the
telecommunications industry, and the privatization and economic protection of
information (Schiller 2006). The recent expansion of location-based technologies has
brought about the expansion of geographic information, and the government’s role was
again crucial, requiring cellular service providers to add geolocation capabilities to their
products which then spurred industry’s investment in new geographic information
technologies and new ways to commodify the technologies, their use, and the information
they create (Wilson 2012).
On the flip side of the commodification of information is the use of information to
sell commodities. Communications and media scholars recognize the purpose of
advertising as transforming its viewers into consumers (Jhally 1990). Marx’s concept of
ideology, the ideals and values of the dominant social group which are taken on by the
non-ruling classes as their own, was furthered by Gramsci (1971), who posited that when
the non-ruling classes take on the ideals of the upper class as their own, they consent to
their own domination. He called this process hegemony. Thinkers associated with the
Frankfurt School identified the role of the media in transferring the ideas down from the
ruling class and out to the non-ruling classes. The “culture industries,” including
advertising and the media, legitimizes the capitalist system of production and brings
individuals into the system by directing their non-working time towards consumption
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2007). Ads quell radicalism by giving the worker a vision
and path of upward mobility. Through advertising, the consumer sees himself as a
16
member of a community, yet he experiences this community individually in time and
space (Poster 1990).
Smythe (1977) argues that there is no distinction between working and non-
working hours in a capitalist system, because workers spend their non-working hours
viewing media and its commercials. The time spent viewing advertisements has two
effects: it turns viewers into consumers by feeding them messages to buy, and it turns the
collection of individual viewers into an audience which media companies can sell to
advertisers (Smythe 1977). Jhally and Livant (1986) take this one step further, arguing
that viewing is productive labor, such that a worker’s time spent watching the media
manufactures surplus value. These arguments were created with television viewing in
mind. Jhally and Livant (1986, 142) argue, “In programmes, audiences create meanings
for themselves while in advertising audiences create meaning for capital.”
Historicizing Los Angeles
The transformation of Los Angeles from one of many small agricultural towns in
California in the mid-19th century, lacking the natural features to support either a large
population or economy, into the state’s main urban center and economic powerhouse by
the mid-20th century, is traditionally told as one of boosterism: Los Angeles is the city
that created itself by selling itself (McWilliams 1946/1973; Fogelson 1967/1993; Starr
1985). Boosters promoted the region and built out the land for their incoming customers
(Starr 1985). Railroads acted as the early booster for the region, hosting tours and
providing free lodging for visitors. In contrast to other regions in which the laying of
railroads and roads followed settlements, the settlements followed the laying of the
17
railroads and roads in Los Angeles (McWilliams 1946/1973). The massive growth of the
city at the turn of the century and in the 1920s was due to the cross-country publicity
efforts of local developers (McWilliams 1946/1973). The city’s population was drawn to
its suburban form, with large 100 x 400 square foot lots that allowed “hobby farms” at
home for urban workers. This cross between rural and urban living was a selling point as
the city marketed itself to Midwesterners and Easterners ready to escape their native
cities that were becoming denser with foreign immigrants (Fulton 2001). The boom of the
1920s was travelled on the newly completed transcontinental highways; unlike earlier
train-traveling immigrants, these new arrivals came complete with a car. These people
were largely born in America and they had the financial means to set up a new life
Figure 2. Billboard at corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, circa 1920
(Fogelson 1967/1993). When these new residents arrived, the semi-urban landscape was
already filling with advertising (Gudis 2004). Figure 2 shows a photograph of the
intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, taken in 1920. The image reveals
18
an airfield surrounded by undeveloped land. The only other permanent structure is a
billboard. Outdoor advertising such as the “Hollywoodland” sign drew new Angelenos
into new neighborhoods (Gudis 2004), and, once there, outdoor advertising sold them on
products that would complete their urban living (Cross 2000).
The boosterism that brought residents to the city is one part of a slightly different
telling of the growth of the city. The development of Los Angeles is posited as a growth
machine as the efforts of private boosters combined with local leaders in making Los
Angeles the dominant urban center of California, beating out the existing favorite San
Francisco and potential upstart San Diego (Logan and Molotch 1987). Though the
machine’s effects were wildly successful, the machine itself was not perfectly
coordinated. “Never a monolithic political bloc, business developed its political role in
the urban policy-making process by a combination of bargaining and conflict with its
rivals, and by accommodating to its internal differences, rather than by imposing its
preferences upon the body politic (Issel 1988, 119). Erie (1992) argues that the local state
was more of an independent factor in early 19th century Los Angles than most historians
allow and that private industry boosters were both limited and supported in different
ways by the actions of local state actors. Yet whether the primary objective was private
development or public infrastructure that supported private goals, growth was the
intention and the effect of early 20th century Los Angeles.
As in the remainder of the United States, progressive reforms came to Los
Angeles in the early part of the 20th century. The Progressive movement in the United
States grew in response to the political “machine” of entrenched party politics that was
seen as running some cities (Judd and Swanstrom 2012). In Los Angeles, middle- and
19
upper-class activists were frustrated by what they saw as the city’s lack of vision and the
ease with which political parties could impede municipal progress with loyal politicians
(Fogelson 1967/1993). Such “machines” were not as entrenched in the Los Angeles
community as they were in other American cities, as Los Angeles lacked the teeming,
impoverished neighborhoods of European immigrants to support party politicians
(Fogelson 1967/1993). The remedies prescribed by the Progressives were to disempower
the political parties and to bring the organizational and productive prowess of business to
government. Los Angeles transformed its City Council into a nonpartisan body in which
party affiliations were not listed on ballots in 1909, two years before California mandated
the reform for all municipal governments (Sonenshein 2006). Another Progressive Era
development, public boards and commissions, became common governmental structures
at all level of California government. These bodies were composed of citizens offering
their expertise on an unpaid basis, and they were populated with leaders in the business
community (Pincetl 2003). Progressives made institutional land use planning a major
component of Los Angeles municipal administration by making Los Angeles the first city
in the nation to enact wholesale zoning in the city (Fogelson 1967/1993).
World War II was a major turning point in the history of Los Angeles, and it
transformed the city into a post-war center of production in the national Fordist economy
(Clark 1983). The Fordist economy, characterized by mass production and mass
consumption, federal spending and national culture, was evidenced, if not typified, in Los
Angeles, yet the specifics of place make Los Angeles a unique version of the Fordist
story (Keil 1998). Its pre-war economy was steadily growing on a diet of real estate and
agriculture, oil and Hollywood (Keil 1998), but the rise in automotive production before
20
the war signaled a shift towards manufacturing that the war would underwrite. In this
chapter of Los Angeles history, the growing wealth of the region through the middle
decades of the 20th century is tied directly to the rise of the aerospace technologies and
arms industries as federal funds infused the region’s economy and supported the
consuming population of the region’s cities and suburbs (Scott 1990). The explosions on
Pearl Harbor that pulled the United States into World War II, marked the explosion of
Los Angeles’s burgeoning industrial economy (McWilliams 1946/1973). Local place-
makers, the elites of the growth machine, worked to make the region attractive for the
arms and aerospace industries (Bloch 1987). Following the war, the region’s industrial
bases blossomed with federal money. “Los Angeles, the second largest metropolitan
region in the USA, is literally the product of the technological age — the era of the
automobile, the airplane, and the rocket” (Crouch and Dinerman 1963, 3). With these
industries, the Los Angeles economy was for the first time fully tied into the national
economy, and its population was prepared to do its part. “Los Angeles had already laid
out the structure for mass consumption (suburbs, automobiles, etc.) without possessing a
corresponding productive apparatus” (Keil 1998, 64, citing Davis 1990). As with earlier
booms, those that arrived were ready to complete their new lives with new homes and
new products to fill them (Hise 1999).
The Los Angeles of the late 19th century fulfills numerous different critical
visions of cityhood in the late capitalist era. For two decades, development in the city
boomed. Mayor Tom Bradley had strong ties to Washington, which brought a funnel of
federal money, and foreign investment, notably from Japan, flowed into the Southland.
The unified consensus for growth — the key feature of the growth machine in the eyes of
21
many urban theorists (Vogel and Swanson 1989; Whitson and Judd 1991) — makes Los
Angeles under Bradley an exemplary growth machine. Los Angeles in this era is also
characterized as an example of the “internationalization” of cities (Soja 1987) or a
“global city” (Abu-Lughod 1999; Erie 2004), due to the rise of international service
firms, such as law, banking, advertising, locating nodes in the city, as well as the amount
of foreign investment in development. Forces of globalization may undercut the strength
of local growth machines (Logan and Molotch 1987), because the importance of
maintaining relationships with local politicians, property owners, and other elites is lower
for international actors than local business interests. International capital has many sites
to choose for its investments, and it can use its mobility to extract concessions from local
government; consequently, municipal actors seek to brand and sell their cities, enacting
the part of the “entrepreneurial city” (Hall and Hubbard 1996). When their interests align
and agreements are reached, growth results, but a machine may never come into fruition.
The mobility of capital and inter-city competition that fuel the entrepreneurial city when
fully realized, create the “postmodern city” (Harvey 1985). Late 19th century Los
Angeles fulfilled this vision for the “Los Angeles School” of urban studies (Dear 2003),
with the rise of satellite business centers drawing investment out of downtown, the
influence of global investments, and the chaotic nature of development all working t
increase the alienation and impersonal character of urban life.
These categorizations of Los Angeles are not mutually exclusive. The global city
thesis focuses on the high-level exchange and accumulation of capital, while the post-
modern and Los Angeles School visions of cityhood focus on the dystopic effects of
transnational capital on cityspace. The growth machine thesis focuses on the mechanics
22
of development — the investment of capital in the landscape. The growth machine does
not ignore the effects of global capital. Instead it seeks to “bring the state back in”
(Skocpol 1985) by disambiguating the role of state actors in creating the local
manifestations of global tendencies. Both the view “from above” and the view “from
below” have their critics: work on globalization is criticized for ignoring the role of local
actors (Bayart 2008) and the Los Angeles School is criticized for being overly theoretical,
even vague (Erie and MacKenzie 2009), while work on the growth machine, as noted
above, is criticized for lacking a theoretical base. Yet the growth machine thesis is not
devoid of theory. Indeed, the machine model was developed by Logan and Molotch
(1987) as they theorized the differing ideas and uses of cityspace that they identified
between residents and elites. They used Marx’s “use value” to explain the residents’
valuation of the places they lived and worked, and they employed “exchange value” to
understand the commodification of property pursued by landed interests. Such
conceptions place the analysis of local machinations within a broader explanatory model
of political economics. All of these visions of Los Angeles share the underlying concern
of the effect of capital — be it by local business elites, global finance, or transnational
corporations — on the lived experience of the city.
The effect of capital on the city is at the heart of two current debates on the
politics of development in Los Angeles. First, the status of the growth machine in Los
Angeles is questioned by urban scholars. By the 20th century’s end, the city’s sustained
and even unhampered growth led some commentators to argue that the tide was shifting.
Davis (1990) describes the rise to power of homeowner coalitions whose NIMBY (Not In
My BackYard) politics opposed the continued development of the Southland. In Fulton’s
23
(2001) view, the negative effects of growth had reached a tipping point, and the growth
machine of Los Angeles had disintegrated. Purcell (2000) argues that the growth machine
churned onwards, despite the obstacles of NIMBY groups, decreased federal funding, and
the increase in importance of geographical and government fragmentation in the face of
political challenges.
Second, the extent and effects of planning on Los Angeles land use and growth is
under debate. The city has long been described by “sprawl” (Wolch, Pastor, and Dreier
2004), urban development characterized by unchecked and unregulated growth. Hise
(1999) argues that the suburban residential developments that are often the cornerstone of
sprawl criticisms were often carefully designed and planned, with locations chosen for
proximity to employment opportunities and schools and commercial blocks placed near
residential blocks to create “complete” communities. This characterization stands in
opposition to Fogelson’s (1967/1993) characterization of planning in Los Angeles as
well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful due to the influence of private business
interests on City Council members, whose municipal power overrode the city’s Planning
Department and Planning Commission and allowed them to legislate around Planning’s
recommendations at every turn.
This project’s findings speak directly to these questions. The development of
outdoor advertising in Los Angeles is legally complicated and politically fragmented.
Unlike other types of land use regulation, any limitation of advertising invokes the
constitutional issue of freedom of speech. Because of the variety of legal and
administrative issues involved in signage, authority is distributed amongst numerous
24
agencies. The number of different city offices that are involved in signage stems in part
from the Progressive Era changes to state structures that remain to this day.
The city's political structure was created by progressive reforms in its 1925
charter and provides for a relatively weak mayor, and a city council composed
of 15 members, each of whom represents a gerrymandered district of
approximately 260,000 residents. … City services are provided by 32
departments, and administrative oversight is shared between the city council
and more than 240 city commissioners (Box and Musso 2004, 264).
Such fragmentation makes arriving at and enforcing coherent policy difficult.
Further, fragmentation means that numerous entrypoints exist for private industry to
concatenate with state actors into a growth machine and thereby influence and potentially
undercut city planning.
The Consuming Landscape and the Consuming Machine
I posit the consuming landscape as a descriptive and analytical lens to understand
Los Angeles cityspace. Harvey (1975) posited that the urban form is now primarily
directed towards consumption. The concept of the consuming landscape builds on this
argument. It is derived from the term “spaces of consumption,” which speaks to
individual sites of buying and selling, but intentionally employs different language.
Consuming, a verb, is more apt than the noun consumption, because it speaks to the on-
going process of being a consumer rather than simply the act of buying. If spaces of
consumption are sites of purchases, than the consuming landscape is the broad-scale field
of day-to-day life in a capitalist society. Landscape is an appropriate geographic concept
for considering advertising and its effects, because landscape is defined as a broad-scale,
visual field (Duncan 2000). The concept of landscape in geography has been critiqued as
a bourgeois conception of space, in which the elite are empowered to gaze upon pleasing
25
aesthetic scenes of productivity and order (Cosgrove 1985), and Mitchell (1997) employs
the term in this sense when he argues that anti-homeless laws categorize homeless
persons as displeasing objects within the urban landscape that bourgeois elite hope to
remove.
I employ communication and information theory to deepen this consideration of
landscape. When we consider a billboard through the lens of information theory, we
understand it as more than an object to be viewed: it is a repository of information on
capitalist culture, including lessons on what to buy and how to behave. Information has a
physicality (Hayles 1999), and advertising’s messages are not ephemeral. Like
information, then, the urban landscape is not just a scene to behold or even a “way of
seeing” (Cosgrove 1985) — it is the broad-scale physical manifestation of cityspace.
When city residents view the messages of advertising, they incorporate the consuming
messages into their selves. Viewing the consuming landscape is not the conscious,
empowering act described by Cosgrove (1985); it is a subconscious, disempowering
experience. All urban residents are affected, including the bourgeois elite. The consuming
landscape understands the city as the entire sensory field of the cityscape in which the
desire for consuming is instilled. The concept helps identify the physical geography that,
per Gramsci (1971), disciplines the city resident into the lifestyle of capitalism. It
recognizes that messages of consuming saturate urban space, rather than being solely
confined to the spaces of consumption in which products are bought or later used.
Further, just as billboards feature changing advertisements, the consuming landscape is a
constantly changing terrain. New spaces of consumption are built, new advertising is
projected, and new consuming behaviors are enacted. These aspects of the consuming
26
landscape reveal capital’s drive to grow; but not only this, they create that growth. Thus,
the consuming landscape both reveals and produces capitalist society (Lefebvre
1974/1991; Hayles 1999).
The concept of the consuming machine is an analytical tool for understanding the
state’s role in growing capital through the landscape. The term builds on the idea of the
growth machine (Logan and Molotch 1987) by looking to the coordination of state and
private efforts to develop the city. The growth machine sees the development of land as
the basis for urban growth (Molotch 1976); the consuming machine looks to the urban
landscape. The growth machine analysis focuses on private actors in real estate and its
attendant fields, such as architecture, construction and law; the consuming machine adds
the outdoor advertising industry to the mix. The current trend of outdoor advertising to be
draped over existing buildings (see Chapter 2) and incorporated into new architecture
(see Chapter 4) means that the analysis considers the traditional growth machine players
in addition to advertisers.
Together, these terms help us identify answers to the question posed by regulation
theory: what social structures exist that maintain capitalist society, despite the inherent
contradictions of the capitalist system? As noted, urban theorists suggest that regulation
theory can provide a theoretical underpinning for work in the growth machine vein, and
they suggest the growth machine analysis to make work in the regulation school less
abstract and more agent-based. A model for breaking down the barriers between the
abstract and the concrete is provided by work in critical legal geography. This work
criticizes earlier branches of geographic work for their assumption of two separate
realms—the spatial and the legal—and the corresponding naturalization of each. Critical
27
legal geography builds on the work of critical legal studies in criticizing traditional legal
scholarship and judicial analysis by arguing against the idea of the law as a universal,
monolithic set of rules. Instead, this work argues that legal rules and meanings are
situated in social contexts (Holder and Harrison 2003). Bringing together these two
strands of scholarship, the goal of critical legal geography has been to show the inherent
interconnection of law and space (Blomley 2003a). With this work in mind, this project
employs the concepts of the consuming machine and consuming landscape to analyze
individual actors and actions, even as it considers the over-arching goals of the capitalist
system.
Project Description
There are two aspects to this dissertation. One is a political geographic study of
billboard regulation in Los Angeles. This study uses qualitative research to understand
the politics of outdoor advertising in Los Angeles. I analyze three aspects of sign
regulation: 1) the ban on new billboards, including the lawsuits that tested it and its
effects on the city’s landscape; 2) the billboard inventory program including ensuing
litigation, the mechanics of the inventory and its results; and 3) the development process,
wherein new signage is approved under the new legal framework. These three topics are
studied using primary sources including city council files, court filings, transcripts of
public meetings, and development agreements, as well as transcripts of interviews with
individuals (See Limb and Dwyer 2001).
First, I study the laws and litigation that have defined billboard regulation in Los
Angeles for the last decade. The legal terrain is shifting and highly political. In 2002, the
28
City Council enacted a ban on new off-site signs in Los Angeles except within designated
sign districts. Thus, from the beginning, the new ban had an important component based
on spatial variability. At the same time, the City Council enacted an inventory program to
catalog all existing billboards in the city and research their permitting status. Each of
these aspects of the 2002 sign laws were challenged in court, and the litigation itself
affected the landscape of billboards as much as the laws did. The litigation revealed the
legal framework to be unstable and inspired sign companies to put up new signage. In
Chapter 2, I describe the 2002 sign ban and the litigation that challenged it in court, and
in Chapter 3, I consider the fate of the city’s inventory program, including the court
challenges, the work completed by the city under the program, and the effort to make the
data public.
In Chapter 4, I analyze the development process in action by studying a
redevelopment project recently approved by the city that promises to be a massive new
site of outdoor advertising in Los Angeles. Studying an individual project exposes the
dynamics of the consuming machine. The site of study is the Wilshire Grand project,
approved by the City Council on March 29, 2011. The location of the project was not part
of an existing sign district, so the developers could not incorporate off-site advertising
into the building unless the city created a new sign district. The city did so, over public
disapproval of the signage. Because a sign district was created, approval of the project
involved nearly every city entity that work on signs.
The second major aspect of this project is a study of billboard data created by the
public using a website created for this project. Volunteered geographic information (VGI)
(Goodchild 2007) is location data created by nonprofessionals. It is one aspect of the
29
cultural phenomenon of “neogeography” (Turner 2006) that has emerged as online
mapping and publicly accessible base maps from sites such as Google Maps has allowed
the nonprofessional to easily take part in mapping. To engage with the phenomenon of
neogeography in a socially impactful way and to test the usefulness of VGI, I developed a
website that allows the public to map billboards and record pertinent data, such as
address, owner, and whether the billboard is lighted or is digital. This project was
inspired by the City’s inability to create an up-to-date inventory of outdoor advertising
and to maintain the information that it does have in an open and accessible manner. I
describe and study the Billboard Map website in Chapter 5. I analyze the spatial accuracy
of the data by comparing the location of signs extracted from website entries with the
locations as determined in fieldwork. In the concluding chapter, I bring together the two
parts of the project. I analyze the Billboard Map data in terms of the completeness and
the correctness of the dataset, which under the traditional spatial data quality rubric looks
to whether relevant data is missing as well as whether all included data belongs in the
dataset. Specifically, I find that many of the signs that users chose to enter in the
Billboard Map were not signs that the city’s inventory of billboards intended to include.
But rather than interpret this as undermining the quality of the dataset, I conclude,
inspired by the work of Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS)
and the ideas of Critical Urban Theory, that the extra signs show that the public views the
landscape of signage differently than city actors. It shows that community members see
signage in their neighborhoods as one thick landscape of advertising, rather than as
separate legal and administrative categories of signs. Further, the finding suggests that the
creation of a map based on the public’s perception of signs, rather than the city’s, would
30
be a productive exercise with the potential to help communities reenvision their
neighborhoods and remake the public spaces that they share.
31
CHAPTER TWO: THE LEGAL LANDSCAPE OF BILLBOARDS
IN LOS ANGELES FOLLOWING THE 2002 SIGN LAWS
In the late 1990s, the City of Los Angeles began to experience an uptick in new off-site
signs. The sign law in place at that time had been enacted in 1986 (Ordinance No.
161312). According to long-time Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety
(LADBS) employee Luke Zamperini, the city enacted the 1986 sign law at the behest of
existing billboard companies who aimed to stop new companies from putting up signs in
their prime territory. Of these laws, the City Planning Department (2009, 3) stated,
The City’s current sign regulations, adopted in 1986, have shaped the way
signage has been incorporated into our streetscapes, in a way that can now in
retrospect be described as excessive. A proliferation of signage adds
significantly to the visual clutter for which Los Angeles has become well-
known, and points to the need for stricter sign regulations.
The experience of the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles is instructive. In
the late 1990s, permit applications for billboards jumped within the Hollywood project
area of the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (Hollywood CRA).
3
At
that time, says Kip Rudd, Senior Planner for the Hollywood CRA, traffic studies had
revealed commuting patterns from Beverly Hills to studios in the valley that traveled
straight through Hollywood, and these commuters were a coveted segment for outdoor
advertisers. Traffic to and through the area was expected to increase as well due to the
construction of a Metro rail stop and various development projects in the works. The
3
In 1945, California enacted the Community Redevelopment Act to encourage public
and private partnerships to redevelop blighted areas (Parson 1982). The law authorized
the creation of individual project areas for redevelopment, and the Hollywood project
area was designated in 1986 (Reynolds 2012).
32
number of permit applications for signs in the Hollywood CRA had been about one per
month during the period of June 1998 to June 1999; it jumped to two per month from
July to October 1999, with increasing rates expected thereafter. The environmental unit
of the Hollywood CRA believed that signage was categorically exempt from the
California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), so it did not conduct any environmental
review of signage applications. “We were just signing permit applications,” Rudd says.
Activists began pushing for the city to limit or otherwise regulate the ever-
growing number of billboards. In late 2000, the City Council ordered the creation of a
Sign Task Force to study the proliferating signage in the city towards making changes to
the municipal code (Ordinance No. 173681). The City Council ordered a moratorium on
new billboards in the Hollywood CRA project area and in November, 2000, adopted an
Interim Control Ordinance citywide to prevent a rash of sign installations prior to
enactment of a more stringent ordinance (Ordinance No. 173562). In May, 2001, the City
of Los Angeles adopted an Interim Control Ordinance over supergraphic signs citywide
for the same reason (Ordinance No. 173988).
4
On November 15, 2001, the Hollywood
CRA enacted a Design for Development (DFD) – an official document that sets
guidelines for development within a project area – that banned new billboards and pole
signs within its bounds.
On May 24, 2002, the City Council enacted a permanent ban on new supergraphic
signs and mural signs (Ordinance No. 174517) and on June 10, 2002, enacted a
4
The Los Angeles Municipal Code defines an Supergraphic Sign as: “A sign, consisting
of an image projected onto a wall or printed on vinyl, mesh or other material with or
without written text, supported and attached to a wall by an adhesive and/or by using
stranded cable and eye-bolts and/or other materials or methods and which does not
comply with [certain other provisions of the sign ordinance]” (I L.A.M.C. 4.4 § 14.4.2).
33
permanent ban on new off-site signs (Ordinance No. 174547). These laws also banned
the renovation or alteration of already existing supergraphics and murals. These laws
were part of a package of legislation that included OSSPIP and its associated collection
of fees from sign owners (Ordinance Nos. 174442 and 174736). OSSPIP would be the
city’s first effort at a comprehensive inspection of existing off-site signs, the idea being
that in order to effectively regulate billboards, the city would need to know the extent of
billboards that already existed and their permitting status. The package also created the
planning structure for enacting SUDs, special districts wherein new off-site or
supergraphic signs would be allowed under enumerated circumstances. The rationale for
SUDs was that off-site signage was more appropriate in some parts of the city than
others, so in certain commercial centers new signage should be allowed. The sign
districts would only be allowed within areas that were already recognized as “regional”
or “regional commercial” centers, of which there were twenty-one across the city. The
first of these special districts created by the city was the Hollywood Supplemental Use
District in October, 2004 (Ordinance No. 176172).
Almost immediately after the regulations were passed, outdoor advertising
companies challenged these laws in court. Their legal claims were bolstered by the city’s
own contradictory actions. While banning new billboards, the city approved a contract
with CBS/Decaux to allow off-site signs on street furniture such as bus stops and kiosks
around the city (Ordinance No. 174378). The city approved numerous massive
supergraphic signs, spanning entire building walls (e.g. Ordinance No. 174546), in the
new Hollywood Sign District. The city allowed two of the three largest outdoor
advertisers in the city, CBS and Clear Channel, to convert hundreds of traditional
34
billboards into digital billboards (Motion No. 03-2771). Courts saw these actions as so
contradictory and contrary to the intent of the new sign regulations, as to render the new
regulations unconstitutional. The success of the initial legal challengers inspired a wave
of lawsuits against the city and more brazen challenges to the laws as advertisers put up
new signs in violation of the laws and without city approval. Such back-and-forth
movements in legislative, judicial, and community settings played out with large effects
on the city’s landscape.
I focus on three cases in this chapter:
1. CBS and Clear Channel v. City of LA, in which two of the largest outdoor
advertisers in the city challenged the city’s inventory program and its concomitant
fee, and Summit Media v. City of LA, in which a smaller outdoor advertiser
challenged the legal settlement that disposed of the CBS and Clear Channel case;
2. Metro Lights v. City of LA, in which a smaller outdoor advertiser alleged that the
city’s contract with CBS/Decaux for thousands of bus stops and kiosks across the
city, adorned with off-site signs, undercut the City’s ban on new off-site signs;
and
3. World Wide Rush v. City of LA, in which a smaller outdoor advertiser alleged
that the city’s exceptions to the sign ban that would allow new signs to go up at
the city’s discretion, for example, pursuant to development agreements with real
estate developers, undercut the ban.
This chapter continues the work of critical legal geography by uncovering the
political underpinnings and spatial ramifications of the Los Angeles 2002 sign laws. It is
my argument that the struggles surrounding the sign laws can be analyzed as the
consuming machine in action. The drive to develop the consuming landscape through
35
new signage, manifested through coordinated action by elites in city hall and outdoor
advertising, broadly describes the actions underlying the litigation. This analysis draws
from the growth machine thesis (Molotch 1976; Logan and Molotch 1987), but the work
of critical legal geography, as applied in this chapter, broadens the growth machine
analysis in two ways. First, the growth machine thesis posits land development as the
most important role of city government (Molotch 1976). It stems from a political
economic perspective by viewing land as a commodity and the interaction of the public
and private realms as inherent to the development process. Thus, the analysis focuses on
land development, but not on the production of space. Not surprisingly then, urban
studies relying on the growth machine thesis focus on land, not space. Specifically, they
study the functioning of the growth machine as a social cause which has a physical effect
on cities. Critical legal geography looks to space as a component of social life; therefore
an application of critical legal geography to a study of urban land development will look
to the role of space in the functioning of urban politics. Here, this will entail a
consideration of the consuming landscape of off-site signage as a factor in and goal of
urban political machinations.
Second, critical legal geography can expand the view of the growth machine to
the legal landscape of the city. The topic of work on the growth machine is generally
large-scale development projects, such as stadiums and shopping centers. Critical legal
geography sees the legal landscape as pervasive, and it therefore studies the role of law in
manufacturing everyday spaces and places, from the public spaces of parks and streets to
the private spaces of homes. Outdoor advertising looms large over downtown and
shopping districts from large developments, but it is also pervasive throughout cityspace.
36
The perspective of critical legal geography can therefore broaden work with the growth
machine. Further, the machinations of laws and litigation are not the topic of growth
machine studies. Relevant court cases may occasionally appear in this work, but they are
not the focus of the study. Litigation is inherently adversarial, so it is not an obvious
focus for work within the growth machine oeuvre as the growth machine looks to the
coordination of private and public actors. This chapter will show that litigation can have a
broad effect on cityspace and that the negotiations of opposing attorneys as well as the
choices of their clients during litigation, be they members of the City Council or owners
of outdoor advertising companies, can have major impacts on cityspace. The next section
lays the groundwork for the current legal disputes by briefly describing the history of the
regulation of outdoor advertising in the United States
The Regulation of Outdoor Advertising in the United States
The outdoor advertising industry grew out of traveling circuses and early theater
producers, who publicized their arrival in cities across the country with signage
campaigns (Gudis 2004). By the late 19th century, marketers realized that such services
were useful for a range of industries and developed the posting of signs into a business
niche. Early advertisers tacked up and painted ads on whatever available surfaces they
could find – trees, poles, walls, fences – and as long as it has existed the industry has
been associated with uncontrolled signage.
Since these early days, the main arguments against outdoor advertising have been
aesthetics, safety, deceptive marketing, indecent content, and objectionable products
(Taylor and Chang 1995). Court opinions across the United States upheld regulations of
37
outdoor advertising from the early 20th century onwards — initially on the basis of
public health and safety and later under the basis of aesthetics (Goodrich 1929). The
industry has long been characterized as a rogue, unethical business. Early advertisers saw
themselves as brash businessmen, unpopular because of their single-minded and
successful devotion to profit, and from the beginning, the companies have run into
trouble with the law (Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981). Early advertisers were known to
place signs without receiving consent from the property owner and hence by means of
trespass. As the industry grew, this became one of the first behaviors which the
associations sought to curb with self-regulation, though it continues to this day. The
associations themselves were also guilty of breaking the law. Illegal, monopolistic
practices were taken by the associations once the industry became large enough for
competition to dampen profits of the largest players. In 1916, the first court ruling came
down against the outdoor advertising industry, finding monopolist behaviors including
price collusion and unlawful limits on the number of firms that would be permitted by the
association to operate in given areas (Souder 1956). In 1929, a federal court found
monopoly practices again when it enjoined large individual outdoor advertisers from
colluding with one another and from acting as both advertising agencies and sign vendors
(Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981).
Outdoor advertisers learned early to counter opposition. Their tactics have been
fourfold. First, advertisers have sought to self-organize and self-regulate. The first
association of outdoor advertisers was created in 1891 and such groups quickly grew,
consolidated, and organized in response to community opposition, with the effect of
spurring the growth of the industry (Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981). From the beginning,
38
these groups promulgated codes of conduct for their members to avoid negative publicity
and regulation (Souder 1956). Second, the industry has cultivated positive social images
by donating ad space for public-minded campaigns. The advertising industry promoted
the national war effort consistently during the First and Second World Wars. Yet the
industry also fought against aspects of the war effort that curtailed its business, such as
“lightless nights” (Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981). Third, outdoor advertisers have
cultivated relationships with state actors to press for regulatory frameworks that
benefitted the business. This is true both on the level of the organization – the Outdoor
Advertising Association of America (OAAA) to this day is a powerful force – and on the
level of the individual, as businessmen have used personal connections to lobby their
positions (See Gould 1988). Finally, the industry has characterized its opponents as anti-
business, extreme, or irrational.
In the first part of the 20th century, opposition to outdoor advertising focused on
spaces outside of cities, as highways cut into parkland and scenic areas that had been
previously unreachable by large groups. Travelers escaping urban spaces on motorcar
holidays found themselves confronted by large advertisements and a vocal opposition
grew that decried the despoiling of natural resources. In that era, city planning became a
common practice, and urban reformers including those with the “City Beautiful”
movement fought to improve urban life (Parker 2004). Because the groups pushing these
efforts, both inside and outside cities, were more populated by women, they were
characterized by outdoor advertisers as overly sensitive and unaware of business realities
(Gudis 2004).
39
In the 1940s and 1950s, the activist community against billboards had achieved
some success. The Ogden Nash line, “I think I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a
tree / And if the billboards soon don’t fall / I may never see a tree at all,” became a
rallying cry for groups across the country. Many of the new housing development
communities that were growing in the 1950s had signage limitations in their codes, and,
as zoning restrictions became common planning mechanisms, town and cities across the
country were instituting signage regulations based on zoning (Gudis 2004). The industry
had succeeded in dissuading Congress from passing two acts which would have banned
billboards within a wide setback area from federal highways. But in 1958, Congress
enacted the Bonus Act, which granted states an additional one percent of federal highway
funds if they enacted sign regulations (Pub. L. 85-381). Initially seen as a success for the
activist community, the Act ultimately did not spur the hoped for regulations as only half
of the states opted for the funds, and those that did found that the “bonus” funds were
eclipsed by the costs of regulation (Dorsey and Swormstedt 1981). It did not reduce the
amount of billboards along highways in the 1960s (Taylor and Chang 1995).
In 1965, Congress replaced the Bonus Act with the Highway Beautification Act
(HBA) (21 U.S.C. 131, Pub. L. 89-285). This legislation was initially hailed as a major
national success by the activist community. Lady Bird Johnson had championed the issue
of signage proliferation and pressured her husband to enact regulatory legislation to
protect the scenery along highways (Gould, 1988). In addition to this national legislation,
municipalities were enacting their own ordinances to regulate and remove off-site signs.
Such regulations have been upheld by state and national courts. In Markham Advertising
Co. v. State of Washington, 73 Wash. 2d 405 (1968), the Supreme Court of California
40
upheld the distinction between on- and off-site advertising as a legitimate classification
on which to base speech regulations (Leffler 1982). In Metromedia, Inc. v. City of San
Diego, 453 U.S. 490 (1981), the U.S. Supreme Court approved of this distinction in a San
Diego ordinance that banned off-site signs in the municipality on the bases of urban
aesthetics and traffic safety (Aronovsky 1981).
Despite legislation, the outdoor advertising industry has successfully expanded
across the nation and within cities. In retrospect, the Highway Beautification Act has
been criticized as a massive win for the outdoor advertising industry. The Act prohibits
signage along highways except in areas zoned commercial or industrial or unzoned areas
used for commercial or industrial uses. These limits were no more than the industry itself
had been lobbying for years in response to activists’ calls for more stringent rules (Gudis
2004). In fact, the Texas attorney and OAAA President Phil Tocker worked directly with
President Johnson’s staffer Bill Moyers on the legislation, at the direction of the
President. The OAAA was so aware that the provisions were beneficial as the Act moved
through the legislative process that it began taking out ads supporting the Act and the
protection of natural scenery (Gudis 2004). The legislation includes the pronouncement
that outdoor advertising is a “legitimate part of the marketing function.”
An amendment to the Act was later passed at the behest of the industry that has
nearly halted efforts to reduce signage to this day. The Act originally allowed local
jurisdictions to reduce signage through amortization, a common planning approach.
“Amortization in the American planning system is a technique for the removal of non-
conforming uses after the value of a non-conforming use has been recovered— or
amortized— over a period of time” (Collins 2000, 215). Pursuant to this provision, local
41
jurisdictions granted owners of non-conforming signs – signs in violation of the HBA – a
grace period to recoup costs and then required the removal of the signs. A 1978
amendment to the Act (121 U.S.C. § 131(g), Pub. L. 95-599 § 122(d)) banned the
amortization approach, bowing to the OAAA’s argument that amortization did not
constitute “just compensation” for the governmental taking of its property, in violation of
the Constitution. This was later upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals (Naegele Outdoor
Advertising, Inc. v. City of Durham, 844 F. 2d 172 (4th Cir. 1988)). The effect of this ban
on amortization is that local jurisdictions are required to pay the fair market value of a
non-conforming sign in order to enforce its removal. Given the lucrative nature of
outdoor advertising, and the limited amount of local government funds, these types of
payments are nearly impossible.
The Legal History of Los Angeles’s 2002 Sign Laws
On February 8, 2002, the Los Angeles City Council enacted the OSSPIP program,
which ordered LADBS to identify all billboards in the city, research the permitting status
of those signs, and collect a fee from the signs’ owners for performing this work. On
September 27, 2002, Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. (Clear Channel), National Advertising
Company, and Viacom Outdoor Inc. (predecessor to CBS Outdoor Inc.) (CBS) filed suit
in federal court, alleging that OSSPIP was invalid as an unconstitutional restriction on
speech in violation of the First Amendment and an abridgment of their right to equal
protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. On October 4, 2002, Vista Media
Group, Inc. filed in state court, arguing that the inspection fee was unconstitutional. Clear
42
Channel and CBS intervened in the Vista action, arguing that both the fee and the
inspection itself were invalid.
On October 30, 2002, in Clear Channel v. City of Los Angeles, (2002), the federal
District Court issued a preliminary injunction that barred the city from enforcing the sign
inspection program, on the basis that the program violated the First Amendment. The
court found that the program unconstitutionally burdened non-commercial speech. The
court focused on OSSPIP’s distinction between on- and off-site signs. On-site signs tend
to display speech for a local business, such as a restaurant or a store, whereas off-site
signs display a variety of speech, from national advertising campaigns to political ads to
public service announcements – a combination of commercial and non-commercial
speech. Because OSSPIP requires a fee and inspection of off-site signs only, it burdens
off-site signs, but not on-site signs, and therefore burdens non-commercial speech more
than commercial speech. The court also agreed with the billboard companies’ argument
that the program unconstitutionally distinguished between signs based on their content.
The court found that the city did not put forward a clear basis for the inspection program,
so there was no justification for a content-based distinction. The OSSPIP program was
immediately halted.
The city appealed the injunction and on August 15, 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals found in the city’s favor and overturned the injunction. The case was sent
back to the trial court, where the only remaining issue was the amount of the fee the
companies should be required to pay under the inspection program. The program itself
was deemed valid, and it appeared set to move forward, following this nine month delay.
However, the program was not restarted. The litigation continued on the sole issue of the
43
fee amount in Vista Media v. City of Los Angeles, as CBS and Clear Channel had
intervened in this action and both cases revolved around the constitutionality of the
OSSPIP program.
In late 2001, the year the city instituted the moratorium on new billboards, the city
approved a contract with JCDecaux, a major international outdoor advertiser, that gave
the company the right to put up thousands of kiosks, bus stop enclosures, and other
structures that featured off-site signage (Ordinance 174378). It was a unilateral, twenty-
year contract. Since 1987, the city had entered into agreements with a series of companies
to install and maintain bus stops which included the right to display advertising. The
2001 contract went beyond this to include numerous types of street furniture. In one fell
swoop, the city thus created a vast new landscape of commercial signage throughout the
city and granted the financial benefit to one company. In fact, two companies benefitted,
as JCDecaux partnered with CBS, already a large player in the outdoor advertising
market of Los Angeles, to fulfill the contract. Five months later, the city made its ban on
new off-site signage permanent (Ordinance No. 174547).
In 2003, new off-site signs began appearing all over the city. These were the size
of the CBS/Decaux street furniture ads approved by the city, but they hung on the sides
of buildings. Unlike the street furniture signs, these had not been permitted by the
LADBS or otherwise approved by the city, and they appeared to be hung in blatant
violation of the city’s off-site sign ban. Dennis Hathaway, then a member of the Venice
Neighborhood Council, noticed three signs on the wall of a carpet store on Lincoln
Boulevard, half a block from his house (Figure 3). He was walking with his
granddaughter, and she commented on the violent image shown in a movie
44
advertisement. Hathaway was well aware of the aesthetics of Lincoln Boulevard from his
work on the neighborhood council to improve the appearance of the street. He knew that
these signs were new, and he suspected they were unlawful. Mr. Hathaway called in a
complaint to LADBS.
Figure 3. Metro Lights signs
The signs had been put up by a company called Metro Lights. The company had
not sought permission from the city to put up the signs. As complaints from the
community rolled in, including complaints from other sign companies, DBS began
issuing citations to Metro Lights. Rather than take down the signs, Metro Lights filed a
complaint in federal District Court, alleging that the city’s sign ban violated the First
Amendment. First Amendment law holds that the government can pass a law that
infringes speech, but only if it has a legitimate state purpose. A law that is passed with a
legitimate purpose may still violate the First Amendment if at the same time exceptions
to the law are allowed that undercut the legitimate purpose. Such a law is called
unconstitutionally underinclusive. Metro Lights argued that the city’s billboard ban was
rendered fatally underinclusive by the city’s street furniture advertising program with
CBS/Decaux. Metro Lights alleged that Los Angeles’s purported goals of improving
45
urban aesthetics and public safety through a ban on new billboards were undercut by the
city’s concurrent erection of thousands of new outdoor signs on street furniture.
In Metro Lights L.L.C. v. City of Los Angeles (2006), the District Court agreed
with the sign company. After numerous rounds of amendments and motions, the court
issued a preliminary injunction which enjoined the city from enforcing its off-site sign
ban against Metro Lights, stating, “[t]he City cannot, on the one hand, preclude Plaintiff
from displaying messages on its off-site signs as a supposed legitimate exercise of its
police powers while, on the other hand, authorizing its Street Furniture contractor to erect
off-site signs in or near the public rights of way throughout the City of Los Angeles.” The
city appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
In September 2006, the city’s lawsuits with CBS and Clear Channel concerning
the billboard inventory finally ended, three and a half years after the Ninth Circuit ruled
the program constitutional. The City Council agreed to a settlement with CBS and Clear
Channel, by which the parties agreed to a fee structure for the inventory program (Motion
No. 03-2771). Yet the settlement went far beyond the subject of the inventory fees, or
even the inventory itself. The city granted the parties “modernization credits” to
transform up to 840 sign structures into digital signs — and since sign structures often
have front-and-back signs, this allowed up to 1,680 digital signs to go up — and for this
pair of companies to put up 200 new off-sign signs. This grant of rights was on its face in
opposition to the city’s 2002 sign ban, which prohibits both new signs and the alteration
of existing signs. Further, the settlement denied the city the right to deny permit
applications based on these modernization credits except in cases of electrical or
structural flaws, a provision that avoided public comment and that LADBS later stated
46
significantly limited its scope of review. The city also agreed to deem lawful all of CBS
and Clear Channel’s existing sign inventory.
In exchange, CBS and Clear Channel agreed to take down three percent of their
signs, which amounted to forty-nine signs each as CBS represented it had 1,628 sign
structures in the city and Clear Channel represented it had 1,657. As to the other ninety-
seven percent of CBS and Clear Channel’s signs, the city promised to issue new permits
for any signs that were unpermitted or out of compliance with their permits. The city
agreed to these terms despite the fact that an existing ordinance gave the city the right to
order any unpermitted sign to be taken down, and despite the fact that the city did not
know how many unpermitted signs this might possibly include, since the CBS and Clear
Channel made no representations as to the legal status of their signs and the city had not
yet conducted its billboard inventory. The City Council approved the settlement on the
advice of then-City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo who argued that this deal was the best the
city could hope for and that it would save the city years of continued litigation. CBS and
Clear Channel immediately began acquiring permits and converting traditional vinyl-
faced billboard to digital displays. The City, however, did not restart the inventory
program, which will be discussed in the following chapter.
At this time, a number of companies were pushing legal boundaries by putting up
signs that violated the sign ban, seemingly emboldened by the Metro Lights ruling. These
signs were usually supergraphics, which had not been technically litigated in the Metro
Lights case. These signs can be installed relatively quickly compared to a traditional pole
billboard, by unfurling a large vinyl sheet and affixing it to the side of a building. There
were two strategies taken by outdoor advertisers. One was cat-and-mouse: put up a sign,
47
reap revenues until the city issues a citation, take the sign down, wait a few months, and
then repeat the cycle with a new sign. The history of one outdoor advertiser is instructive.
Kayvan Setarah owns a number of commercial buildings in Hollywood, and he has
supplemented his income by renting his exterior walls for outdoor advertising (Zahniser
2010b). In January 2007, LADBS inspected his building at the northeast corner of the
busy intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Presumably the
inspectors were responding to a complaint, because LADBS did not at that time conduct
surveys of off-site signage. They found a supergraphic on the building that measured 224
feet by forty feet and wrapped around the building's north, west and south walls. It was
unpermitted. They issued an order to comply, and the sign was taken down ten days later.
Less than two months later, in March 2007, a new supergraphic went up, also
unpermitted. After the city demanded its removal, the sign went down in June 2007. In
August 2007, a new supergraphic went up that remained for a year.
The second strategy taken by outdoor advertisers at this time was to test the
constitutionality of the sign law by putting up signs without city approval and then suing
to challenge any citations they received. This strategy had the benefit of reaping millions
of dollars for the sign companies while they tested the constitutionality of the sign laws in
court — a process that takes years as the cases wind their way through the courts. World
Wide Rush and SkyTag were two companies who took this tack.
World Wide Rush filed in federal District Court in 2007 to stop the city from
enforcing citations against thirty-four unpermitted supergraphics across the city. It filed
for a preliminary injunction in 2008. World Wide Rush generally argued that the
exceptions to the off-site and supergraphic sign bans rendered the laws unconstitutional.
48
It specifically argued that the exceptions ran afoul of the First Amendment’s “unfettered
discretion” rule. “This requirement seeks to `alleviate the threat of content-based,
discriminatory enforcement that arises where the licensing official enjoys unduly broad
discretion in determining whether to grant or deny a permit.’” Outdoor Media Grp., Inc.
v. City of Beaumont, 506 F.3d 895, 903-04 (9th Cir. 2007) (internal citations omitted).
In ruling on World Wide Rush’s application, the District Court identified three
considerations for determining whether, “an ordinance confers unfettered discretion in
violation of the First Amendment: (1) whether the ordinance contains reasonably specific
criteria on which a denial may rest; (2) whether the ordinance outlines objective factors to
consider in denying an application under the reasonably specific criteria; and (3) whether
the ordinance requires officials to state the reasons for his or her decision to either grant
or deny a permit so as to facilitate effective review of the official's determination, which
allows the determination to be enforceable on review.” World Wide Rush, LLC v. City of
Los Angeles, 563 F. Supp. 2d 1132 (2008) (internal citations omitted). The court noted
that the law excepted signs in areas that were permitted pursuant to a sign district,
development agreement or a specific plan. The court found that the exception that
allowed otherwise banned signs to go up in areas governed by specific plans that allowed
them was invalid. A “specific plan” is a state-law planning mechanism that allows
jurisdictions to lay out finely tuned development and planning guidelines for small
geographic areas within their general bounds. The court found that there were no
discernible standards that limited the city’s enactment of specific plans. Therefore, there
was nothing to prevent the city from enacting a specific plan that would allow a favored
party to put up signs it approved of or conversely to prevent a disfavored speaker by the
49
same means. The court then found that the “specific plan” exception to the off-site and
supergraphic sign bans were unseverable from the remainder of the ordinances, rendering
the entire bans unconstitutional. It granted World Wide Rush’s preliminary injunction
and barred the city from enforcing its citations against World Wide Rush.
The city appealed the ruling, but the preliminary injunction acted as an invitation
for sign companies to get in on the act. Supergraphics went up all of the city on
seemingly any wall that could hold a sign. Some companies applied for permits; some did
not. Of those that did, the city denied permits based on various code provisions: under
fire safety and other health code provisions, but also under the auspices of the other code
provisions, such as “wall sign” requirements, that did not apply. When the city issued
citations, the companies filed in federal court, knowing that the injunction in favor of
World Wide Rush would prevent the city from enforcing its citations.
SkyTag was another company that engaged in the “delay with litigation” strategy
of profiting from unpermitted supergraphics. It had engaged in legal battles with the city
for years, with its owner Michael McNeilly often arguing to the media that any city effort
to take down signs was an infringement on his freedom of speech. McNeilly became
famous in the city for putting up large supergraphic-size murals of the Statue of Liberty
as a nod to his constitutional rights, only to change the image years later to
advertisements (Figure 4). In the aftermath of the World Wide Rush injunction, SkyTag
was one of nearly twenty outdoor advertisers who filed a “copycat” lawsuit against the
city seeking its own preliminary injunction. These cases consolidated with the World
Wide Rush case.
50
Figure 4. Art illegally posted by SkyTag owner Michael McNeilly, later replaced by
an advertisement
McNeilly filed a declaration with the court claiming that it had put up 118
supergraphics prior to the city’s Interim Control Ordinance went into effect. Only after
the city provided photographic evidence that supergraphics were not at nearly all those
locations did McNeilly admit to the court that some thirty locations had supergraphics,
while the remainder had smaller “placeholder” signs. In World Wide Rush v. City of Los
Angeles, 605 F. Supp. 2d 1088, 1113 (C.D. Cal. 2009), the court denied SkyTag’s motion
for a preliminary injunction, declaring McNeilly’s claims, “approached an outright
falsehood” and that McNeilly himself, “has no credibility with this court.”
In the midst of this forest of unpermitted supergraphics was growing a copse of
fully legal supergraphics in Hollywood (Figure 5). The Sign DFD enacted by the
Hollywood CRA was created with the purpose of providing a path for allowing “creative
signs” that matched the character of the neighborhood, incentivizing development, and
serving as a model for the Hollywood sign district that was then being planned by the
city. The historic character of buildings was to be protected as were views of the
Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood Sign. The area of the Hollywood SUD that the city
51
eventually created is nearly identical to the area of the Hollywood CRA and therefore
almost any sign that was approved within the Hollywood SUD needed approval from
both the city and the Hollywood CRA.
Figure 5. Permitted supergraphic in Hollywood Sign Use District of Los Angeles
Although the Hollywood CRA held public meetings when weighing major
decisions, it did not seek public opinion in many of the early signage decisions under the
signage DFD. Senior Planner for the Hollywood CRA Kip Rudd stated, “We thought we
were reflecting the will of the community when we first proposed our DFD that allowed
for supergraphics, allowed for removal of signs, allowed for roof signs, but we got a lot
of blowback.” They were lucrative for developers, and he says, many of the development
projects would not have been possible without this financial incentive. The city approved
fifteen sign and development agreements within the Hollywood CRA, allowing forty-five
52
large-scale signs to go up in four years. So many massive new signs went up in
Hollywood that a community backlash ensued.
At the same time, digital billboards began lighting up the Los Angeles landscape
(Figure 6). With the settlement to their lawsuit in hand, CBS and Clear Channel had been
methodically putting up digital signs across the city and a vocal opposition was
developing, both from the public and from smaller billboard companies who were still
subject to the city’s law that prevented the digital upgrades that CBS and Clear Channel
were installing under the imprimatur of the settlement agreement. A few months after the
city settled with CBS and Clear Channel, a smaller billboard company, Summit Media,
filed in federal District Court to overturn the settlement, arguing that the city was
thereunder applying its laws differently to different parties. A year later, the federal
appellate court for California, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, held that state court
Figure 6. Digital billboards erected pursuant to the City of Los Angeles's legal
settlement with CBS and Clear Channel
53
was the proper venue for such a claim. Summit Media filed in state court on August 27,
2008.
The public argued that the signs were distracting and obtrusive, and some flashed
into the windows of private homes at all hours of the day and night. The city had no legal
means to order the removal of the signs or even to regulate which locations CBS and
Clear Channel chose to put up these signs. The uproar over one sign in the Silver Lake
neighborhood of Los Angeles was so fierce that the Council member for the
neighborhood, Eric Garcetti, put forward a Motion, which the City Council passed
(Motion, October 22, 2008) that requested the LADBS to investigate whether the one
sign was violating any existing permitting or regulatory requirements. Inspectors found
the sign complied with all lighting, electrical and structural regulations and that the sign
was properly permitted under the settlement. The only pressure point that existed was
political. Presumably to avoid further bad press, and perhaps to avoid political pressure
from Garcetti, who was not only City Council President but also a resident of Silver
Lake, Clear Channel reverted the sign to a traditional non-digital billboard (Hathaway
2010).
But the uproar over digital signs at large was growing. When considered in
combination with the number of unpermitted supergraphics going up in the wake of the
World Wide Rush ruling and the community outcry over the permitted supergraphics that
were engulfing Hollywood, the city was pushed to institute a temporary ban on
supergraphics and digital sign conversions. The Interim Control Ordinance, enacted on
December 26, 2008 (Ordinance No. 180445), temporarily banned supergraphics — thus
removing the exceptions to the ban that the court had found unconstitutional. The
54
ordinance also banned digital sign conversions — thereby halting the enactment of the
city’s own settlement with CBS and Clear Channel. The City Council made these bans
permanent on July 9, 2009 (Ordinance No. 180841).
Two weeks after issuing the interim ban on supergraphics and digital displays, the
city’s luck finally seemed to change. It experienced its first favorable court ruling as to
the billboard ban in Metro Lights, L.L.C. v. City of Los Angeles, 551 F.3d 898 (9th Cir.
2009), when the federal appellate court overturned the lower court’s ruling. The Ninth
Circuit held that the city’s off-site sign ban was not rendered unconstitutionally
underinclusive by the street furniture agreement. The circuit court found that the city’s
goals of traffic safety and improved aesthetics were not undermined by allowing street
furniture signage. The city could find that having one company control this group of
similarly-framed signage could lead to a more controlled landscape compared to a
proliferation of uncontrolled billboards. Further, the city found the street furniture
contract was a “classically legislative decision” wherein it determined that the profits of
the street furniture ads and the installation of bus facilities by CBS/Decaux outweighed
its interest in limiting off-site signage.
Yet the Metro Lights ruling had no effect on the World Wide Rush injunction,
and the court still had the matter of the proliferation of unpermitted supergraphics to deal
with. In fact, the World Wide Rush court put the blame for unpermitted signage on the
city’s own shoulders: the city was unlawfully denying permits that should have been
granted due to the injunction in place against enforcing the sign ban. In World Wide Rush
v. City of Los Angeles, 605 F.Supp.2d 1088, 1104 (C.D. Cal. 2009), the court stated,
In the wake of the World Wide Rush Order, various companies applied for
permits for Supergraphic Signs. Instead of adopting new regulations that
55
cured the constitutional infirmities identified in the World Wide Rush Order,
or simply accepting the applications and issuing permits, the City refused to
accept permits, following the unconstitutional prohibitions in [the city’s sign
ban]. In response, some of these sign companies began to put up unpermitted
Supergraphic Signs throughout the City.
For example, after the injunction World Wide Rush applied for permits for
supergraphics and was denied. LADBS personnel informed World Wide Rush that the
city banned supergraphics and cited the provisions of the sign ban that the World Wide
Rush ruling had invalidated. The city issued citations to World Wide Rush for failure to
have a valid permit, even though the city had wrongfully denied its permit applications,
and the City issued citations based on code sections that clearly did not apply. World
Wide Rush appealed to the District Court, and the court held the city in contempt of its
earlier ruling.
This was not the only courtroom in which the city was having trouble. In the
Summit Media case, in which the small billboard company was challenging the legality
of the settlement agreement that allowed CBS and Clear Channel, and only CBS and
Clear Channel, to install digital billboards, the judge chastised the city for having
represented in court that no new digital conversions were taking place but later issued at
least one more permit for a new digital sign to go up. The judge recused himself from the
case a month later. Even though the settlement agreement had brought much negative
attention to the workings of the city, with allegations of favoritism to the city’s biggest
outdoor advertisers, and a backlash from constituents as digital billboards were placed
around the city, the city was fighting in court to keep the settlement agreement intact.
Although the city was enforcing citations against World Wide Rush in violation
of a court order, the city was not taking such actions against other companies whose signs
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lacked permits. According to a long-time deputy city attorney in the criminal division,
under City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, criminal prosecutions for putting up illegal signs
was not a tack the office was willing to take. In July 2009, Carmen Trutanich became
City Attorney, elected in part because of a “get tough on billboards” platform. Ironically,
he beat out Jack Weiss for the job, the only councilperson that had consistently pushed
the city to regulate rampant signage.
Just how irregular and ineffective the city’s regulation of billboards had been in
recent years was soon highlighted. On November 4, 2009, the Superior Court in the
Summit Media case invalidated the city’s settlement with CBS and Clear Channel. The
court held that the settlement was an ultra vires act, meaning the city had acted beyond its
legitimate municipal powers in making the agreement. In Summit Media v. City of Los
Angeles (L.A. Super. Ct. Nov. 4, 2009, 6-7), the court ruled,
[T]he Settlement Agreement clearly allows the City and [CBS and Clear
Channel] to circumvent the general ban on alterations to existing off-site signs
… Because land use regulations involve the exercise of power, ‘[i]t is settled
that the government may not contract away its right to exercise [its] police
power in the future.’ … Here the central purpose of the Settlement Agreement
— the exemption of [CBS and Clear Channel] from zoning laws in return for
certain alleged benefits to the City — is illegal, so the contract as a whole
cannot stand.
The city’s settlement with CBS and Clear Channel was declared void, putting the
legal status of every digital billboard conversion in question. Further, any unpermitted or
out of compliance billboards that the settlement agreement had rendered legal were now
moved back into the illegal category. Of course, the city still did not know how many
billboards were in this category because it had not finished its inventory, but as of that
date, LADBS was finally conducting inspections pursuant to the inventory program. CBS
57
and Clear Channel immediately filed notices of appeal, which put the ruling and the legal
of status of thousands of signs in limbo.
Some signs, however, were plainly, wantonly illegal. In one such case, new City
Attorney Trutanich made good on his campaign promises as well as garnered some
publicity for himself by throwing an advertiser in jail. Two weeks before the Academy
Awards were scheduled to be held in February, 2010, the City Attorney’s office learned
that an outdoor advertiser had a website up, advertising supergraphic space on a building
at the corner of Hollywood and Highland — clearly visible from the Academy Awards’
red carpet, and the hundreds of cameras focused on it. The building owner was Kayvan
Setarah, who was well known to the city for his cat-and-mouse tactics of putting
unpermitted supergraphics on this building (Zahniser 2010b). The city attorney’s office
sent him a letter explaining that a law forbade putting a supergraphic up and that criminal
sanctions could ensue if the law were broken. Days later, a supergraphic went up in the
middle of the night. The city, led by Trutanich, responded with the most aggressive tactic
taken to date against an outdoor advertiser. Setarah was arrested on the night of Friday,
February 26, 2010. He was kept in jail over the weekend on $1 million bail, until he was
arraigned on Monday morning. His bail was reduced at his arraignment hearing to
$100,000. After promising to remove the sign, he was released on bail (Pelisek 2010a).
Earlier that week, the City Attorney’s office filed its first nuisance abatement
action against supergraphics companies since Trutanich had come into office. The office
filed in federal court concerning twelve allegedly unlawful signs, including one owned by
World Wide Rush. At the time, an attorney for World Wide Rush told the Los Angeles
Times, “It appears that the city is setting up a major confrontation with Judge Collins on
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respecting her permanent injunction,” referring to the District Court’s injunction barring
the city from enforcing its sign ban and over which the city had already been held in
contempt (Zahniser 2010a).
This confrontation never came to pass. In World Wide Rush, LLC v. City of Los
Angeles, 606 F.3d 676 (9th Cir. 2010), the federal appellate court overturned the World
Wide Rush injunction on May 26, 2010. The Ninth Circuit held that the “unbridled
discretion” challenge to the sign ban did not apply to this situation. The “unbridled
discretion” challenge is normally applied to a regulatory scheme that delegates authority
to a single person, such as an administrator, police officer, inspector, as opposed to a
legislative body. The Ninth Circuit noted that the challenge can apply in rare
circumstances in which a legislative body sets up a permitting scheme that reserves some
decision-authority for itself under that scheme. This type of discretionary authority is
distinct from the classically legislative discretion to enact laws. The Ninth Circuit held
that the City Council’s authority to enact special plans, sign use districts and development
agreements stems from its legislative power to regulate land use, not any authority set up
under the sign ban. The city had this authority prior to the sign ban, and the fact that the
sign ban contains an exception based on this authority simply affirms this authority. This
ruling ended the World Wide Rush injunction against the sign ban, so the city’s sign ban
was again in effect. The ruling had the added benefit of wiping the contempt order off the
city’s record.
Most unpermitted supergraphics in the city began to come down at this point. The
injunctions sought by the city to remove the signs were no longer necessary. But there
remained the matter of monetary damages based on earlier violations of city law. In the
59
World Wide Rush case, for example, the city continued to press its case. Yet by this time,
the state had also entered the fray, based on violations of state law forbidding signage
within 500 feet of state highways. For example, the supergraphic installed by World
Wide Rush at 10801 National Boulevard was primarily viewable from the 10 freeway,
installed without state approval and in violation of state law. Rush had settled with the
state’s Department of Transportation prior to the Ninth Circuit’s World Wide Rush
ruling, paying $218,000 to the state (Hathaway 2011b). In opposition to the city’s claims
for damages for the same sign, World Wide Rush argued that he had already settled “on
behalf of the people of the state of California” and should not have to pay two sets of
damages for the same illegal act. The state court agreed and dismissed the city’s claims
(Maddaus 2012). However, in numerous other cases the city was successful, extracting
large damage awards from outdoor advertisers (Hathaway 2011a, 2011c).
In September, 2010, the City Council took its ban on supergraphics one step
further by enacting a permanent ban on supergraphics in the Hollywood Sign District.
The district would still allow digital signs under the amended law, and the ordinance as
passed was disapproved of by the city’s Planning Commission (Ordinance No. 181340).
This was the one spot in the city which had been argued was the perfect location for the
visual excitement of signage and which remains the site of the majority of permitted
supergraphics. The heyday of illegal supergraphics was at an end, though not before
those signs that were grandfathered in — which had received permits but were not yet
installed — were put up (Zahniser 2010c).
60
Laws, Litigation, and the Consuming Machine
Whether the growth machine is alive and well in Los Angeles is an active
question in local urban studies. Fulton (2001, 16) argues that the growth machine is
“collapsing under its own weight.” Purcell (2000) argues that it is not. I believe that the
question should be reframed. The issue is not the development of land. The issue is the
development of consumers. Is the consuming machine alive and well in Los Angeles?
The evidence of this chapter argues for a resounding “Yes.” Unlike other studies of the
urban growth machine, the evidence is not the mechanics of a large-scale development
project. Instead it is the city’s strategic passage and litigation of laws that reveals the
machine in action. Because the machine here grows the consuming landscape of the city,
it is a consuming machine.
One aspect of 1980s development that scholars of Los Angeles have not
recognized is the 1986 revision of the city’s sign laws. It was these laws that the Planning
Department later said, “have shaped the way signage has been incorporated into our
streetscapes, in a way that can now in retrospect be described as excessive.” As the city
was growing its office centers such as downtown, Century City, and the Westside, and as
the number of commuters grew from suburbs father afield, the city’s streets were filling
with off-site signage. These developments go hand in hand from the perspective of the
outdoor advertisers. Billboards are priced according to the average times a sign is viewed.
Billboards in heavily trafficked areas are therefore more highly valued and more highly
priced. The workers commuting from the suburbs are an “audience commodity” (Smythe
1977) that is sold by outdoor advertisers to potential advertisers. If traditional growth,
cast in terms of large-scale developments, housing suburbs, and residents, was booming
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in the 1980s, then another aspect of capitalist society was growing as well.
Communication scholars read advertising as a medium for transferring the cultural ideals
of the elite to the non-ruling classes (Gramsci 1971; Poster 1990). Speaking of television
airtime, Jhally and Livant (1986) assert that the viewer creates his or her own meaning
while watching the creative programming, but the advertising between shows provides
the viewer with meaning. These arguments apply equally to the medium of outdoor
advertising. As the residents from the expanding suburbs were commuting in growing
numbers to the old and new commercial centers of Los Angeles, the number of
consumers in Los Angeles grew as well. The increase in signs meant an increase in
advertising messages in the urban landscape. If the city’s commuting patterns were
stretching, they were becoming more filled with messages, and commuters were putting
in longer hours of “watching as working” (Jhally and Livant 1986).
Fulton (2001) and Davis (1990) time the downward turn in the city’s development
boom at the late 1990s. At this time, the community pushback against the increasing
advertising in the landscape was being heard in city hall. The City Council issued a
moratorium on new off-site signs in 2000 and enacted the permanent ban in 2002. These
measures could be read as evidence of the end of the growth machine. However, the legal
history that followed the laws undercuts this reading. The machine survived, and it was
growing the landscape of signs — and the consuming public who would view it.
During the few months between the city’s moratorium on new off-site signs and
its ordinance that made the ban permanent, the city signed the contract with CBS/Decaux
which gave it the right to install “street furniture” such as bus stop shelters and kiosks
that were adorned with off-site signs. These signs were exempt from the 2002 sign laws
62
banning new off-site signs. While the city appeared to quell growth with the ban — the
street furniture contract grew the consuming landscape. The contradictory actions were
highlighted by the trial court in the Metro Lights case against the city. The court ruled
that the thousands of signs that the city has allowed so undercut the purposes of the sign
ban as to render the ban an unconstitutional limitation on speech: Metro Lights’ speech
was banned but CBS/Decaux’s was not, without a viable reason. The city’s two explicit
goals for limiting off-site signage, aesthetics and driver safety, were negatively affected
by the street furniture signs. The appeals court later overturned this ruling. It found that
the small signs of the street furniture, regulated by one company, would not so undermine
the ban as it render it unconstitutional, noting the coherent look of the signs, many of
which did not face traffic. The Metro Lights signs, also managed by one company, and
also framed in metal with a coherent look, were ordered to be removed.
Whether one agrees with the trial or the appellate court as to the constitutional
issues, the overarching fact remains that the city approved thousands of new off-site signs
just months after it banned them. From a traditional legal perspective, the actions are
constitutionally questionable; from a political economic perspective, the actions are
contradictory and speak to the city’s underlying contradictory goals. The effect of the
street furniture contract was new advertising in the everyday spaces of people’s lives —
along the streets and sidewalks — visible when walking and driving throughout the city.
Since the contract was signed a decade ago, the signs have added a thick new layer to the
consuming landscape of Los Angeles. Further, the actions show the city’s tendency to
work in the traditional growth machine manner — in concert with the elite of the
development industry. The contract grants the new consuming landscape to one
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company, a large transnational concern with deep ties to city hall. Metro Lights, on the
hand, was characterized as city hall as a scofflaw, because it ignored city hall and hung
up its signs without its authorization. The city justifies the signs by a need for updated
bus stop furniture. However, this landscape of signage has appeared at the hand of
JCDecaux in cities around the world, strongly implying that the impetus for the signs
began with JCDecaux, not the city’s needs. More likely, the city gave an ear to this large
company and found that its desire to grow the audience commodity of Los Angeles
commuters was in line with its own goal of maintaining a city of consumers.
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CHAPTER THREE: THE HISTORY AND FINDINGS OF
LOS ANGELES’S BILLBOARD INVENTORY
Along with its 2002 ban on new billboards, Los Angeles instituted a program to
inventory all billboards in the city. OSSPIP aimed to identify billboards and to determine
their legal status by researching their permits. It has long been rumored that a large
portion of the city’s billboards are unpermitted or out of compliance with their permits,
which renders them technically illegal and subject to removal. Permit records are
theoretically open and searchable, yet in reality billboard permits are extremely difficult
to locate because they have been kept in different city departments and in different
formats since the city began issuing them in the 1920s. By instituting its inventory
program alongside its ban on new billboards, Los Angeles acknowledged that
enforcement of its regulations could only be effective with up-to-date knowledge of the
landscape of billboards. Whether the city is rewriting its sign ordinance – as it is right
now – or considering a new development project, knowing the number, location and legal
status of existing signage is key. This knowledge is important for private actors as well,
such as activist groups and community members, as they decide where to focus their
efforts and resources.
With OSSPIP, Los Angeles would become the first city in the United States to
create a publicly accessible database specifically focused on off-site signs. Municipal
institutions do not generally collect or keep on-going data on billboards or other off-site
signage in their jurisdictions. Nearly all cities simply do not know how many billboards
65
sit within their boundaries. When it comes to signage, the extent of governmental action
often begins and ends with the issuance of permits: after issuing a permit for signage, a
city government may never again inspect a sign or interact with its owner though the sign
will likely exist in the urban landscape for many decades. A sign can be expanded,
moved or significantly altered and most permit-issuing institutions have no way of
knowing. Maintenance of the original permit document over time varies between
jurisdictions and can change within the same jurisdiction; it is often haphazard, which can
render any later enforcement efforts extremely difficult.
Enforcement requires resources, both in terms of data, technology and manpower.
Regulatory agencies cannot enforce codes and regulations unless they are able to
determine when violations occur. Technology is key here, for an infrastructure of
information allows regulators to maintain the data in a usable format. Human resources
are necessary to investigate potential violations and issue citations and other punitive
measures proscribed by codes and regulations. Within the structure of the city
government, signage is regulated by the LADBS. Created by the City Charter in 1925,
LADBS is responsible for enforcing all of the city’s laws relating to zoning and building.
It issues permits, conducts inspections, responds to complaints, and issues citations for
noncompliance. The Enforcement Division of LADBS is not pro-active in identifying
sign code violations: it acts based on complaints, rather than canvassing for code
violations on its own. According to Luke Zamperini, LADBS’s head of OSSPIP until
2012, 84 people are assigned the task of code enforcement over the 1.2 million buildings
and 850,000 separate land parcels in the City of Los Angeles. Thus, LADBS simply does
not have the human resources to conduct surveys for code violations. Instead, it relies on
66
the public to alert it to a problem. Pursuant to the city’s 2002 OSSPIP ordinance, LADBS
was for the first time charged with proactively inspecting all billboards within the city
and maintaining a database of the collected information.
The specific purpose of OSSPIP is two-fold: to identify all off-site signs in the
city and to determine their legal status. The overarching goal is complete and up-to-date
public knowledge of off-site signs in the city. This knowledge is important for effective
regulation of signage in the urban landscape. In creating policy, drafting ordinances or
considering applications for new signage, it is necessary to have an understanding of the
existing landscape. This is true for state actors as well as private entities and the public in
general. This chapter describes the fate of the OSSPIP program. In the previous chapter,
we saw that the program was delayed due to litigation. This chapter picks up that history
following the settlement of the OSSPIP lawsuits. After this time no legal barriers blocked
the city from initiating the program, yet the city stalled for years. The following section
describes the city’s contradictory actions prior to restarting the program and then the
mechanics of the program and the work done by LADBS in conducting OSSPIP. Next,
the chapter describes the efforts of this researcher to access the OSSPIP database. After
completing the initial OSSPIP survey, LADBS refused to release the data until I filed a
legal complaint under the California Public Records Act (PRA), (Cal. Gov. Code §§
6250, et seq.) — the state version of the federal Freedom of Information Act. The chapter
then describes the findings of the OSSPIP database.
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The History of the OSSPIP Program
The City Delays Restarting OSSPIP
Weeks after the OSSPIP ordinance was passed in 2002, LADBS began putting
together a team of inspectors. This work was halted almost immediately when the largest
outdoor advertising companies in the area brought actions in state and federal court
challenging the inspection program, as described in the previous chapter. When these
cases settled in early 2007, the outdoor advertisers that benefitted from these settlements,
CBS and Clear Channel, began “modernizing” signs pursuant to the rights they had been
granted by transforming traditional billboards into digital screens that could display ads
that changed every few seconds.
The city however, did not immediately begin its billboard inventory. Instead, the
city attorney’s office and LADBS began an extended process of researching appropriate
fees for the inventory program for all other outdoor advertisers besides CBS and Clear
Channel even though the only plainly legal situation was to apply the same fee structure
to all parties. When asked by the media why the program had not restarted, LADBS
personnel stated that litigation prevented the program from being restarted, while City
Attorney’s office admitted that no current litigation was preventing the program.
Despite the city’s inaction, CBS and Clear Channel were even moving forward
with one settlement promise that benefitted the city by providing the city with a list of
their billboards and the permit information they maintained. For those signs for which
they provided permit information, CBS and Clear Channel could pay reduced inspection
fees. In a final draft of the settlement agreement, the City Attorney had promised that this
list was private, proprietary information and would not be made public. The City Council
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had not been apprised of this contract provision when it had approved the settlement. A
few Council members became aware of the provision just days before the court was set to
sign off on the settlement. They pushed the full council to hurriedly promulgate a
statement that any lists the city received would be public information. The City Attorney
crossed out the “proprietary” provision of the final draft at the last moment, which can be
seen on the final, court-approved copy of the settlement as it was struck out by hand.
Months later, the city still acted as though the billboard lists were not public
information. The LA Weekly was ignored by LADBS when it informally requested
access to the lists (Pelisek 2008). When the LA Weekly submitted an official request
pursuant to the PRA, someone in the city alerted CBS and Clear Channel. Within days,
these companies filed for a preliminary injunction to prevent the release of the
information that they had provided to the city. The court denied the request, ruling that
the information was public. However, when the city finally provided the LA Weekly with
the billboard lists from the companies, it had redacted the permitting information so it
was unclear which signs were permitted and which were either unpermitted or out of
compliance with their permits. For the LA Weekly’s purposes in determining which
billboards were legal, the list was useless (Pelisek 2010b).
Council member Jack Weiss put forward, and the full Council approved, a motion
requesting that LADBS report back within 15 days on the status of restarting the OSSPIP
program and the status of digital billboard installations by CBS and Clear Channel
(Motion, September 12, 2007). LADBS prepared a series of reports (December 3, 2007;
February 21, 2008; May 27, 2008) pursuant to this motion which revealed that, by May
27, 2008, Clear Channel had received permits for 38 digital conversions and installed 29
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of them, while CBS had received permits for eight digital conversions and installed three.
Yet LADBS still had not restarted the program. LADBS reported (May 23, 2008), more
than a year after the legal bar to restarting OSSPIP was lifted and nearly eight months
after the City Council ordered the status report, that it was still working with the City
Attorney to determine appropriate fees for the program.
The City Restarts OSSPIP
Not until October 31, 2008 — two years after the city settled with CBS and Clear
Channel — did the City Attorney and LADBS provide the City Council with proposed
language for an ordinance to restart the program. On December 5, 2008, the council
passed the ordinance (Ordinance No. 180446), which required the inventory program to
restart as of January 9, 2009, and to proceed on a three-year inspection rotation with five
LADBS staff members: a clerk/typist, three inspectors, and a senior inspector. The
findings were to be stored in a publicly accessible database. All signs found to be in
compliance with their permits were to be issued Certificates of Compliance that were to
be affixed to the signs. The program was restarted in early 2009 under the supervision of
Luke Zamperini, head of signage for LADBS’s Code Enforcement division.
OSSPIP had two components: fieldwork and permit research. During the
fieldwork phase, three inspectors traversed all thoroughfares in the city that were likely to
have off-site signs — those zoned for commercial, industrial, or high-density residential
uses. An inspector would drive to a particular street, walk a block collecting information,
then return to his vehicle and drive to the next block that had signage. For each sign
identified, an inspector noted such information as sign location (address),
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Figure 7. OSSPIP Field Survey Inspection Form (front)
71
Figure 8. OSSPIP Field Survey Inspection Form (back)
72
height, size, the number of sign faces, the direction the sign faced, billboard company (if
shown), and the billboard company’s identification number (if shown). The form used by
LADBS inspectors shows the extent of information collected during the fieldwork stage
of the survey (Figure 7 and Figure 8). The fieldwork was completed in about nine
months.
Next, the inspectors research the permitting status of each of the signs identified
in the field survey. This was the work that was designed to determine the legal status of
the signs. Zamperini reported that this work was much more difficult than LADBS
anticipated. Los Angeles began granting permits for billboards as early as the 1920s, and
after conducting any pre- and post-installation inspections, the city’s involvement with
the signage was complete. No later inspections were conducted; no paperwork was
required to be maintained; no municipal fees or taxes were due. The records kept of the
early permits were spotty at best. They were maintained in different files of different
departments — some on paper, some on microfiche. Originally, the Department of Public
Works issued billboard permits. In 1946, this shifted to LADBS. Yet until the 1960s, one
hold-out Department of Public Works employee continued to issue permits for signs in
addition to LADBS. The OSSPIP inspectors had only the current addresses to go on in
locating permits, but this was not a stable or reliable piece of evidence: street names had
changed over the years, lots had been subdivided, incorrect addresses were listed on
applications. It took the three inspectors some eighteen months to complete their
permitting research.
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Efforts to Make the Results of OSSPIP Public
As part of the research for this dissertation, I conducted interviews of several
high-level employees of LADBS during the summer of 2011. I interviewed LADBS
Principal Inspector Luke Zamperini on June 22, 2011. Zamperini explained that of the
approximately 6,000 sign structures found, approximately 5,000 complied with their
permits. The remaining 1,000 were either not in compliance or simply had no permits at
all. According to Zamperini, the legal status of unpermitted and noncompliant signs
would not be determined by additional LADBS fieldwork or research but by the outcome
of a pending lawsuit. Following the interview, I e-mailed Zamperini to request a copy of
the OSSPIP inventory and to ask for the name of the lawsuit that would determine the
legal status of the 1,000 signs that were either out of compliance or for which no permits
were found. Zamperini replied that he had referenced the case Summit Media LLC v.
City of Los Angeles, but that, “[b]ecause of the litigation the data cannot be released at
this time.”
As described in the prior chapter, the Summit Media case challenged the legality
of the city’s 2007 settlement with CBS and Clear Channel, which gave those two
companies, and only those two companies, the right to install digital billboards in the
city. In the settlement, the city promised to issue new permits for any CBS or Channel
signs that were unpermitted or out of compliance with their permits, even though it did
not then know how many signs this included. Summit Media sued in state court, arguing
that the City had exceeded its powers in the settlement, for it had promised not to apply
existing and potential future zoning laws to CBS and Clear Channel. The trial court
agreed, and on November 4, 2009, it invalidated the settlement agreement, finding, “the
74
central purpose of the Settlement Agreement [is] the exemption of [CBS and Clear
Channel] from zoning laws in return for certain alleged benefits to the City….” The city,
along with CBS and Clear Channel, appealed this ruling. The appellate process is
characterized by long timelines; when I was conducting interviews for this project in
2011, the parties still had yet to file briefs on the appeal.
On July 8 and July 18, 2011, respectively, I interviewed Ken Fong and Michael
Bostrom of the City Attorney’s office. Fong is the head of civil billboard litigation and
Bostrom has worked on many of these cases. When asked about the status of the OSSPIP
inventory, each said that they inventory was nearing completion and would be made
public soon. I informed them that Zamperini stated the inventory could not be released
because of the Summit Media case, and each was plainly surprised. Fong asked who
Zamperini had spoken to in the City Attorney’s office, while Bostrom asked if I had
spoken to Jane Usher. Jane Usher then held the official title of Special Assistant City
Attorney, and she was described as then City Attorney Carmen Trutanich’s “right-hand
gal,” by another interviewee. In Bostrom’s opinion, Usher would be aware of any orders
from the City Attorney’s office as to the release of the OSSPIP data. Bostrom asked me if
I had filed a public records request for the data. The California PRA requires a
government agency to provide access to public records within ten days of a request,
except in the case of certain limited exemptions (Cal. Gov. Code §§ 6250, et seq.). The
litigation exemption — which LADBS was apparently relying on in holding the OSSPIP
data until the Summit Media case was resolved — applies to documents created for on-
going litigation (County of Los Angeles v. Superior Court (2000), 82 Cal. App. 4th 819,
applying Cal. Gov. Code § 6254(b)). As Bostrom pointed out, the OSSPIP data was not
75
created for Summit Media or any other litigation, but because of a municipal ordinance;
accordingly, the PRA’s litigation exemption would not apply.
On August 2, 2011, I interviewed Jane Usher. Usher said she had not heard that
Zamperini was refusing to release the OSSPIP data because of the Summit Media case.
However her demeanor was different from Fong and Bostrom’s when I informed her of
this, and she did not appear surprised. She said, “I think people in the city don’t want to
inflame the litigants in the case [i.e. CBS and Clear Channel]. There is a sticky wicket.
There were about 100 that were digitized, that’s all, and their future is under a cloud.”
On September 1, 2011, I interviewed Frank Bush Assistant Chief of LADBS
Code Enforcement and Hector Buitrago, a 35-year veteran of LADBS who now works
for the department on a contract basis. Buitrago was formerly LADBS’s Deputy
Superintendent and was the senior person directly responsible for the OSSPIP at its outset
in 2002. Bush and Buitrago confirmed the details Zamperini had provided and added that
the fieldwork portion of the database could be available to the public on the Department’s
website within weeks of our interview, but not those portions of the database that spoke
to the legality of the signs, due to the pending Summit Media case.
Bush soon confirmed this information on the record at a public hearing. On
October 18, 2011, the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee held a hearing on
the possibility of instituting a tax on billboard revenue. Councilperson Bill Rosendahl
asked if anyone present knew how many billboards were in the city. Frank Bush took the
microphone. He stated that according to his department’s recent survey of sign structures,
there were about 6,200 sign structures with a little more than 9,000 ad faces in Los
Angeles.
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On September 14, 2011, I made a written request to Bush pursuant to the PRA to
inspect and obtain a copy of the OSSPIP inventory. On October 13, 2011, Hazel Harris,
LADBS Custodian of Records, replied to the request with a PRA determination letter
offering to disclose the number, address, height, and size of signs issued permits by
LADBS within a specific time range for a fee of $625.04 for an estimated eight hours of
computer programming costs to create, test, and run a query of LADBS’s database.
In my opinion, the letter was not fully responsive to the PRA request, because the
OSSPIP inventory contains a great deal of data not mentioned in the letter and LADBS
offered no excuse for failing to provide complete access to the OSSPIP data. I sent a
second letter, in which I asked for clarification of these issues and renewed my request
for the entire OSSPIP inventory. Specifically, I asked if LADBS’s offer to disclose
records included records for all signs identified pursuant to the OSSPIP ordinance,
whether permitted or unpermitted, and whether the disclosure would include all data, not
just address, height, and size.
LADBS responded with a revised determination letter in which it asserted that a
public interest exemption applies to the OSSPIP inventory, because the inventory is in
draft form and possibly contains “inaccurate, unverified data.” This was the first time
anyone affiliated with LADBS claimed that the OSSPIP inventory was incomplete. The
letter states that there is, “a strong public interest in avoiding the confusion that would
result from the release of inaccurate and unverified information should the database be
made available in its current form.” The letter claims LADBS will, “release the
information contained in the database after the research has concluded and the data
subsets have been verified.” The letter also admits that the OSSPIP inventory will, “be
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subject to public inspection” when complete, and that the database is not exempt from the
PRA under a litigation privilege. The letter stated that the only “finalized” information
contained in the database was the location data, which it offered to disclose “in Excel
format” for the same estimated cost as the October 13 letter.
On November 10, 2011, I spoke by telephone with Harris. I asked if LADBS was
still offering to release height and size data. Harris stated that the offer had changed, and
that LADBS would now provide only sign locations and nothing else. I asked whether
LADBS would consider lowering the fee given the more limited disclosure. I spoke
several more times with Harris by telephone the following week. Harris told me that the
estimated cost would be lowered to $312.52. She further explained that the original
disclosure offer had been limited by order of the City Attorney’s office.
On December 8, 2011, I sent a third letter to LADBS, once again renewing my
request for the entire OSSPIP inventory. In the letter, I questioned the legal and factual
bases upon which my previous requests had been denied. LADBS did not respond to this
letter. On May 30, 2012, I filed suit in the Superior Court.
During the course of settlement negotiations with the City Attorney’s office, the
city changed its position as to the OSSPIP database. All communications took place
between the City Attorney’s office and my attorney. On June 28, 2012, the city offered to
provide access to the address, size, height, number of sign faces, owner, and permit
number (if any). The city referred to this offer as the “entire” database. It asserted that I
would then be able to research the permitting status of off-site signs as they were
providing me the permit numbers.
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In two other letters, the city reiterated its offer to provide the “entire” database.
The city also claimed that LADBS had offered the entire database in its correspondences
of October 13, 2011 and November 7, 2011. However, in each letter, the city then
reiterated its offer to provide a limited portion of the survey information plus permit
numbers. The city never offered the entire survey information nor any of the permitting
research.
The LA Weekly published an article on the lawsuit on August 2, 2012 (Aron
2012). The article stated that the city was refusing to provide access to the entire
database. The same day, Jane Usher of the City Attorney’s office pressured the LA
Weekly to retract or revise the article, claiming that the city had offered to provide me the
entire database but that I refused. The author of the article stated that he had been
screamed at by Usher as he had never been screamed at before. The author informed the
Editor in Chief of the LA Weekly that he had found no proof that the city had actually
offered to provide the entire database. But the LA Weekly acceded to the pressure and
published a “correction” to the article that reiterated the city’s claim.
The same day the article was published, Jane Usher sent a letter to the President
of USC, C. L. Max Nikias, informing him of the LA Weekly article and claiming that I
was interfering with the City Attorney’s efforts to regulate billboards. She stated, “Ms.
Sedano is suing my employer, the city, for access to public billboard permit records,
which we are happy to release to her, at her cost, and for access to non-public draft
documents, which will not be released.” Usher thereby confirmed that, despite the city’s
protestations to the contrary, the city was not in fact offering me the entire database but
was instead holding back certain information that it claimed was in “draft” form.
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In the weeks that followed, my attorney reached out to the City Attorney’s office
numerous times to clarify the city’s offer and to resolve the matter. He requested the city
Attorney to provided a list of all categories of information that are a part of the inventory,
including any template form that LADBS inspectors completed while in the field, as an
effort to resolve the question of the scope of the inventory and to follow up on the city’s
heated response to the LA Weekly offer that it wanted to settle the matter. The City
Attorney’s office sent a letter indicating that it was treating the request for the inspection
form as a new public records request which meant the city had a new 10-day statutory
period in which to provide the document. Despite the office’s forceful claims to the LA
Weekly that it was ready to settle the case, the letter did not respond my attorney’s
inquiry as to a settlement.
My attorney was not able to speak to a member of the City Attorney’s office until
the first court date, a status conference on September 4, 2012. At that hearing, Deputy
City Attorney Kim Westhoff requested the court to order the parties to complete a
settlement conference. The court obliged and ordered the parties to report back on the
results of a settlement conference by mid-October. Doing so thereby put off any
settlement negotiations until we could schedule and attend a settlement conference. The
City Attorney’s office delayed in scheduling a settlement beyond the court’s deadline and
thereby delayed all negotiations until late October.
At the settlement conference, on October 29, 2012, the city offered to provide the
entire inventory as I had been requesting for over a year. I agreed to settle the case. The
city promised to provide a digital copy of the entire OSSPIP database, including all
aspects of information that LADBS collected during both the fieldwork and legal
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research portions of the project. I paid $600 for the information, and I dropped the
lawsuit. The OSSPIP inventory was public information and was intended to be available
to the public for free, but the city claimed that it would take a software engineer eight
hours to write a program to extract the data from LADBS’s software system and put it
into a shareable format. Two weeks later, the city provided my attorney a copy of the
database in a single Excel spreadsheet. The same day, the city put the database up on the
LADBS web site, freely available to the public.
The Findings of the OSSPIP Inventory
The OSSPIP inventory identifies 5,874 sign structures in the City of Los Angeles,
containing 9,025 sign faces. The inventory contains 11 columns of location information
for each sign, 17 columns of physical information identified during fieldwork, 20
columns of permitting information, and 3 columns of findings (Table 1).
Table 1. Columns of information in OSSPIP inventory
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The inventory shows that off-site signs are spread through the metropolitan
region, with more density in the central portions of the city. Los Angeles has an awkward
shape, with the San Fernando Valley in the north separated from the central basin by the
Santa Monica Mountains, plus a thin strip of land stretching south that connects the
downtown area to the harbor. Projecting the results of the Billboard Inventory on a
topographic map of the city reveals that outdoor advertising is present in nearly every flat
portion of the city (Figure 9). The San Fernando Valley, ringed by the Simi Hills to the
west, the Santa Susana and San Gabriel Mountains to the north, Verdugo Mountains to
the east, and Santa Monica Mountains to the south, contains some 260 square miles of
land, an area so broad and flat that it is easy to forget there are hills in every direction.
This flat spread of urban space is coated with outdoor advertising. The central portion of
the city contains the densest area of signage, in the downtown area and the manufacturing
region to the south, but signage spreads out from this core evenly towards beach areas to
the west, the mountains to the east, and the harbor to the south.
The inventory contains 20 columns of permitting information, providing the
specific contents of the signs’ permits, such as permit number, date of issuance, and the
height, length, and width of the sign. Of the 9,025 signs identified in the field, 1,350 signs
have empty columns of permitting information. LADBS was unable to locate a permit
associated with these signs, meaning the signs lack permits. With 1,350 unpermitted
signs revealed in the inventory, LADBS’s claim of 1,000 disputed signs seems low. And
this is without even considering whether any of the 7,675 signs that do have permits are
in compliance with their permits.
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Figure 9. All OSSPIP Entries, Projected on Satellite Imagery
A sign – or any other structure subject to permitting requirements – is out of
compliance with its permit if its physical characteristics do not match its permitted
specifications. In the case of a billboard, the sign is out of compliance with its permit if it
is larger than, higher than or has more ad faces than its permit specifies. Comparing the
fieldwork data for 7,675 permitted signs in the Billboard Inventory with their permitting
information reveals the following:
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➢ Signs longer than permit allows: 1,010
➢ Signs wider than permit allows: 1,077
➢ Signs higher than permit allows: 2,904
➢ Signs with more sign faces than permit allows (i.e. a double sign on a single
sign permit): 686
Table 2. Unpermitted and permitted but noncompliant signs in OSSPIP
Permitted But Out of Compliance Company Total
Signs
No Permit
Longer Wider Higher Extra
Face
Total
Total
Unpermitted
and Out of
Compliance
American 4 0 0 0 2 0 2 2
Bulletin 3 0 0 2 0 0 2 2
Cal Pac 2 0 0 2 2 0 2 2
CBS 2288 203 590 524 699 170 1220 1423
Clear 2310 361 82 80 773 291 992 1353
Connell 2 0 0 2 2 2 2 2
General 6 0 2 4 4 0 6 6
Kem 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1
L.A. 9 7 0 0 1 1 1 8
Lamar 3783 715 284 365 1312 192 1538 2253
Property 78 16 3 18 18 1 27 43
Regency 202 20 4 22 109 16 120 140
Reliable 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 2
Show 2 1 0 0 1 0 1 2
Summit 49 2 11 13 34 1 36 38
Unknown 33 16 1 2 9 0 10 26
Van 251 7 33 42 131 12 158 165
Totals 9025 1350 1010 1075 3098 686 4118 5468
In total, the inventory reveals that 3,964 of the 9,025 signs are noncompliant in at
least one of the four listed ways (Table 2). Adding these 3,964 signs to the 1,350 signs
with no permit yields a total of 5,314 signs that are unpermitted or noncompliant with
their permits. Thus, well more than half the off-site signs in the city are illegal according
to the city’s own permitting records. Mapping these signs shows that they are evenly
spread throughout the cityscape (Figure 10). There is not one neighborhood or region
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that has only perfectly lawful outdoor advertising. The landscape of illegal signs is
citywide.
Figure 10. Map of unpermitted and noncompliant signs in OSSPIP
Along with its 48 columns of location, fieldwork, and permitting data, the
Billboard Inventory contains a section of “Findings.” Its columns, “Permitted,”
“Presumed Lawful (sic),” and “Estimated Date of Construction,” put forth the city’s legal
findings as to the 9,025 signs. This section was not mandated in the ordinance that
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initiated the program, and prior to the inventory’s release, city actors claimed that the
city’s legal findings were not public information and would not be included in the
inventory.
The Findings section appears to clearly note whether a sign has a permit on
record. The Permitted column lists a “Y” or “N” to denote permitting status: 8,302 signs
receive a “Y” while 723 signs receive an “N.” For the 723 signs that have an “N” in the
Permitted column, the columns for specific permitting information are empty. This makes
sense: if a sign lacks a permit, there is no permitting information to provide. However,
these 723 signs are not the only signs with empty columns of permitting information. As
noted above, 1,350 signs, not just 723, have no permitting information listed and thus no
permit. Of these 1,350, the city has granted 627 signs a “Y” in the Permitted columns.
The city offers no explanation for identifying these signs as permitted. Thus, the
Permitted column does not reveal whether a sign has a permit, as it suggests, but whether
the city has deemed the sign to be legally permitted (Table 3).
The Presumed Lawful column identifies 2,052 of 9,025 signs as “Presumed
Lawfully Erected per California Business and Professions Code Section 5216.1.” For the
remaining signs, this column is blank. Section 5216.1 is a state law that creates a
rebuttable presumption of legality for any sign that has existed for more than five years
but has not been cited as unlawful by a government agency. This state law, enacted in
1983, strongly favors sign owners. For a city as large as Los Angeles and with such
limited code enforcement resources, it is nearly impossible for the city government to be
aware of signs that go up unpermitted. Prior to the Billboard Inventory program, Los
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Table 3. Analysis of OSSPIP’s “Permitted” and “Presumed Lawful” designations
Not Permitted Permitted
No Permit Shown No Permit Shown
Company Total
Signs Total
Total Presumed
Lawful
Total
Total Presumed
Lawful
American 4 0 - - 4 0 -
Bulletin 3 0 - - 3 0 -
Cal Pac 2 0 - - 2 0 -
CBS 2288 83 83 83 2205 120 61
Clear 2310 138 138 138 2172 223 188
Connell 2 0 - - 2 0 -
General 6 0 - - 6 0 -
Kem 1 0 - - 1 0 -
L.A. 9 6 6 0 3 1 0
Lamar* 3783 459 459 459 3324 256 175
Property 78 15 15 15 63 1 1
Regency 202 2 2 0 201 18 14
Reliable 2 2 2 2 0 0 -
Show 2 1 1 1 1 0 -
Summit 49 0 - - 49 2 1
Unknown 33 16 16 10 17 0 -
Van 251 1 1 1 250 6 4
Totals 9025 723 723 709 8302 627 444
Angeles relied on public complaint to inform it of sign violations, as it had no regular
code enforcement patrol unit for signs. Yet relying on members of the public to report
code violations is an ineffective strategy, because nearly all members of the public are
not aware of the specific rules as to signage and do not know if a sign is technically in
violation.
In order to rely on Section 5216.1, a sign owner must be able to prove that its sign
was in place for more than five years. Thus, the law creates a presumption that favors a
sign owner, but the sign owner bears a burden of showing evidence that the code section
applies. As with the Permitted column, the city offers no explanation in the inventory that
reveals how it decided which signs would receive this designation. The final Findings
column, entitled “Estimated Date of Construction,” contains, “date and document
information as to the date of construction,” according to the inventory’s General Notes.
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The database does not describe the purpose of this column, but presumably it is to catalog
evidence LADBS has identified that could support the rebuttable presumption code
section.
Of the 1,350 signs in the city that have no permit on record, the city identifies
1,160 as presumed lawful under Section 5216.1. Nearly every sign that the city identifies
as unpermitted it also identifies as presumed lawful under code section 5216.1: 709 of the
723 are presumed lawful. Of the 627 signs which lack permits but which the city
identifies as permitted, most are also identified by the city as presumed lawful: 444 of the
627 are presumed lawful. Thus, the city’s legal findings as to unpermitted signs are that
only 14 of the 1,350 unpermitted signs in the city are illegal: of the 1,350, the city claims
627 are permitted and 709 are unpermitted but presumed lawful.
As noted above, the LADBS stated in interviews that the total number of
unpermitted and noncompliant sign structures was about 1,000. It is not possible to
determine from the OSSPIP inventory how LADBS came up with its number for
noncompliant signs.
Explaining the Consuming Landscape
This broad layer of off-site signage is due in no small part to the city’s early over-
zoning of commercial property. In 1921, Los Angeles became the first city in the U.S. to
implement city-wide zoning for land use. From the initiation of the program, critics noted
that private interests easily avoided the recommendations of the city’s Planning
Commission by securing variances and exceptions from the City Council. The result was
a city with far more commercial zoning than city planners deemed beneficial
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(Whittemore 2012). “Zoning, far from guiding the expansion of the metropolis, merely
sanctioned the preferences of private enterprise; and as the excessive number of business
lots indicated, few realtors found zoning an insuperable obstacle to their exploitation of
Los Angeles” (Fogelson 1967/1993, 257). Planners envisioned a city of open spaces and
residential communities that were dotted with commercial centers. Instead, a decade after
zoning was introduced, all of Los Angeles’s main thoroughfares were lined with
Figure 11. Parcel map of Los Angeles by land use zoning category
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commercially zoned parcels (Whittemore 2012). Although later decades saw movements
to down-zone commercial properties to residential designations, the early crosshatching
of commercial property was permanent. Over the years, the distances between dispersed
neighborhoods of single-family homes have disappeared as development filled in the grid
with more of the same: a map of current Los Angeles land use reveals a landscape of
residential parcels enmeshed with a grid of commercial parcels (Figure 11).
Figure 12. Map of OSSPIP Entries Identified by Parcel Zoning
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The small size of commercial lots makes the grid of commercial parcels hard to
see on the map, but when we overlay a map layer of off-site signage, the grid of
commercial parcels visually pops (Figure 12). The early zoning of commercial properties
directly impacted the amount of outdoor advertising in the growing metropolis of Los
Angeles. In 1917, the city banned outdoor advertising from residential districts. This
early effort to regulate city spaces for community benefit was hailed as a “sweeping
victory” for advertising interests since it merely made into law the business practices of
the industry (Baker 2007, 1201). As the city granted variance after variance to
commercial zoning, there was nothing to stop outdoor advertisers from putting up signs.
Comparing the location information of the Billboard Inventory with land use in Los
Angeles reveals that 17% of the city’s 40,525 commercially zoned parcels contain
outdoor advertising (Figure 12).
Los Angeles is famous for its car culture and its vision of suburban living in an
urban setting, two trends that go hand in hand with residents travelling to and from their
dispersed single-family homes via automobile (Axelrod 2009). As early as the 1920s,
traffic congestion was a problem in the city (Gish 2012). The city’s pattern of road types
is a grid of highways amongst local streets. Viewing the city at full extent, the city’s
1,284 miles of highway are difficult to discern amongst the broad swath of 4,274 miles
of local streets and 1,029 miles of collector streets connecting the local streets to arteries
(Figure 13). Again, when we show the outdoor advertising against road type, the
highways reveal themselves as a highly visible grid of signage (Figure 3b). The city’s
662 miles of major highway hold 4,698 billboards — a density of 7.1 signs per mile. The
622 miles of secondary highway hold 2,312 signs, for a density of 3.7 signs per mile.
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Figure 13. Map of Los Angeles roadways
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this map is that the city’s 267 miles of scenic
roadways contain 483 billboards. The signs are clustered along Ventura Boulevard in the
Valley and Santa Monica Boulevard and Venice Boulevard in the central city, roadways
that may be called scenic by administrators but are certainly not by residents (Figure 14).
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Figure 14. Map of OSSPIP entries categorized by road type
Scholars of Los Angeles have long studied large-scale development projects as
the story of Los Angeles’s massive and continued growth, such as housing developments
(Davis 1990; Hise, 1999), civic centers (Fogelson 1967/1993), and commercial districts
(Fulton 2001). This work on Los Angeles is in line with work on urban theory generally
and in the vein of the “growth machine” in particular in that it focuses on large,
individual projects to study the political, economic, and spatial processes that explain the
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city’s growth. Yet this traditional account of development in Los Angeles misses a key
feature of growth: the signage that permeates the city’s landscape, what I refer to as the
consuming landscape. The consuming landscape is especially missing from two
literatures of urban theory: work on public space and work on the growth machine. The
information that is revealed in the OSSPIP inventory can be read as weighty proof that
the city has a goal of growing its public space into a consuming landscape and that the
city works toward this goal in cooperation with the private industry of outdoor
advertising.
The consuming landscape is an important though relatively uncharted aspect of
public space. In recent years, geographers have studied changing manifestations of public
space (Low and Smith 2006). Like work on the growth machine, these studies tend to
focus on single sites, such as a public park or a large-scale development project (Mitchell
2003; Smith 2006). They show that municipalities have supported the building out of
formerly public spaces by private developers into spaces that are centered on shopping,
adorned with logos, and designed to sell visitors not just commodities but to sell them on
a particular, sanitized version of publicness (Banerjee, 2001). Part of this process is
heightened municipal regulation of public behavior in public space, which is
accomplished by security guards, gates, and apparatuses of surveillance (Davis, 1990).
Mitchell (1997) and Harvey (2006) are exceptions here, in that they bring a
scholarly focus to the public space of public streets. Mitchell’s (1997) study of anti-
vagrancy laws in Santa Monica, CA is an exception in that it focused on the public space
of streets and sidewalks, finding that city’s laws resulted in the actual removal of certain
members of the public from public streets, and, since these people were homeless, he
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argued that the laws rendered their very existence in the city illegal. He sees the increased
regulation of homeless and poor people out of urban places as an aspect of the post-
Fordist mode of regulation — an effort by state actors to create spaces that are attractive
for global capital. Harvey (2006) describes the effect of private capital on public streets
in his analysis of the spatial reorganization of Paris under the order of Napoleon III and
the direction of Baron Haussman. Thousands of buildings were razed to lay down
straight, wide boulevards and structures built according strict aesthetic guidelines of
expensive materials. The prices of the rebuilt districts forced working-class people into
neighborhoods that had not been revamped. The result was a city that was segregated into
bourgeois and working-class districts with wide boulevards that allowed easy military
access. The new boulevards were lined with bourgeois cafes and shops, whose expensive
goods, well-dressed clientele, and sumptuous aesthetics spilled onto the street, creating a
hybrid public-private space that clearly spoke to which “public” was invited to this public
space.
Following these authors, I analyze public space as more pervasive in cityspace
than individual sites of community gathering. It is true that public space is found in
particular nodes such as parks, plazas and, in our current era, malls; but public space is
also found in the spaces in between, in the spaces we move through as we shuttle
between home, office, school, and mall. Billboard activists have traditionally argued
against them because they are a source of “blight” that diminish the aesthetics of
cityspace. But the argument of a displeasing appearance could be levied against myriad
objects in cities. Further, it renders the issue of consuming landscape into the category of
“quality of life” issues, which, “raise a politics of aesthetics above the politics of
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survival” (Mitchell 1997, 326). The most salient feature of billboards and other off-site
signs is not the quality of their aesthetics but the content of their aesthetics: they project
the corporate messages of advertising across the cityscape.
The pervasiveness of billboards and their messages of consumption suggests we
see all urban space as a space of consumption. When all of cityspace is acknowledged as
a space of consumption, not just shopping centers, city residents can be recognized as
consumers, not just when they are shopping but all the time. Marxist media scholars
understand city residents as a part of the urban economy in that they are sold as a
commodity to advertisers (Smythe 1977). Their viewing of ads and purchasing behaviors
renders the concept of “non-work time” meaningless because their leisure hours become
a form of labor in the urban economy (Jhally and Livant 1986). These contributions are
important, but they are deepened with a consideration of space.
The OSSPIP inventory reveals that billboards inundate cityspace with advertising.
The nearly 9,025 signs shown in the inventory are physical objects in the landscape, but
these objects are not inert. They engage with cityspace with their informational content.
We can consider the combined spread of outdoor advertising through the city as a layer
of cityspace. With advertising’s messages of consumption, this layer of outdoor
advertising is the consuming landscape. But this layer is more dense than the 9,025 spots
on the map of Los Angeles. The messages of the signs do exist simply at the location of
each sign. The messages spread out from the signs into the swath of cityspace from which
they are viewed, rendering the public space of cities into a combined public/private space
of consumption. Billboards are situated across Los Angeles along commercial streets in
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every corner of the city, expanding the consuming landscape well beyond the upscale
districts described in Harvey’s (2006) account.
It is not simply the projection of advertising messages that concerns us here.
MacKay’s (1969) version of information theory asks us to consider the information of a
billboard as a process or an action. In this view the information of a sign does not simply
exist on the sign itself or even out to the distance from which it could be seen. The
viewing of a sign is part of the sign’s message when we consider information as a
process. A viewing may seem like an ephemeral act. But for each viewing, we must
consider the ramifications of Hayles’s (1999) argument that information is not
immaterial. Information always exists somewhere, in some physical manifestation. Each
seemingly ephemeral viewing of a billboard, therefore, occurs somewhere. In fact, each
viewing occurs by, and in, someone. When a person views a billboard, he becomes a
receptacle for its information. The information is stored in his brain, consciously or
subconsciously finding a home therein among his lifetime of memories. The collective
messages, each encouraging consumption, each seen and stored by the city’s residents,
workers, children and visitors, are a part of the consuming landscape just as much as the
billboards themselves.
Clearly, we can consider the OSSPIP inventory as a piece of information. But if
we apply MacKay’s argument that information is a process, we no longer see the
inventory as a separate object or even as a collection of pieces of knowledge that are
themselves immaterial: OSSPIP is a series of actions. This includes but is not limited to a
City Council vote, legal complaints and settlements, thousands of survey forms filled out
by LADBS inspectors, thousands of paper permits, the digital architecture of LADBS’s
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servers, a CD storing an excel spreadsheet, and the mental architectures of the many
people that created the inventory and that have perused it since. Importantly, this view
lets us consider the behaviors that OSSPIP has inspired as a part of the analysis. The
lawsuits filed by outdoor advertisers, the foot-dragging by city hall in restarting the
program, and the dilatory and obfuscative responses by LADBS and the City Attorney’s
office to the public records request are part of the analysis.
The history of OSSPIP as described above plainly reveals a willingness on the
part of the city government to avoid the collection and release of information on outdoor
advertising in the city, especially on the legal status of billboards. Yet the facts that the
OSSPIP ordinance was ever passed and that the project was finally undertaken reveal the
opposing tendency. Of course, it is possible to focus solely on the information eventually
released. This is what the media does when it reports on OSSPIP but discusses only the
numbers in certain columns of the database, and it is what the City Planning Department
does when it creates a graphic that summarizes OSSPIP by only listing a few numbers
from the data collected. But if we step back and consider the broader aspects of OSSPIP
as suggested by information theory, we see the contradictory position of the city as both
an architect of the conditions that foster industry’s growth and simultaneously a regulator
of industry excesses. Indeed, this is the role of the state in a capitalist system (Harvey
1975).
A closer consideration of the contents of the inventory, as selected, chosen and
published by the city, reveals the city to be quite an active agent towards its own goal of a
consuming landscape, not simply a mediator of conflicting values as regulator and
champion of capital. The “Findings” section of the inventory is instructive. The City
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Attorney’s office was adamant during settlement negotiations for the public records
lawsuit that the inventory did not contain any legal conclusions and that, if the city had
reached any legal conclusions as to the content of the inventory, these were not public
records and would not be produced. And yet, the city’s purported findings were produced
by the city, and they read as a catalog of evidence supporting the maintenance of illegal
signs in the cityscape.
The Findings section contains three parts: Permitted, Presumed Lawful (sic) and
Estimated Date of Construction. The city could very easily have created the OSSPIP
database without these columns; indeed, the ordinance does not call for the inclusion of
this or any other legal conclusion. The Findings section shows the city actively shielding
unlawful signs. By including the Permitted column, the city shields 627 from appearing
to lack permits. The city protects sign owners from appearing to own unpermitted signs
and itself from appearing lax in enforcing its own laws. The rebuttable presumption of
code section 5216.1 that the city refers to in the “Presumed Lawful” column is
technically a legal shield that can be invoked by a defendant. Here, the city claims the
presumption on behalf of the sign companies. In the 2,052 cases of signs which the city
designates as “presumed lawful,” the city has taken on the job of the sign owner by
publicly arguing that the signs are legally protected by law.
Luke Zamperini of LADBS responded in writing to a few questions about these
issues following the release of the OSSPIP inventory. I asked if he could explain the
discrepancy between the 1,000 number he had previously quoted me for unpermitted and
noncompliant signs and the number that the inventory revealed actually to be out of
compliance or unpermitted. He answered, “Although many structures are not in perfect
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sync with their permits, the deviance is considered minor or insignificant.” He further
explained,
Panel size:
There are four standard panel sizes that the billboard industry currently uses;
bulletin (14' x 48'), poster (12' x 24'), square (24' x 24'), and 8-sheet (6' x 12').
These sizes are approximate and have varied over time dependent of the
evolution of the machines used to produce copy. Permits in the past may or
may not have included the frames (typically 1') around the copy in the size
description. So, if the permit described a 10' x 22' panel and we saw a poster
panel, we considered it to be in conformance with the permit.
Height:
In some instances the height of the structure as measured in the survey did not
match the height noted on the permit. However, in most cases we could find
no evidence that the structure had been modified after installation and, being
unaware of any method inspectors of past eras may have used to measure sign
height accurately, we determined that if our measurement was within several
feet of the description on the permit, we considered it to be in conformance.
This is a strikingly tolerant attitude towards the regulation of public space. In the
privatized world of urban public spaces, “zero tolerance” of legal infractions is the norm
(Smith 2002; Belina and Helms 2003). The tolerance voiced by Zamperini is mirrored by
the city. Two years after the inventory was completed, the City of Los Angeles has taken
no enforcement actions against any of the illegal signs discovered by program. Because
of the Billboard Inventory, the city government knows that the public space of Los
Angeles is permeated with thousands of signs that are technically illegal, and it knows
which signs stand in violation of its laws. The city chooses to let the illegal signs stand.
The state’s protection of outdoor advertising is also seen at higher levels of
governments. The city’s sign laws give it undeniable power in regulating billboards and
other outdoor advertising across the city. But state law undercuts much of this power. The
rebuttable presumption created by Business and Professions Code section 5216.1 means
that any sign that has existed for more than five years but has not been cited by a
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government agency is presumed lawful. But for a city as large as Los Angeles and with
such limited code enforcement resources, it is nearly impossible for the city to be aware
of signs that go up unpermitted. Los Angeles relies on public complaint for awareness of
sign violations, as it has no regular code enforcement patrol unit for signs. Relying on
members of the public to report code violations is not a particularly effective strategy,
because most members of the public are not aware of the specific rules as to signage and
do not know if a sign is technically in violation.
A second state law severely undercuts the power of local governments to reduce
outdoor advertising in their jurisdictions. A common method for governments to have
structures removed is amortization. In this technique, a structure that was once legal but
is no longer due to a change in law, is ordered to be removed after a specific period of
time; the extended time period gives the owner time to amortize the cost of the structure
over a period of time while it makes profit from the structure (Collins 2000). When many
billboards were rendered unlawful by the federal HBA in 1965, municipalities ordered
their removal after an amortization period. Outdoor advertisers pushed Congress to
amend the law, and in 1978 Congress banned the use of amortization to remove signs
rendered illegal by the HBA. The only remaining method for government entities to
remove such signs was – and still is – for them to pay just compensation, i.e. the fair
market value of the signs. After lobbying by the outdoor advertising industry, the ban on
amortization was picked up by states. In 1986, California enacted Business and
Professions Code section 5412 which requires compensation be paid to a sign owner
upon order of removal by a government entity. Considering estimated monthly revenues
of for Los Angeles signs of $14,000 for a standard double-sided 14 x 48 feet billboard
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(Pelisek 2008), $81,000 for a supergraphic (Hathaway 2011b), and $128,000 for a digital
billboard (Pelisek 2008), paying out the fair market value of any of these signs is well
beyond the financial capability of Los Angeles.
The number of signs that the city claims are protected by this state law speak to
power gained by capital when it gains a foothold in cityspace. Swyngedouw (2000)
explains that capital leaves its mark on the landscape. The structures that serve growth in
one era, such as highways, office towers, and housing developments, are fixed into the
geography of a place. These structures in turn fix geographical possibility. They act as
physical limitations on current and future iterations of place. Billboards have evolved
over the years from hastily glued up flyers to wood framed signs to the large steel
structures that are common today. These signs are made to last, and indeed they have.
Billboards limit the possibilities of the urban landscape just as do other structures do built
in the growth of capital. Outdoor advertisers are not likely to remove their signs, for they
are their source of profit. They are limited in their current form – for example, billboard
owners might prefer to have larger sign faces or digital signs, but are constrained by the
current structure of their signs. Property owners that have a billboard on their property
are not likely to remove them, because they get a percentage of profits from the billboard
owner. More broadly, the conception of an urban landscape is fixed by billboards. In
many people’s minds, a landscape of billboards is just what a city looks like.
The state laws granting a rebuttable presumption of legality and banning
amortization for the removal of signs protect billboards that already exist. They add legal
strength to the power that comes from already existing in the landscape. Billboards are
geographically fixed by the law, not just by their physical presence. The content of the
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inventory speaks to the power that exists by having a permanent stake in the landscape.
And it reveals a layer of the legal landscape of the city. Cityspace is permeated with
thousands of signs that are technically illegal. The city can no longer claim that it does
not know whether signs are illegal. Because of OSSPIP, the city is fully aware that many
signs stand in violation of its laws. The city actively chooses to let the illegal signs
spread, and it actively chooses to let illegal advertising spread into cityspace.
Conclusions
The city eventually released the OSSPIP inventory without a court order. It did so
eighteen months after I initially requested access to the information. During the course of
the eighteen month period, the city gave different reasons for why the data was not being
released. The first reason given was that the data would not be released while the Summit
Media appeal was still pending. The lawsuit would resolve the legal status of the CBS
and Clear Channel signs, which together comprise a majority of signs in the city. As Jane
Usher said, these companies’ signs are “under a cloud” until that case is resolved. Next,
the city claimed the that the OSSPIP inventory was incomplete and would not be released
in draft form. The city made this claim for the first time six months after high-level
LADBS personnel told me that their work was complete. The city made this argument
even though the fieldwork and permitting research portions of the work – according to
LADBS the only two portions – were complete. Finally, one year after my initial request,
the city claimed that it was, in fact, offering me the entire database; the only issue was
what the database actually included.
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Facts show that there is some truth to the first rationales stated by the city – the
legal status was unclear as to many of the signs, and the inventory was in a draft form –
even if these rationales were not legal bases for failing to release the data. On June 29,
2011, Zamperini stated the data would not be released until the Summit Media case was
resolved. The city finally agreed to release the database on October 29, 2012. That same
day, the city received the tentative opinion of the appellate court in the Summit Media
case. The next day, October 30, 2012, the Summit Media case was heard by the
California Court of Appeal. The court’s tentative opinion was to uphold the lower court
ruling in full and void the settlement between CBS and Clear Channel and the city as an
illegal contract, and the court made this opinion final a few weeks later. This timeline,
strongly suggests that the initial reason given by the city for refusing to release the
database is the correct one: the city said it would not release the data until the Summit
Media appeal was resolved, and it didn’t.
The OSSPIP inventory is not exempt from public disclosure simply because it
may have been relevant to the on-going Summit Media litigation, as described above. On
the contrary, the fact that the OSSPIP inventory may be relevant to on-going litigation
only heightens the importance of its availability.
The public interest in the activities of a public agency is quite likely to be
highest when the agency is being sued. That is exactly the time when
members of the public become aware of possible misdeeds or undesirable
practices on the part of the agency, and have the strongest incentive to
examine records which shed light on the operations of their government. This
purpose is served by adopting a limited construction of the "pending
litigation" exemption in section 6254, subdivision (b): a document is protected
from disclosure only if it was specifically prepared for use in litigation (City
of Hemet v. Super. Ct. of Riverside County (1995) 37 Cal. App. 4th 1411,
1420).
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Why would the city not release the data until Summit Media was resolved? Jane
Usher’s off-the-cuff response to the issue answers this question. She said, “people in the
city don’t want to inflame the litigants in the case.” This is the simple answer: CBS and
Clear Channel did not want the data to be released, so decision-makers in the city held it.
And the city itself – or certain of those decision-makers – benefitted as well. The number
of signs that the OSSPP inventory reveals to be out of compliance with permits puts the
city in a bad light; the city appears to be failing in enforcing its regulations. Holding the
data from the public masks this finding.
The inventory that was eventually released attempts to resolve the legal status of
many potentially problematic signs; it includes the city’s purported findings as to the
legal status of the many unpermitted and non-compliant signs. Notably, it asserts that
hundreds of apparently unpermitted signs are presumed lawful under state law. This law,
like the bar on amortization of signs, severely undercuts the ability of municipalities to
decrease advertising in their landscapes. Activists and city employees voice frustration
with the effect of this law. Yet LADBS employee Luke Zamperini who headed the
OSSPIP program until his recent promotion is now supportive of this presumption. He
said, “the more I looked into it, the more I believed in the rebuttable presumption,
because we aren’t the only ones that can’t find permits.” In Zamperini’s view then, old
signage whose permits either never existed or have been lost to posterity should be
protected. The burden of shoddy record-keeping, whether on the government or the
billboard companies’ part, should be carried by the government, even if that means that
some unpermitted signs are thereby protected from removal. It is a very different posture
if we imagine the city spending its time vigorously enforcing its sign laws as fully as
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possible rather than researching and cataloguing the evidence that might support sign
companies’ legal defenses.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE APPROVAL OF THE WILSHIRE GRAND
REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT
Los Angeles in 2009 had seen its real estate market collapse and was suffering through
economic crisis with the rest of the United States. In late 2009, Los Angeles City Council
member Jan Perry brought a motion to the Council that put forward a call to the city to
incentivize development in the downtown area to increase the city’s tax revenues. The
motion offered no strategy and mandated no concrete steps to bring in the entertainment,
business, or hotels that it sought. It was more of an open-ended announcement to
developers that the City Council was ready to approve projects in downtown Los Angeles
— an invitation to take part in the growth machine. Land is a resource that cities can
develop again and again. Indeed, cities must develop land cyclically because it is a
limited resource. The process of uneven development, which Marx called the general law
of capitalist accumulation, is the tendency for capital to accumulate in one sector while it
retreats from another (Smith 1982). As capital moves in and out of an area, land loses and
gains value, and capital is grown in the process. Uneven development is the growing and
re-growing of capital in shifting neighborhoods. Perry’s motion was a reminder to the
development elite that downtown Los Angeles was on the upswing of uneven
development.
Perry’s motion declared,
The City has experienced a serious drop in tourist visits, as evident by a
decrease in transient occupancy tax revenues and the recent announcement
that dozens of hotels in the region are experiencing severe operation losses
that call into question their viability over the next few years. … Businesses,
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such as hotels, are forced to hold off on improvements to their properties ….
Improvements to local tourist attractions and hotels are essential to attract new
visitors and to ensure that those who have visited will return because they
enjoyed the facilities they used (Motion, October 14, 2009).
As it turns out, Perry was already working behind the scenes on a major hotel
redevelopment project that was in the works. In the spring of 2009, Hanjin International
had presented a plan directly to Perry to demolish and completely rebuild its Wilshire
Grand hotel. Hanjin International is a Korean company and the owner of Korean Air. The
private capital that was to underwrite the redevelopment project would come from
outside of the city – outside of the state and the country, even. Therefore, the uneven
development process which draws capital from one location in order to grow it in another
would not be obviously operating within the city limits to the detriment of another part of
Los Angeles. According to Jan Perry and other proponents of the project, one billion
dollars of foreign money would be infused into the city via the Wilshire Grand.
The Wilshire Grand hotel site occupies an entire city block in downtown Los
Angeles, bounded on three of its four sides by major arteries of downtown traffic:
Wilshire Boulevard, 7th street, and Figueroa Street. It is in the heart of the financial
district, surrounded by mid- to high-rise office towers and just a few blocks north of the
Staples Center, L.A. Live and the Los Angeles Convention Center. It is two blocks east
of the 110 Freeway. 7th and Figueroa is "Metro Center" – a transfer stop for the Blue
Line and the Red Line of LA's growing subway system with numerous bus lines stops
within a two block radius. 7th street itself is experiencing a revitalization, with new
restaurants, galleries, and shops opening up regularly on 7th street as it moves east from
Figueroa.
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Though the Wilshire Grand's location is at the heart of downtown Los Angeles’s
economic, cultural, and transportation transformation, the hotel's structure was a vestige
of the past (Figure 15). When the hotel opened in 1952 as the Hotel Statler, it was the
largest hotel in Los Angeles and featured then-modern technological luxuries – all rooms
were wired for television (Richard 2009).
Figure 15. 1950s image of the Hotel Statler, which became the Wilshire Grand
As new hotels, office towers, and entertainment destinations grew around the Wilshire
Grand, its structure, facade and facilities became outdated (Figure 16).
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Figure 16. The Wilshire Grand hotel, circa 2009
According to Hanjin, the Wilshire Grand was losing money, and it made more sense to
shutter the hotel than to continue operating the 500 rooms and facilities of the aging
structure. Hanjin wanted to demolish the old hotel, whose middling, brown structure
filled every inch of its lot like nothing so much as a commercial dirt hill, and replace it
with two towers that would burst into the skyline with dramatic lighting and signage. If
Hanjin had its way, the towers would be coated in off-site signage banned by the Los
Angeles sign laws.
This chapter describes the permitting process that Hanjin negotiated on route to
the approval of its redevelopment plan by the City of Los Angeles. At the City Council
hearing in which Hanjin secured its approval, Council member Ed Reyes emphasized that
the city had been analyzing the proposal for nearly two years and stressed the depth and
comprehensiveness of the city’s consideration. The following section describes the
project’s lengthy permitting process, as the proposal moved from the Planning
Department to the Planning Commission, to the Planning and Land Use Committee of the
City Council and finally to the full City Council. I then consider the approval process, the
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actions of city decision-makers and the effect on the city’s public spaces as evidence of
the consuming landscape and the consuming machine.
The Wilshire Grand Permitting Process
Hanjin informally brought its proposal to Council member Jan Perry before it
entered the official city channels. Although a development project is officially introduced
to the city with an application to the Planning Department, it is standard for the developer
of a project of this scale to introduce the project to the staff of the City Council member
in whose district the project sits, or if the developer has personal connections with the
Council member, to the Council member herself. Preparing a project application for a
complex development project costs many thousands of dollars, so an applicant wants to
be sure it has the support of the Council member before proceeding.
Hanjin sought to rebuild its Wilshire Grand property into two large towers that
would be visually bold and technologically innovative. Hanjin proposed the project as an
“iconic” structure that would remake the city’s skyline. Yet the visuals that would make
this an iconic structure were banned by Los Angeles’s building and sign regulations.
Indeed, the city’s sign ban had been fully litigated in the prior decade and saddled the city
with massive costs as well as political complications. Most of these, as seen in Chapter 2,
stemmed from the city’s enforcement of a blanket ban on new off- site signs while
negotiating exceptions to the ban for certain favored actors. Hanjin’s Wilshire Grand
project could only be approved if the city approved just such a personally tailored
exception to its sign ban through the creation of a sign district that encompassed just the
one city block that holds the Wilshire Grand.
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It may seem presumptuous to design a project around signage when such a
building could only happen if the City Council designated a new sign district. Hanjin
assembled a crack development team, whose players had knowledge of how development
happened in Los Angeles and vast connections in the Los Angeles political community,
forged through years of experience. Thomas Properties Group was the developer, A.C.
Martin the architect and Turner Construction the builder. James Thomas is a scion of
development in Los Angeles, and nation-wide. He led former firm Maguire Thomas
Properties with partner Robert Maguire to national prominence in the 1980s, when it was
the largest commercial real estate developer in the nation. Through his firms, Thomas has
had a hand in developing much of the current Los Angeles skyline. A.C. Martin and
Turner Construction similarly had a major hand in designing and building downtown Los
Angeles. This was a team that knew how to get things done: together, this team had
developed, designed and built Los Angeles’s current tallest office building in the 1980s.
The Wilshire Grand project presented an opportunity to build an even taller building.
From the outset, signage was envisioned as a major aspect of the project. Hanjin brought
in a second architecture firm to focus on the exterior of the building, with one architect
focusing on landscaping and a second on signage.
Hanjin team’s also included attorney Mitch Menzer, a real estate attorney with
deep connections to City Hall. Menzer served on the city's Planning Commission from
2000-2004 and was its President for 2002-2003. He has been on numerous boards and
committees at the city and state level, advising the government on real estate and
environmental issues. His connections to City Hall and his first-hand experience at the
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Planning Commission would prove key in moving this massive project through each
development hurdle with maximum signage rights approved.
The Planning Department
The project that Hanjin submitted to the Planning Department was a tough ask,
even for its development team. It was comprised of two massive towers, each almost
entirely covered with signage. The composition of the signs would be a new technology -
- not the vinyl supergraphics that cover entire walls that Angelenos are now all too
familiar with. These would be digital signs whose pictures would be composed of a
lattice of electronic lighting elements, capable of projecting moving images across the
expanse of a building face while allowing outward visibility from inside the towers. With
its project application, Hanjin submitted to the Planning Department a proposed
ordinance that would transform the one-block site of the hotel into a sign district. The
proposed sign district would permit 80% of the wall faces between 35-150 feet, 60% of
the wall faces between 150 feet and the crown of each tower, and 100% of the crown of
each tower to be covered with signage. Below 35 feet, the buildings would carry a
combination of electronic signage and a wrapping news tickers.
From mid-2009 to late 2010, the Hanjin team met with staff of the city’s Planning
Department an average of twice per week. In these meetings, the lead planner on the
project Kevin Keller and assistant planner Shana Bonstin discussed the many issues that
arise in a project of this scale with members of the Hanjin team. The permitting process
results in reports on multiple aspects of the projected project, and assessing the
environmental impact of a proposed project is paramount to this work, as mandated by
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CEQA (Cal. Pub. Res. Code §§ 21000, et seq.). The Environmental Impact Report (EIR)
which planners must prepare is “the heart of CEQA” (County of Inyo v. Yorty (1973) 32
Cal. App. 3d 795. The EIR covers a broad scope of environmental effects, from air
quality to traffic, visual impacts to foliage. Other reports are more narrow and focus on
specific effects. In many cases, the data and text is provided by the development team for
use by the state.
The EIR must contain alternatives; if more environmentally-friendly options exist
but are not chosen, the staff must explain why (14 Cal. Code Reg. § 15126.6). Here the
staff included an alternative for the project without off-site signage: Alternative 9 -
Zoning Compliant Signage. Staff's description of this alternative plainly states that it
removes the negative visual impacts of signage. As its rationale for not choosing this
alternative, the recommendations use broad language as to the benefits of the project,
such as bringing highly trained workers to the area, but nothing as to the signage or the
visual impact of the project. Says Keller, “When it’s convenient you look at specific
things; when it's not you'll look broadly – so here we had to look at it all as a whole and I
think we thought that the project as a whole would bring employment and the project as a
whole wouldn't pencil out without the signage.” “Penciling out” is the standard rationale
by developers and city staff for including signage in building development projects: the
costs of property and building in Los Angeles are so high that development can only hope
to turn a profit if the property owners can make back the costs of building with lucrative
off-site signage deals. Because the Hanjin team met with planning staff bi-weekly while
staff was researching and drafting the EIR, the Hanjin team was aware of the staff’s
findings and recommendations before the report was made public. In fact, developers can
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affect the city’s decision-making process in the report’s creation. Keller reports that
Hanjin’s team pushed very hard for the Planning Department to leave the “Zoning
Compliant Signage Alternative” out of the EIR, but ultimately the department chose to
include it.
Planning Staff and the Hanjin team discussed the provisions of Hanjin’s proposed
sign district ordinance throughout this period. Keller reports that the Planning
Department urged changes to Hanjin’s language that would shut down loopholes and
tighten up the provisions. Hanjin submitted a series of drafts, but the Planning
Department ultimately drafted its own version of the ordinance to make changes that
Hanjin’s team would not. At a minimum, the sign district would need to meet the
strictures of the ordinance that allows the creation of sign districts, including its location
and its size. The site is located in downtown, so it meets the location requirement of
being in high-intensity commercial areas zoned regional commercial or regional center.
As to its size, the current ordinance requires that a sign district be at a minimum either 1
entire city block or 3 acres. However, the sign ordinance is being revised, and the
Planning Commission had spent many months considering its goals, holding public
hearings, and working on its language. Under the Planning Commission’s proposed
ordinance, the minimum size requirement for a sign district is 1500 feet of street frontage.
This site contains 1420 feet of street frontage, so it does not meet the proposed code as
drafted by the Planning Commission.
The Planning staff's draft ordinance for the sign district divides the area into
vertical zones, with different amounts and types of signage allowed at each level (Figure
17).
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Figure 17. Planning Department's proposed vertical sign zone levels for the Wilshire
Grand Redevelopment Project
Vertical Sign Zone 1 is the street-level environment. Zone 2 is from street-level to 150
feet, a height chosen by planner Kevin Keller because 150 feet is the traditional height of
the downtown built environment. Zone 3 is from 150 feet up to the crown of the building,
encompassing the towers of the proposed Wilshire Grand project. Zone 4 is the crown of
the tower, where a building identification sign is traditionally placed. Staff allowed the
greatest amount of signage in zone 2, though still much less than the amount sought by
Hanjin. Over Hanjin’s requests, Planning staff recommended that such text, logos or
signs be disallowed in Zone 3, the expanse of the towers, but that architectural lighting be
allowed to cascade across the towers. Hanjin sought animated signage around Zone 4, the
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crown of the building. Staff again limited this request, to a reduced amount of digital
signage, with a static image for 2 hours followed by a slow transition event to a different
static image.
During this time, Hanjin was doing what it could outside of the Planning
Department to ensure a smooth process down the road. Members of its team met with
staff of Council member’s Perry’s office as well as staff of the Mayor. It took its cause to
the public, appearing at state-mandated public meetings such as meetings with the
Downtown Neighborhood Council. Hanjin met with labor representatives for hotel and
construction workers during this time. It is a common practice development practice to
secure the approval of labor representatives for new development projects, so that union
representatives and members can be counted on to appear at approval hearings showing
their support.
The Planning Department made its draft version of the EIR publicly available in
July, 2010 and, following state-mandated timing and publicity requirements (14 Cal.
Code Reg. § 15105), took public comment for thirty days. 26 of the 31 comments
submitted by residents were to voice opposition to the proposed signage. The Final EIR
was made available to the public on October 6, 2010, and a public hearing on the matter
was held on November 3, 2010. All public speakers but two were representatives of
unions that voiced support of the proposed project. A member of the Downtown
Neighborhood Council voiced support, as well, and the President of the Coalition to Ban
Billboard Blight voiced opposition only to the signage aspect of the project.
The Planning Department delivered its completed recommendation report to the
Planning Commission, which included the staff’s analysis, findings, conditions for
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approval, in addition to exhibits such as Final EIR and proposed sign ordinance. In
describing the recommendations, Keller pointed out that the report does not make a
recommendation as to whether the Planning Commission should approve any off-site
signage. However, the report included a proposed draft of a sign ordinance that would
allow off-site signage, rendering its studious non-opinion on off-site signage decidedly
opinionated.
The Planning Commission
The Planning Commission heard the project on December 16, 2010. As with all
Commission actions, the Commissioners had 14 days to review the staff report and
prepare for the meeting. The members sit as unpaid experts, volunteers, chosen because
of their experience from their own careers. The careers that made them appropriate
members of the commission also rendered them quite busy individuals who had to fit
their commission duties into their primary work. Only five of the nine commissioners
attended the hearing. Commissioner Michael Woo, for example, who could be
characterized as the commissioner most critical of signage at that time, was unable to
attend the hearing.
Of the approximately five hours and thirty minutes the commission devoted to the
project at the December 20, 2010 hearing, well over half of the time was devoted to
signage. This alone is note-worthy. The project was to be the first skyscraper built in
downtown Los Angeles in twenty years, and it could possibly be the largest building on
the West coast; it was projected to include well over one million square feet in office
space and over 500 hotel rooms; construction alone on the project would take years with
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significant effects on the traffic and environmental conditions of the area. The project
would be hugely impactful on Los Angeles, in myriad ways, but signage was the issue
that garnered the attention of the Planning Commission.
Given the city’s recent history of political and missteps regarding signage, it was
important for the city not to make another error with respect to its sign laws. Yet for all
the time spent discussing signage and the potential risks new signage approvals entailed,
not one person mentioned the reason that off-site signage was included in the project
proposal. The project could avoid these legal and political dilemmas by simply excluding
off-site signage. Obviously, buildings that do not feature off-site signage compromise the
vast majority of buildings in Los Angeles, and even including off-site signage in the
facades of buildings is a recent phenomenon. Yet the inclusion of off-site signage, whose
only purpose was to bring in revenue for Hanjin from advertisers, was taken for granted;
it was the question of how much signage to allow that was difficult to answer.
Deputy City Attorney Michael Bostrom began the discussion of signage by asking
for more time to fully vet the signage package. He warned that if the signage package did
not fit within the legal constraints put on the city's sign ordinance by the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals, then the city's entire sign ban could be struck down, rendering the city
powerless to stop new billboards from going up across the city. As Bostrom explained,
the Ninth Circuit ruled that, so long as the city still furthered its stated goals for the sign
ban in allowing a sign district, the sign district was constitutional. The city had only two
stated goals for its sign ban: decreasing visual blight and increasing driver safety.
Accordingly, Bostrom explained, the city had to be sure that the sign package in the
Wilshire Grand project furthered these goals. The sign package would have to include a
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take-down program that adequately removed blight. It would have to adequately protect
driver safety. Because the city attorney's office had not had the time to fully analyze the
proposal, he could offer no opinion as to its legality. He stated that the applicant met with
the City Attorney's office and presented the relevant documentation just two weeks prior,
yet the office needed at least two months to give a competent legal opinion. He asked the
Planning Commission to continue the matter so the City Attorney’s office could meet
with Planning staff and the applicant.
California's Permit Streamlining Act sets a strict timetable for government
agencies to act on permit applications, and if an agency misses a deadline, it is deemed to
have approved the permit application (Cal. Gov. Code § 65920, et seq.). The deadline for
the Planning Commission to act based on this state-mandated timetable was December
21, 2010, the day after the hearing. Therefore, if the Planning Commission did not act on
the application at this hearing, the application would move to the city council deemed
approved as recommended by Planning Department. The deadline could only be extended
per state law with the applicant’s approval. Rejecting the application was not mentioned
or even hinted at in the hearing; the Planning Commission clearly wanted to approve the
application. Commissioner Roschen asked the applicant to extend the deadline two
months to allow the city attorney do complete its review. The applicant refused, speaking
through its attorney Mitch Menzer. Menzer cited the city’s dire economic circumstances
and claimed the new jobs and infusion of capital into the local economy that the project
promised could not be put off any longer. Roschen asked the applicant to extend the
deadline one month, then two weeks. Menzer refused. Menzer stated that there were still
months before the City Council would vote on the project, during which time the parties
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could arrive at a mutually acceptable version of the signage package. However, this
would mean the Planning Commission, the body charged by the city with created
citywide land use policy and making recommendations on large-scale development
projects, would not be involved. Roschen seemed dumb-founded by Menzer's refusal,
and he was clearly upset. He moved the meeting along by calling a representative from
the Mayor’s office to speak.
Mark Mullen, senior advisor to Mayor Villaraigosa for economic development,
said, “As you know, we’re not generally seen as friendly to economic development. …
We want to think of L.A. as the international gateway to the U.S. We are losing that. If
we are unable to get beyond the hill to get these projects done, we’ll continue on the slide
that we’re on. This project will bring in one billion in private investment. Foreign
investment.” He urged the commission to, “get the job done,” and pointed out that there
was no requirement for a developer to meet with the City Attorney’s office, as the City
Attorney’s office was suggesting.
The Planning Department staff then presented their findings and
recommendations. Shana Bonstin spoke as to all elements of the project except for
signage. Kevin Keller stood up to present the signage recommendations, but
Commissioner Roschen suggested they take public comment, since the signage
discussion would be long and the room was filled with members of the public hoping to
speak.
Three categories of public speakers spoke. First, there were downtown residents
and property owners. Residents were uniformly in favor of a new landmark building, and
nearby property owners were in favor of the capital the project would bring to the area,
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although a few property owners strongly opposed the current project parameters,
including the signage. Second, numerous representative of labor unions and current
employees of the Wilshire Grand spoke, pushing for the project to be approved
expeditiously due to the need for jobs. A number of these people specifically argued that
the issue of signage should not delay the project. Finally, members of local
environmental and anti-billboard groups spoke against the sign package, nearly all of
whom were careful to say they did not oppose the project, just the proposed signage.
Reasons included the size and amount of signs, the effect on the city skyline of digital
lights climbing two tall towers, and the impact on traffic safety from vast signage so close
to the 110 freeway.
Kevin Keller then presented the Planning staff’s signage recommendations. He
described the work his team did to research the lighting technologies involved and the
standards for specifications, such as brightness, that they were proposing. He then
described the issues that would underlie any off-site signage decision: the size of the
signage allowed, the area of the proposed sign district, and the take-down requirements,
by which Hanjin would be required to having off-site signage taken down in other
sections of the city before it would be allowed to install new signs.
The design team working for Hanjin then spoke, having been introduced to the
audience by Commission President Roschen as “extraordinary” and their work on this
project as “stunning.” Rios Clemente Hale was Hanjin's architect for the project’s
signage, landscape, and exterior spaces. Mark Motonaga, the architect who designed the
signage and lighting, told that the Commission that he imagined diffuse, moving images
up the towers, created with a lattice of digital lights. He said that this vision was inspired
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and enabled by new technologies, but that the team looked to the current lighting and
environment of the project’s site for its proposal.
Finally, the Commission itself discussed the project. Commission President Bill
Roschen noted that the revised sign ordinance, which the Commission had spent years
revising but which the City Council had stalled on approving, is very much geared
toward creating sign districts, not one-off projects with signage. However, the sign
district on the table was a one-off sign district, bounding only the area of the Wilshire
Grand. Planning staff got around this by proposing that the city study the creation of a
larger Figueroa Corridor sign district that would stretch from the Wilshire Grand south on
Figueroa Street to the Staples Center, which is itself coated in off-site signs.
Roschen was highly concerned with the proposed lights that would stretch up the
length of the towers, Level 3 in the Planning Department’s schema of the building, from
150 feet high up to the crown of the buildings. The Planning Department proposal
allowed digital lighting to cover 60% of the exterior of the towers at this level, which
would feature slowly changing images. Hanjin had sought approval for off-site signage to
be displayed here, but the Planning Department’s proposed ordinance disallowed it. Still,
these would be huge swaths of digital visuals. Roschen was unwilling to approve what he
described as a massive change to the skyline of the city without any accurate visual
rendering of the proposal. The information provided by the development team did
provide a visual representation of proposed project, but the rendering did not display the
large-scale signage and lights when they are fully turned on, so it is impossible to discern
their effects on the cityscape (Figure 18). Roschen was the only member of the
commission who seemed concerned about it. But without his vote, the four other
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members who were present lacked a majority. The commission therefore did not approve
the lighting in Level 3 of the project, the proposed digital lights across the length of the
towers.
Figure 18. Renderings of the proposed Wilshire Grand redevelopment project
purportedly highlighting the lighting requests
As to whether to allow off-site signage, Roschen stated, “This is how you make it
happen — by having off-site signs. So I’m willing to say that with the reductions that
staff has made, which is considerable from what the applicant has asked for, that the off-
site opportunity is a reasonable and fair one.” Indeed, this is the only time during the
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entire discussion that whether to have off-site signage at all was discussed. Presumably
the “it” Roschen refers to is large-scale development. This is thus an implicit nod to the
“penciling out” argument. Because off-site signs are the only way a project such as this is
possible, according to this argument, the sign package the city would be allowing is
“reasonable and fair” to the developer. His comment that the staff made considerable
reductions to the sign package is undercut by his comment on the approved amount of
signs just a few moments later that, “the scale of the signs are unique and not unique by a
little bit but unique by a lot.” The Planning Commission approved this unique scale of
off-site signs, sending the project on to the City Council’s Planning and Land Use
Management Committee (PLUM).
The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee
Two appeals were submitted to the Planning Commission's recommendations: one
from the Hanjin team and one from an adjacent property owner. Hanjin’s appeal was
almost entirely concerned with the amount of signage and lighting recommended by the
Planning Commission. These appeals asked different versions of: more signs, bigger
signs, brighter signs. It requested that architectural lighting be permitted in Vertical Sign
Level 3, the body of the towers. Planning staff had approved this lighting, but the
Planning Commission had recommended against it. However, Hanjin asked for much
more than this. Notably, it made requests which it had not made at the Planning
Commission hearing.
Brookfield Properties, who filed the second appeal, owns three commercial
buildings adjacent to the Wilshire Grand. Brookfield argued that the EIR did not analyze
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the impact of the proposed signage on office workers. It critiqued the take-down program
as approved recommended by the Planning Department, because there were no
requirements in place as to the signage to be removed, there could be overall detriment in
the aesthetics of the city. Finally, Brookfield noted that none of the exhibits showed a
visual representation of the proposed signage. The exhibits showed only an arbitrary
"illuminated area" that did not allow a complete analysis of the visual impacts of the
project.
The PLUM committee of the Los Angeles City Council heard the application on
February 22, 2011. Much work had happened behind the scenes since the Planning
Commission approved the project on December 16, 2010. The City Attorney’s office
analyzed the application and met with Council member Jan Perry and her staff, as well as
architects, attorneys, and lobbyists from the applicant's team. The Planning Staff drafted
findings in support of the Planning Commission recommendations, at the request of the
Planning Commission. And in preparation for the PLUM committee to hear the proposal,
the development team presented the application to the three City Council members who
sat on the PLUM committee, Committee Chair Ed Reyes, Jose Huizar, and Paul
Krekorian. Reyes's and Huizar's districts surround Jan Perry's downtown district —Reyes
to the west and north, and Huizar's to the east and north. Krekorian’s district spans a
range of neighborhoods in the south-west San Fernando Valley. Although the Wilshire
Grand site is blocks from the western edge of Huizar's district, he did not attend the
PLUM meeting. Only Reyes and Krekorian were in attendance.
Unlike the Planning Commission hearing, which began with a presentation from
Planning Staff on the application and their recommendations for action, the PLUM
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committee began with comments by Council member Perry on the benefits of the project.
She highlighted the money that this project would bring to city coffers, the community
benefits that Hanjin would be bringing to the city, and the work done by Planning staff
and the Hanjin team to put together the package. She put forward a spate of proposed
amendments that would significantly change the signage as crafted by the Planning
Department and approved by the Planning Commission. She requested that architectural
lighting up to the length of the towers be approved; this matched Hanjin’s appeal. She
also requested that more lighting elements be allowed within each digital display; this
also matched Hanjin’s appeal. She also requested amendments that would make the
signage package more likely to withstand legal challenges, including a take-down
provision and study of a future Figueroa Corridor sign district.
Kevin Keller, the lead planner on the project, pointed out to the committee that
the Planning Commission had disapproved of architectural lighting on the towers, as
Perry was requesting. He also pointed out the Planning Department had studied the
technology in-depth when it made its recommendations as to density of lighting elements
in the digital displays. Council member Reyes defended Perry’s amendments (and
Hanjin’s appeals); he stated that the Planning Department itself had recommended
architectural lighting. He did not address the lighting elements.
Fewer members of the public attended and spoke at this meeting compared to the
Planning Commission hearing. Dennis Hathaway of Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight
spoke, addressing the contents and timing of the developer's requests as stated in its
appeal. I quote at length because it well describes the situation and issues.
I am not opposed to the project, only the appeal. I attended the Planning
Commission hearing which went on for seven hours and much of that meeting
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was about the sign district. At that meeting, planners talked about how they
had been working with the developer for months and reaching a consensus on
the signage, and the developers never got up and disputed that characterization
of things. Now here they are with an appeal to greatly increase the amount of
signage. Just for one example, the Planning Department recommended and the
Planning Commission approved electronic signage, off-street advertising at
the 7th street frontage, the Wilshire St. frontage and the corner of Wilshire
and Figueroa with a total of 6,200 sq. ft. This appeal is asking for a total of
28,500 sq.ft., a 360% increase. They are also asking for an unspecified
number of supergraphic signs which the Planning Department had not
recommended and the Planning Commission had not approved. And finally,
the developer wants this architectural lighting even though the Planning
Commission disapproved of them on the grounds that there was no
demonstration given at that meeting to show what this would actually look
like - what kind of effect this would have on the city skyline. This is
unprecedented. There is no other building in the city anything like this, and
the Planning Commission said, 'We're not necessarily opposed to this, but we
have to see this. We can't just approve this and make it a test case and have
something that could provide distraction on the freeway.
Another community member spoke to this issue. Laura Salahi argued that she was
against the appeal, “on the ground that it subverts the public process. This application
went through the Planning Department and Planning Commission without objections
from the developer, and at this last minute they are appealing the decision and this does
not allow the public to fully respond.”
No one from the city or the development team addressed the issue of the timing of
the appeal or the change for public comment. The PLUM committee did not question or
respond to these comments. The attorney for the developer, former president of the
Planning Commission Mitch Menzer, did respond. He said spoke to,
set the record straight on a number of issues. The statement was made that the
sign program was unprecedented in terms of brightness and scope and I want
to point out that this sign program is the most intensively studied in the city,
starting with an intensive technical analysis to set the correct brightness levels,
to regulate motion and movement and also to ensure that it's consistent and
compatible with the financial district where it's located. … I want to assure
you that this represents best practices and going forward as a kind of template
for this type of electronic signage. These issues were vetted by the technical
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experts, by the Planning Department and finally by the Planning Commission
and everyone was in agreement that these types of regulations were
appropriate.
This comment is difficult to square with the fact that the city’s experts, the Planning
Department and Planning Commission, decided on size and brightness levels that were
lower than what his client sought. He continued, “We have an issue that we've raised as
to the size of some of the signs that we think are necessary to make sure that those signs
are consistent with the architecture and will fit in and be integrated with the architecture
and that's the issue that we've appealed to restore the original dimensions that we
originally proposed.”
Ed Reyes continued the matter for one week to study the proposal. As to the
signage, both Council members Krekorian and Reyes stated that they needed to be sure
that the project was legal. They did not state any concern with the content of the proposed
signage.
The day before the next PLUM hearing on the Wilshire Grand project, lead
planner Kevin Keller, “he heard through the grapevine” that Jan Perry was planning to
ask the PLUM committee to approve the remaining major signage appeal requested by
Hanjin — to increase the size of signs allowed by 360%. He admits he was furious.
At the PLUM hearing the next day, Perry did indeed make the proposed
amendment. She stated, “Signage is an important part of downtown,” contributing to,
"the dynamic feeling of the areas where there's sports and entertainment and restaurant
venues and the city's skylines." She said that this project would create, “an urban
connection” between this area and the Staples Center further down Figueroa. She stated,
The signage being proposed for this project is a new technology. It is fully
integrated into the curtain wall of the project. What is being proposed by the
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developers is not a billboard and it is not standard signage that has been seen
in this city to date. ... I feel that it's appropriate to ask the PLUM committee to
grant the applicant's appeal for signage on level 2, the area between 35 ft and
150 ft in height. It is important to maintain the architectural integrity with the
building as it is envisioned.
This basis for the appeal -- the architectural integrity of the building -- replicated Hanjin’s
own language in its appeal.
Kevin Keller did not have time to prepare a full response to what he believed was
a massive expansion of the signage on the proposed project. At the first PLUM hearing,
he kept his comments on Perry's amendments quite restrained, merely pointing out that
they varied from the recommendations of the Planning Department and Planning
Commission. Here, he was still restrained, but he offered a fuller explanation of the effect
of the amendment and its great difference between the Planning Department's
recommendations and the amendments. He explicitly laid out the signage change that she
was proposing to allow for each proposed sign. For example, he pointed out that, “on
Seventh Street facing south, Planning staff and the Planning Commission recommended a
maximum sign ... of 3000 square feet. The appeal in front of the commission would raise
that maximum from 3000 to 16000 square feet.” He listed the numbers for all the major
sign spaces in the project. He finished his comments by pointing out that the Planning
Department's recommendations had been, “carefully evaluated and were supported by our
Planning Commission.”
Neither Reyes and Krekorian expressed any concern about the scale of the
signage being proposed, about the timing of the developer's raising of the issue, or its
lack of support from the Planning Department or the Planning Commission. Reyes asked
Keller to clarify that the signage rights were tied to building thresholds — so that the
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developer would not have a right to put up signs before a significant portion of the
building was established. Keller answered his assurances but pointed out that they apply
whether or not they were talking about a increase in signage by 300%. But besides
Keller, no one was talking about the increase in signage. Mitch Menzer, counsel for the
developer, did not speak, strongly suggesting that he knew his client’s requests were
going to be approved. Within a few moments, they were. Reyes moved to end the
meeting, claiming that all the stakeholders were, "on the same page." He stated that the
Development Agreement, Environmental Impact Report, and Sign Use District were
being approved and forwarded to the full council, with the amendments raised by Jan
Perry on February 22, 2011. Before he could end the meeting, Menzer interjected, asking
him to clarify that they were approving the amendment Perry proposed today. Reyes
agreed, adding, "I see no questions with that." He ended the meeting, congratulating all
and claiming that it was, "almost anticlimactic."
The City Council
On March 29, 2011, the full City Council heard and considered the project’s
development package, including the signage rights. Ed Reyes asked planner Kevin Keller
to speak to the length of time that the project has been before the city. Keller stated that
the Planning Department had been working on the project since July 2009; they got initial
public input in November 2009, and the project went fully before the public in November
2010. Reyes then summarized this for the audience by claiming, “So for a year and seven
months it's been out in the public.” He then claimed, “[PLUM] reaffirmed the Planning
staff's report essentially and forwarded to this level.” Kevin Keller pointed out that
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PLUM had added architectural lighting on the towers over the Planning Commission's
recommendations and had significantly increased the amount of signage. In response,
Reyes said to the crowd, “The higher levels are not billboards; it is art and I believe it
adds more culture — hopefully a sense of balance.”
Jan Perry gave a similar presentation to the one she gave at the PLUM
Committee, although much briefer. Again, she stated that signage is a historical
component of downtown Los Angeles and that the signage proposed is a new technology
and not a billboard. She then went beyond Reyes's claim of being “essentially” in line
with Planning, stating, “My office has implemented the suggestions from the City
Attorney and Planning at every step.” She spoke to the benefits of the city that the project
promises, including a take-down of one square foot of billboards elsewhere in the city in
exchange for two square feet of digital signage or three square feet of scrolling news
ribbon.
The meeting was opened up for public comment, which again was dominated by
representatives of labor unions, stressing the need for jobs in the city and benefits to labor
yielded by the developer in the agreements already made. A handful of community
members spoke against the signage. One asked the city to consider the traffic
consequences of the signage near the freeway. Another spoke to the visibility of digital
signage across the city skyline at night. Dennis Hathaway, President of the Coalition to
Ban Billboard Blight, denounced the “disinformation” provided by Ed Reyes and Jan
Perry in claiming that their actions were in line with the Planning Department and
Planning Commission’s recommendations.
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Other Council members then spoke to the project. Most praised Jan Perry and Ed
Reyes for their work. Most seconded the need for jobs and their support of the project as
a great step to bring revenue to the city. Only Council member Bill Rosendahl raised real
issues with the project. He took a broad scale view to the project. He argued that the city
needs jobs but that this project isn't about jobs. Flagging the lobbyist's strategy of bussing
in labor union members to give an appearance of public support, he pointed out, “workers
are used all the time to fill the room.” He said, “Look the project is great – nobody is
against it – but the city should get revenue. The same group that has this lucrative
strategy. It should all be on the table. And we should have an eloquent discussion before
we vote.” This is the first and only time in this series of public hearings that the
underlying issue of the signage revenue was raised. Specifically, he hoped to find a way
for the city to receive a percent of the revenue generated from the signage, as is provided
in the city's contract for street furniture with CBS/Decaux. But more broadly, he was
voicing the opinion that the implicit should be explicit -- especially given the city's dire
financial situation.
Reyes told Rosendahl he was over his time limit, and the microphone passed to
another few Council members, who each stated that the project will get the city back to
work. Rosendahl then put forward a motion to separate out the sign component from the
package they were being asked to approve, so they could continue to work on it. No one
seconded the motion. Council member Bernard Parks, piped up, “Call the question,”
asking for the project to be voted on. Because not all had yet spoken, Council President
Eric Garcetti first asked for a vote to end debate, which passed 14-0 and then a vote on
the project as a whole, which passed 13-1, with Rosendahl voting no. Yet there followed
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a conferral between Council members, following which Rosendahl left the room. With
Rosendahl gone, the vote was re-taken. The final vote was 13-0, giving the project and its
signage the appearance of unanimous approval (Ordinance Nos. 181636, 181637).
Planning and the Growth Machine in Los Angeles
The Wilshire Grand permitting process speaks directly to the current debate on
the status of the growth machine in Los Angeles. Fulton (2001) has argued that the
growth machine of Los Angeles has “collapsed under its own weight,” while Purcell
(2000) counters that the growth machine churns onward. In many ways, the Wilshire
Grand project is an archetypal example of the growth machine in action. Public-private
interaction, large-scale project, redevelopment of property, downtown core: these are
hallmark characteristics of academic studies of the growth machine (Jonas and Wilson
1999). A factor that sets this project apart from other studies of the growth machine is the
identification of the consuming landscape as a goal of growth. With this focus, we see
that the Wilshire Grand does not just reveal the growth of a large-scale redevelopment in
order to rehabilitate urban finances — we see a city growing the consuming landscape as
a financial panacea.
The concepts of the information society and post-industrial society align with this
model. Popular in the 1970s as a description for the changing culture and economy
wrought by the spread of information technologies, these posit that information is
replacing labor and industry as the underpinning of the modern economy (Bell 1976).
Schiller (2006) argues that the hopes of the failing global economy of the 1970s were
pinned on the commodification of information. The idea of the information society and
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the commodification of information are relevant to this project, but they are deepened
when we consider space. By considering space, we see the linkages between the model of
the growth machine, in which urban fortunes are grown with land, and the model of the
information society, in which information is the commodity that grows capital. Together,
information and the land grow the consuming landscape.
The idea of information commodities revitalizing a stagnating economy is clearly
evident in land development projects in Los Angeles. After the sign ban, the legal signs
that went up were part of redevelopment projects that were initiated by developers and
approved by the city. Developers argued that the off-site signage they sought would make
the redevelopment projects “pencil out”: they could not make a profit on a potential
redevelopment projects without the addition of off-site signage because the land in Los
Angeles was so expensive. The city wanted the redevelopment projects to happen,
believing that new buildings would bring new business, tourism and jobs to depressed
areas of the city. This is the consuming machine in action. And it is the consuming
machine drawing on uneven development to build urban fortunes. In approving the
Wilshire Grand development, City Council members consistently noted the one billion
dollars of foreign investment in Los Angeles that the project promised. However, the
project would involve the redirection of capital within Los Angeles as well. The City
granted numerous benefits to Hanjin when it approved the project. It granted Hanjin a
waiver of 50% of new net taxes once the project is constructed. The estimated value of
this, based on size projections of the two towers, is $79 million over 25 years. This type
of benefit is common for developments of this size. Critics called this an effective waiver
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of new annual transient occupancy taxes, or bed taxes, that could have been gained by the
city.
When the city’s acceptance of the “penciling out” argument by approving
development projects with large signage packages, nearby land values increase because
investors factor perceived sign rights into the value of land; the value of land that don’t
have the prospect of new signs decrease. A cycle is created: developers argue that
projects do not “pencil out” without signage because the land was so expensive, the city
approves another sign package, nearby land values rise, investors pay higher prices for
land, and then they ask the city for sign rights to develop the property. This issue shows
the need for the creation of broad-scale land-use policy and small-scale oversight in land
development of individual projects — in short, for city planning. The Wilshire Grand
redevelopment is no different from other recent development projects that involved the
granting by the city of sign rights in that the Hanjin team argued to city decision-makers
that the large sign package was financially needed to assure its profits, given the massive
investment it would be making. Therefore the project presents a perfect case to determine
the effectiveness of the city’s planning mechanisms with respect to signage.
Hise (1999) argues that the city’s historic characterization as urban growth of
unregulated sprawl is unjustified. Hise studied the development of large-scale residential
sub-divisions and found that they were highly planned endeavors, carefully designed to
according to the latest planning techniques to take advantage of existing economic and
environmental settings while creating self-sufficient communities. This argument stands
in opposition to Fogelson’s (1967/1993) characterization of planning in Los Angeles:
although broad-scale urban planning of American cities was born in Los Angeles, and
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although its municipal planning institutions were active and well-intentioned, planning
efforts were muted and results were weak due to the strong influence of private business
interests. Fogelson (1967/1993, 257) writes,
Between 1920 and 1930, then, zoning in Los Angeles was fully adopted but
extensively modified. Originally conceived as a means of sound and strong
land-use regulation, it was compromised in its formulation and emasculated in
its implementation. Initially considered as an instrument of planning subject to
administrative control, it was changed into a method of promoting property
interests through political influence.
The Wilshire Grand redevelopment certainly supports the characterization of city
planning as active and well-intentioned. Hanjin International was required to jump
through multiple hoops to secure approval of the project. Indeed, given the size of the
project, the Wilshire Grand approval process is an extreme example of the regulations
placed on new development in the city. But it is not just the developer who must work in
the approval process. The planning and approval process is a massive exercise in data
collection and information creation by both the developer and the city, often in tandem.
Because of this, the entire permitting process can be read as an aspect of the growth
machine.
In part, the reports prepared by the Planning Department are mandated by state
law to make the decision-making process clear and open to the public. Indeed, one might
look at the voluminous file on the Wilshire Grand permit application and come to the
conclusion that the process is fully open and available to the public. If we analyze,
instead, the entire permitting process that resulted in these documents, as information
theory would have us do, we see the tight coordination of public and private elites. The
coordination of public and private actors, of course, is the hallmark of the growth
machine. In this sense, the permitting process should be considered as evidence of the
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growth machine. This permitting process was especially complicated because of the
effect the project would have on the city’s landscape. The goal was a major addition to
the city’s consuming landscape, and the coordination of public and private elites that
made the approval happen was an example of the consuming machine.
Hanjin, like all applicants with large development projects, was required to pay
for the city to consider its application. These projects require a massive amount of city
resources to undertake the environmental and other studies. A project of the size and
scope of the Wilshire Grand is a boon to the Planning Department because it allows the
city to complete work it could not otherwise afford. Kevin Keller says that the Planning
Department used this project as an opportunity to fully study the proposed lighting
technology and arrive at standards for its use, because this technology is “the wave of the
future.” The consuming machine, therefore, underwrites the city’s edification of signage
and lighting technologies, in addition to the permitting process.
Reading an EIR, like any collection of data, is as much about acknowledging the
data not present as it as about the data that is present in the report. Much of the
information that populates a completed EIR is provided to the city by the developer: the
developer presents the city with details of its proposed project, and the city analyzes it.
Thus, the city is beholden to the developer to provide complete and accurate information.
The Wilshire Grand case contains a stark example of the city acting based on incomplete
information. The developer failed to provide the city with renderings, or architectural
drawings, of the towers fully lit with the proposed signage and lighting. The President of
the Planning Commission, Bill Roschen, refused to approve the architectural lighting
because of this, but this lighting was quickly put back in by the PLUM Committee. Two
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years into the permitting process, three days before the City Council was to vote on the
project’s lighting and signage, Hanjin provided renderings of the lighting (Figure 19).
Yet the drawing shows the towers at an extreme angle and in muted tones making it is
difficult to even recognize the proposed lighting and impossible to assess its impact on
the landscape. Thus, the City Council members approved
Figure 19. Rendering of the proposed Wilshire Grand redevelopment project with
decorative lighting on towers
these broadly lit towers without having any idea what they would actually look like.
Viewing information as an action is also useful when we consider the role of the
public in the approval process. Members of the public are not official participants in the
approval process; it is not their duty to consider the project as it is members of the
Planning Department or City Council. However, the public would be quite impacted by a
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project of this size. Some members of the public are more aware of this than others, and
some care more than others. The approval process is designed in part to share details of
the proposed project with the public and allow their input. The Planning Department is
required to present the EIR to the public, and the Planning Commission, PLUM
Committee, and City Council are required to hold open hearings. Yet for those members
of the public that care to involve themselves in the approval process, these official
channels offer extremely limited input.
The Wilshire Grand process shows how just how little consideration by city actors
actually occur at these public fora, and rather how much of the negotiation and approvals
occur behind closed doors and before these public hearings take place. The PLUM
Committee’s massive size increases to the off-site signage that would coat the Wilshire
Grand highlight this. The increases were done at the behest of Council member Perry,
and they matched Hanjin’s own appeal, yet they were not considered by the Planning
Commission. More upsetting to members of the public than the fact that these additions
were inserted into the approval was the way that it happened. The PLUM Committee
members did not discuss or analyze the additions requested by Perry in front of the
public. It was imminently clear that they had already decided to approve the additions
before the hearing. The public did not have any idea that the massive size additions
would be considered at the hearing; the public did not know that the committee members
were being pushed behind the scenes by Hanjin’s team or by Perry to expand the signage.
The public therefore had absolutely no chance to offer its opinion on the additions while
the PLUM Committee was actually considering them.
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It appears that the reinsertion of the large-scale signage after the Planning
Commission had approved the project was a calculated step by the development team.
The Planning Department had recommended a much smaller amount of signage, and it
would have been an extremely tough sell to the Planning Commission to increase the
amount of signage. By not raising the argument for more signage before the Planning
Commission or the public at the Planning Hearing, Hanjin’s team avoided a public
argument on this change. Instead, Hanjin’s team could press for the large-scale signage
behind the scenes to the much more receptive ear of Jan Perry. This strategy was hugely
successful, and it can be chalked up to the experience of Hanjin’s team, especially its
lawyer, Mitch Menzer.
As a former President of the Planning Commission, Menzer knew full well that
the Planning Commission only recommends what the Council should pass. He knew that
legally the PLUM Committee could reinsert the large-scale signage. This strategy is
almost unheard of; Kevin Keller, the lead planner on the project, says of this tack.
“Usually people get it all out at the Planning Commission. It’s rare but it’s permitted.” He
added, “Normally something like that wouldn’t work in the applicant’s favor.” Thus, it
would normally hurt an application to attempt to insert a massive change that had not
been considered or approved by the Planning Commission. But in this case, the
development team had the knowledge of the process and the personal connections to City
Hall that it didn’t hurt their application; on the contrary, it helped the application. The
sign package that the City Council approved highlights the power of the City Council
and, at the same time, the lack of power of the city’s planning mechanisms. Despite the
years of time and effort put into the project by the Planning Department, a large part of
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which was focused solely on the amount and technical specifications of the lighting
elements that should be approved so as to set a model for future projects, the City
Council rewrote these carefully planned limitations to match the developer’s requests. In
this case, the growth machine churned forward, growing the city’s consuming landscape
despite the best intentions of the Planning Department.
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CHAPTER FIVE: NEOGEOGRAPHY, VOLUNTEERED GEOGRAPHIC
INFORMATION AND THE BILLBOARD MAP
In recent years, the geographic literature has abounded with descriptions of the technical
and social changes following the advent of the Internet and their effect on geographic
data. The amount of spatial data has exploded with the improvement and spread of data
capture technologies, such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and mobile devices
equipped with spatial locators. At the same time, the Internet and accessible mapping
applications, have created a venue for persons untrained in Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) or cartography to create maps and combine spatial data in novel ways.
The public has responded enthusiastically and actively. A world of neogeography has
been born from this combination of new technologies and the social changes made
possible by Web 2.0. Geographers are now testing the possibilities for harnessing these
two movements to create academically and cartographically sound geographic
information.
Many types of neogeography exist. A layperson could create “volunteered
geographic information” (Goodchild 2007a) as part of a scientific research project on a
narrow topic or could use one of the many thousands of websites enabled by Web 2.0 that
is a platform for user-uploaded content but is not part of any broader research or policy
initiative. Volunteers could be given specific instructions and training on data collection
and entry, or they could apply geographic tags to photographs that range from accurate to
absurd, following no outside directions. Researchers are excited at the prospect of tapping
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into this cache of data. Government, industry, and academia already rely on VGI for
projects ranging from emergency response to marketing, environmental monitoring, and
cultural shifts.
In this burgeoning field, a few issues have emerged as preeminent. First, the
extent to which VGI can be trusted for use in projects – hence, its quality – is of primary
concern. This topic encompasses both the usual issues of spatial data quality as well as
the more ontological questions of whether and how the quality of VGI should be judged
differently than professionally created geographic information. The second major topic of
concern is the type of data that is best suited to collection by volunteers. Goodchild
(2007a), who coined the term “VGI,” argues that members of the public are particularly
useful for collecting data that changes rapidly and is not remotely detectable, such as
through satellite imagery or aerial photography. More broadly, geographers question
what it means for the discipline when the realm of geography is expanded and entered so
easily.
This chapter describes the Billboard Map, a website for collecting and storing the
location of billboards across Los Angeles that was designed to elicit VGI on a socially
relevant topic and test its quality. The inventory of billboards maintained by the city,
created pursuant to OSSPIP, relies on three inspectors to cover the entire city, and it is
scheduled to be updated only every three years. The Billboard Map offers the possibility
of millions of citizen sensors who encounter billboards in their day-to-day lives and could
together create a more complete and up-to-date inventory than the city can afford to
gather and maintain.
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The Billboard Map site is based on the Google Maps Application Programming
Interface (API) and employs Google Street View (GSV) to let users audit streetscapes
and tag billboards. Users can also enter attributes corresponding to each billboard, and
edit and delete existing billboard entries. The site thus operates as a true Wiki: users are
responsible for creating the data and maintaining the quality of the entries. The Billboard
Map provides structure for users in that it is collects data on a specific topic and offers
guidance for entering data. However, the project is open to the public and users are not
required to undergo any type of training or even to register with the site before entering
data. As such, the Billboard Map occupies a middle-ground in the wide array of
neogeography; it was purposely so positioned as a testbed for VGI.
In the next section, I review the relevant geographic literature. I describe and
ontologically position the terms neogeography and VGI with respect to each other. The
idea of ‘What is a geographer?’ is inherently linked to the question of reliability of
amateur-created data versus professionally data, and its underlying issue of how to define
reliability. It describes the manifold forms of VGI that volunteers create, how researchers
have studied VGI to date, and the traditional analytical considerations of spatial data
quality. The chapter then homes in on the Billboard Map, describing the design of the
site, how volunteers used the site, and the methods and results of a field audit of the first
325 entries on the site. The analysis tests the accuracy of the locational data of the web
entries and their addresses. Finally, the chapter circles back to the concepts of
neogeography and VGI. These concepts are considered with respect to using such data in
professional and institutional settings in light of the lessons learned as to the spatial data
quality of the Billboard Map data.
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Literature Review
Neogeography and VGI
Although the term neogeography has occasionally been used in a variety of fields
since at least 1922 (Haden 2008), its use has become widespread in geography and non-
academic technological circles since Turner (2006) popularized the word in “Introduction
to Neogeography,” O’Reilly Media’s instructional book on accessing locational
information online and creating cartographic mashups and other digital maps. Each using
their own specific language, technologists (Eisnor, Olson, and Wilson 2006; Szott 2006a,
2006b; Turner 2006) define neogeography as non-traditional map-mapmaking, by non-
professionals, using Web 2.0 technologies, and they note the idiosyncratic, untraditional
nature of neogeographic practices. Hence, technologists focus on the “neo” in
neogeography. Geographers have not agreed upon a strict definition of neogeography, but
as Rana and Joliveau (2009, 75) note, it is associated with a group of keywords,
including: “Web 2.0, mashups, public participation, social networking, volunteered
geographical information, crowd-sourced data, user-generated content, open source maps
API and affordable navigational devices, principally GPS data loggers.” It is the product
of, “people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining
elements of an existing toolset. ... [it is] sharing location information with friends and
visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of
place” (Turner 2006, 3). One of the earliest and well-known sites allowing this type of
personal VGI was Platial.com, which, by its demise in 2010, had supported the creation
of over five million maps (Eisnor 2010).
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Web 2.0 is itself a broad term, that speaks to the technological changes of the last
decade as the Internet has shifted from a top-down source of information for users to the
interactive, ground-sourced social system that it is today. Although Tim O’Reilly has
been credited with coining the phrase (Haklay, Singleton, and Parker 2008; Harrison
2008), the term appears to have been coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 (DiNucci 1999;
Ruiz 2008) but was not taken up and expanded by other technologists for five years,
when Robb (2005) noted that the concept of Web 2.0 was gaining traction. He wrote
“What is Web 2.0? It is a system that breaks with the old model of centralized websites
and moves the power of the Web/Internet to the desktop … Basically, Web 2.0 puts the
power of the Internet in the hands of the desktop PC user where it belongs.” As all of the
neogeography keywords listed by Rana and Joliveau (2009) relate to Web 2.0 trends, it
seems that neogeography could simply be defined as Web 2.0 as it relates to geographic
data and tools.
Academics have recently argued that neogeography blurs the distinction between
professional and amateur geographers – some happily, some not. Goodchild (2009b)
finds fault with the term neogeography for this very reason. He argues that amateur
“geographers” lack the training and expertise of trained geographers, and that it is the
skill set yielded by such training that defines a geographer. Hence, in his view, a
neogeographer is not a geographer, and it does a disservice to the field to allow a slippage
between the two. What Goodchild (2009b) ignores is technologists’ focus on the “neo” in
neogeography. Neogeographers – and the technologists who write about them – make no
claims to the academic distinction of trained geographers, if not outright eschewing them.
There is certainly no irony, then, in the fact that uses of the term “neogeography” online
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have declined (Connin 2010), as uses of the term in academic journals have increased
(Haklay, Singleton, and Parker 2008; Elwood 2009; Foth et al. 2009; Graham 2009;
Hudson-Smith et al. 2009; Rana and Joliveau 2009). Indeed, it is important to note that it
is academics, not technologists, who write of the slippage between professional and non-
professional geographers. Technologists focus on non-professionals’ access to previously
unavailable geographic data and ability to use such data in personal and idiosyncratic
ways. As academics have employed the term and worried of the slippage that could result
from map-making by amateurs, technologists have distanced themselves from the term.
Thus, it seems that technologists and Goodchild agree – neogeography does not turn
amateurs into professional geographers.
How does VGI relate to neogeography? VGI is the data of neogeography. This
simple distinction has already been suggested by others (Hudson-Smith et al. 2009, 120)
“There has been an explosion in the amount of GI available and just as Web 2.0 relies on
user generated content, Neogeography relies on user generated content that is locationally
tagged (i.e. VGI).” In coining the term “volunteered geographic information,” Goodchild
(2007) made explicit his goal that data produced by neogeography not be confused with
data yielded by the analysis of professional geographers. If VGI is created by volunteers,
it is ontologically separate from the work of professionals. Priedhorsky, Masli, and
Terveen (2010) prefer the term “geographic volunteer work” to VGI, arguing that it better
accounts for the active and purposeful nature of geowiki contributors. This author
believes that VGI is a broader term than “geographic volunteer work,” and it accounts for
the many types of geographic information created by non-professionals, some of which
are directed and purposeful and others of which are personal, creative, and fun – not aptly
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described by the word “work”. Though other terms have been used to describe Web 2.0’s
user-generated content, such as collective intelligence, community mapping, and
crowdsourcing (Howe 2006), VGI is the first term that focuses on the spatial data of Web
2.0. Given its specificity and aptness, as well as pedigree, having been promulgated by a
long-time leader in the field of GIS (Goodchild 2007) the term has taken root.
Volunteered Geographic Information
VGI is locationally referenced data created by volunteers. The last five years has
seen the creation of a vast digital collection of VGI, enabled by Web 2.0’s social and
technical changes — the availability of digital geographic data and web mapping APIs
combined with the social phenomenon of sharing and interacting with others online. In
this section I describe the various types of VGI and the work that researchers are
currently doing that relies on each type.
A large portion of VGI is spatial data put online indirectly as part of an upload,
such as a photo with latitude/longitude data embedded therein. This VGI is often created
unintentionally as geoenabled smartphones and social media make sharing digital photos
that contain locational data incredibly easy. Websites such as Flickr, Facebook and
Twitter are ubiquitous and together contain millions of photos with embedded VGI.
Computer scientists are working on methods to mine the mass of embedded VGI for
usable data, be they specifically sought results or unexpected patterns. The issue here is
relevance: a hallmark of neogeography is the massive amounts of data created by the
many millions of Internet users (Elwood 2009), so finding data relevant to one’s purposes
is a huge obstacle. Pultar, Raubal, and Goodchild (2008) describe a program that explores
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web pages based on a combination of a word search and an expression that appears to be
a statement of latitude/longitude. Li, Zheng, Xie, Chen, Liu, and Ma (2008) describe a
data mining technique based on location histories of individuals. Jankowski, Andrienko,
Andrienko, and Kisilevich (2010) have proposed and tested a method of identifying
landmarks and other popular community destinations by studying geotagged pictures
posted on the website flickr.com.
The most basic type of intentionally created VGI is online mapping. Perhaps the
most well-known example of Mapping VGI is OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a project
that aims to create an open and complete street map of the world. The main way that
information is added to OSM is by attendees of mapping parties who are taught how to
use high-powered GPS receivers and then sent out on bikes to geolocate spots along
specific routes. Volunteers also add data to OSM by digitizing information from aerial
photography. Google Maps is a major platform for neogeography, and since it made its
API publicly available, its use in VGI maps is nearly ubiquitous. “[I]ts widespread
adoption by Internet users has made Google Maps a de facto standard for presenting
geographic information” (Avagliano et al. 2008, 260). Online mapping also includes
“tagging” an internet post, such as a comment or photo, with a location. For example,
Facebook and other sites allow users to add a location to uploads of all sorts, including
comments and photos. VGI also includes the content of these posts themselves, as
opposed to digital tags or embedded data. For example, a comment on Facebook that
reads, “There was just a car accident at the intersection of Highland and Hollywood,” can
be considered VGI for it locates an event.
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As sharing information online has become more easy and popular, it has become
common for people to post information about themselves and others during natural
disasters or other emergency situations (Boulos et al. 2011). With this social phenomenon
has concurrently arisen the phenomenon of relying on VGI to manage, study or report on
disasters and disaster relief. The quality of VGI must be trustworthy before it should be
relied on in reacting to real-world issues, be they emergencies, such as natural disasters,
or on-going situations, such as community planning. Therefore, one especially fruitful
avenue of research is the study of VGI posted on social networks during natural disasters.
De Longueville, Smith, and Luraschi (2009) analyze Twitter postings, commonly called
“tweets”, made during a forest fire in Italy, while Mendoza, Pobletey, and Castillo (2010)
conduct a similar analysis of tweets that followed an earthquake in China. Guy, Earle,
Ostrum, Gruchalla, and Horvath (2010) propose a system for mining real-time tweets
following earthquakes.
VGI is also created under the direction of research projects. Research projects
based on volunteered mapping existed prior to Web 2.0, the most well-known of which is
likely the Christmas Bird Count (see National Audubon Society 2013). Web 2.0 has
enabled and inspired researchers to design numerous environmentally- and biologically-
focused projects relying on Mapping VGI (Connors, Lei, and Kelly 2012; Gouveia et al.
2004). Love, Trumbauer, and Cole (2009) designed and implemented a water quality
monitoring program that seems based on these ideals. They worked with environmental
groups and concerned citizens to create a GIS to record and analyze water quality
information for the West and Rhode rivers in Maryland. The information would be
collected by citizens from thirty designated observation sites and delivered to the
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environmental groups, who would feed it into a GIS and produce maps using the
information that were comprehensible by lay persons. Kitamoto et al. (2009) created a
web interface that enabled voluntary bee catchers to report data on bee populations,
receive data, and communicate with researchers in an on-going study of an alien bee
species in Japan.
A number of academics and planners are testing the use of VGI as a means to
discover how community members value the places they inhabit. This work is directly
line with Public Participation GIS work, which encompasses a broad field but is based on
the use of GIS for community empowerment (Elwood 2008). Seeger (2008) has tested a
number of projects that use the Internet to gather community input on local areas and
potential designs. Seeger (2008) and Rinner, Keßler, and Andrulis (2008) have used
mashups of the Google Maps API to create web-based, geographic spaces for
contributing to a discussion on planning. Seeger (2008) includes validation steps to
ensure that participants have local knowledge. Hall, Chipeniuk, Feick, Leahy, and
Deparday (2010), Rinner and Bird (2009), and Sidlar and Rinner (2009) all test programs
that allows users to input community geographic assets as map locations, comment on the
assets, and engage in discussion through replies. Hall, Chipeniuk, Feick, Leahy, and
Deparday (2010) and Sidlar and Rinner (2009) used workshops to teach community
members how to use the tool, while Rinner and Bird (2009) relied on an email to users
that described the tool. Priedhorsky, Jordan, and Terveen (2007) provide an on-line space
for community members to rate different city blocks for their bikeability. Seeger (2008)
suggests a similar use of VGI: gathering community assessments of safe routes from
home to school for children.
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Work in the PPGIS vein goes one step beyond asking persons to evaluate the
places around them, by providing platforms to reimagine urban spaces. In an early
example of this, Seeger (2008) created an online system in the guise of a game that lets
participants suggest redesigns of public parks and comment on their designs. Shen and
Kawakami (2010) and Wu, He, and Gong (2010) propose platforms for public
participation that combine 3-D virtual environments with online interactive interfaces.
Wu, He, and Gong (2010) posit that, because the technology exists and the public is now
comfortable with navigating virtual maps, such methods will become the main avenue for
public participation in planning processes. Rinner and Bird (2009) find, however, that
participants in online discussion forums may not be as computer savvy as academics, or
even they themselves, believe, when it comes to navigating and commenting on
geographic visualizations. This finding, based on study participants’ interaction with a 2-
D environment online, may be magnified in a 3-D environment.
Spatial Data Quality and Volunteered Geographic Information
The concept of spatial data quality originally included only positional accuracy —
how closely the placement of a data point on a map matches its actual location on the
face of the Earth. During the last forty years the concept has expanded as researchers
have recognized that different types of errors and inconsistencies can affect the use of
spatial data (Devillers et al. 2010). Although current spatial data quality standards vary,
the following concepts are included in every major spatial data quality rubric: positional
accuracy, temporal quality, attribute accuracy, logical consistency, fitness for use, and
completeness (Van Oort 2005). Positional accuracy is the quality of latitude/longitude
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coordinate (or some equivalent) values. Temporal quality, also called currency, addresses
how accurate the data is over time and includes a combined assessment of the rate of
change of the source material and the rate at which the dataset is updated. Attribute
accuracy is the validity of all information associated with a data point besides its position,
such as the name of a river or the address of a building. Logical consistency refers to the
rules which define the interconnections between data, also called topology, that are used
to maintain internal consistency. Fitness for use is a consideration of how well a dataset
matches the needs of a particular project. For example, a dataset based on high resolution
aerial photography may be well-matched to one project but may be unnecessarily
expensive for a project that does not require such fine resolution. Completeness assesses
the exhaustiveness of a dataset, and it considers both missing and excess data.
Applying these indicators to new technologies and methods of data collection,
such as VGI, is a major concern in the study of spatial data quality (Delavar and Devillers
2010). Hall et al. (2010) note that reliability is an issue for VGI because VGI often
involves the mashing up of varying data types from varying sources. This point is
exemplified by Zandbergen (2009), who shows that even when using one piece of
technology to capture locational data, an iPhone, positional accuracy is difficult to gauge
because three different technologies, each with different and variable precision rates, are
used by the iPhone to gather locational data. Adding to this concern is the fact that the
quality of professionally created datasets is well tested and documented, while the quality
of volunteered data is generally not (Goodchild 2009a). An added layer of complexity is
created when VGI and institutional data are combined in one dataset. This issue is clearly
seen in the realm of disaster relief.
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The most direct attempts to test the positional and attribute quality of VGI have
been made of data contained in OSM, a web project whose aim is to create an accurate,
open and usable street map of the Earth (Haklay, Singleton, and Parker 2008; Haklay and
Weber 2008; Girres and Touya 2010; Haklay 2010). European geographers have studied
the spatial data quality of OSM in a number of European countries. Haklay (2010)
compares OSM data of London and England with the UK’s Ordnance Survey datasets.
He finds that the OSM data is remarkably complete – covering 29% of England in the
four years of OSM’s existence. However, gaps of coverage are found in rural areas, areas
on the urban fringe, and less wealthy areas, which raises issues of social justice. Haklay
finds that the positional accuracy of the OSM data (he only compares point and line data)
is good, with an average of 80% overlap across England between Ordnance Survey and
OSM motorways, when buffered. The study revealed that positional quality can vary with
individual digitizers. Of course, this is true in professional projects as well (Bolstad,
Gessler, and Lillesand 1990).
Girres and Touya (2010) continue this work with a study of OSM data in France,
studying the completeness and accuracy of the spatial data, as well as semantic
consistency and attribute quality. Like Haklay (2010), Girres and Touya find the
positional accuracy of the data (points, lines and polygons) to be good. Similarly, Girres
and Touya find that the completeness of the data falls off outside of urban areas. They
discover that coverage of attribute data is much less complete than positional data, though
when contributors do add attribute data, the data is correct. The study identifies major
problems with semantic consistency, which they argue is due to OSM’s lack of strict
specifications for data tags and values. Girres and Touya join Haklay in arguing that
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OSM should issue more stringent specifications in place of its current informal
specifications, which are often more suggestions for data collection and tagging than
rules. However, they caution that OSM should still allow for contributor freedom, in
order to maintain its volunteer base.
Zielstra and Zipf (2010) assert that OSM data in Germany has major problems
with respect to completeness in non-urban areas. They argue that the data is so
incomplete in rural areas as to be unusable for nearly any project. On the other hand, they
find that the data in larger cities is so rich as to be a better choice for many applications.
Over, Schilling, Neubauer, and Zipf (2010) confirm this finding for OSM in urban
Germany. They argue that, because of the open nature of OSM editing, errors are quickly
corrected and conflicts confronted. They find that real-world changes in roads are shown
in OSM data before other mapping sources reflect the change. Mooney and Corcoran
(2010) studied the exactitude of shapes in the Irish OSM dataset by comparing lakes in
OSM data with those in the government’s dataset. They found that polygons in OSM
were much less finely demarcated (fewer nodes) than institutionally mapped areas.
Echoing Goodchild’s assertion that the quality of VGI is rarely documented, Mooney,
Corcoran, and Winstanley (2010) found a negligible number of data-source tagging of
lines and polygons in OSM across Europe. Ten of eleven countries studied revealed less
than 5% tagging of data-sources. The exception was Austria, with nearly 50% data-
source tagging.
Others note that traditional measures may not properly judge the quality of VGI,
for a variety of reasons. New technologies, such as online map mashups, the fuzzy nature
of data being mapped by non-professionals, and the differing intentions of volunteers
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with respect to data creation and use mean that traditional standards will not necessarily
capture the quality of VGI (Hall et al. 2010; Van Exel, Dias, and Fruijtier 2010). Van
Exel et al. (2010) note that even for a seemingly traditional type of dataset, such as OSM,
traditional spatial data quality indicators may need to be retooled. For example, semantic
accuracy may be hard to judge: predefined schema for attribute data is uncommon in
crowdsourced datasets to allow volunteers’ “creative input” but has a negative effect on
spatial data quality. Researchers highlight the “fitness for use” indicator as crucial in
judging VGI: creative and personal data must be considered in their context of use before
applying rigorous accuracy standards.
A number of researchers turn the test of spatial data quality back on the creator of
VGI. Bishr and Mantelas (2008) propose a model for judging data quality based on the
trustworthiness of the person who contributes the data. They assess “trustworthiness” by
analyzing user ratings of the contributor made by other web users as well as the distance
between the contributor and the geographic information he is contributing. Flanagin and
Metzger (2008) also approaches the issue by analyzing the credibility of the creator of
data, rather than the data itself. They find that peer-to-peer credibility is different than
high-low credibility and that a combination of local knowledge, personal experience with
a site, and the professionalism and layout of one’s online work are likely to enhance
one’s credibility in neogeographic circles. Mendoza, Pobletey, and Castillo (2010) judge
the accuracy of VGI by studying the manner in which the information is propagated
through online social networks — in essence judging quality by popularity, for the more
a piece of information is forwarded to others, the higher its quality is deemed to be. Van
Exel, Dias, and Fruijtier (2010) judge the quality of the user in addition to judging the
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quality of the data. User quality has three components: local knowledge, experience
(amount of time on project, number of contributions to project, etc.), recognition
(identified in social networks but not in crowdsourced geospatial data, and authors
suggest ways to create avenues for this, peer reviewing indicators; an implicit one could
be gleaned from number of times a contributors contributions are subsequently edited).
Google Street View
The GSV interface is a feature of Google Maps that features street-level
photographic imagery of urban streetscapes within the context of a map (Anguelov et al.
2007). The GSV interface provides full pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities from a user’s
perspective. A user can rotate the current view to turn the view a complete 360 degrees,
zoom the camera in and out at a particular location in front of the camera, and increase or
decrease the pitch of the view to move the field of view up or down and towards or away
from the horizon. In addition, a user can proceed forward and backward along a street by
moving a step at a time (where a step is the next available camera position along the
street ahead of or behind the current position), or by clicking on a location in the distance
which moves the current location of the camera ahead to that location. Google updates its
Google Street View dataset at specific locations approximately every eighteen months
(Badland et al. 2010). Since its inception, computer scientists and others have tested the
feature for usability as well as relied on the feature as a basis of research.
Choudary Baccot, Grigoras, and Charvillat (2010) tested two lab-created apps
(one including fake 3D models of the area and one showing brief video segments of
POIs) against Google Maps (including GSV) and Nokia Maps in locating points of
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interest around a landmark. Public users found Google Maps to be the most intuitive and
easy to use. Questionnaires revealed that users liked the GSV feature very much.
However, Kopf, Chen, Szeliski, and Cohen (2010) had opposite results. Their team
created a method for moving down a street virtually using a “bubble” a la Street View,
combined with a multi-perspective strip panorama. In a user test, users found much
preferred the multi-perspective visualization and noted frustration in GSV’s jump
movement down a street. Micusik and Kosecka (2009) test an improved method for
navigating in GSV. Piovesana, Chen, Yu, Wu, Chan, and Hung (2010) devised a tabletop
widget similarly designed to improve interaction with GSV.
A number of projects have relied on GSV as a data source for testing
computational imaging. Xiao, Fang, Zhao, Lhuillier, and Quan (2009) devised a method
for automatically generating 3D city models using 2D streetscape images and test their
method using GSV photographs. Torii, Havlena, and Pajdla (2009) used GSV Pittsburgh
data set which is 10x richer than that available on Google Maps. Directly on point for this
project are studies that use GSV as source for streetscape audits. Badland, Opit, Witten,
Kearns, and Mavoa (2010) compared the results of a physical field test and a virtual field
test using GSV of neighborhood streetscapes for physical activity indicators, by four
elements: function, safety, aesthetics, destinations. The team conducted audits of 12 street
segments (each one block, both sides of street) of four neighborhoods and found that
GSV was more efficient (faster, cheaper) than physical site visits and that efficiency
improved rapidly with user experience. GSV was just as effective as field tests on most
indicators, and that those for which GSV were ineffective could be located using satellite
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imagery or other GIS data. Of course, currency is an issue here, as Google apparently
updates GSV every 18 months.
Curtis, Duval-Diop, and Novak (2010) used GSV to audit the post-Katrina
landscape of New Orleans to identify neighborhood patterns of return and rebuilding.
Although video was available from local community groups, the authors found that GSV
was just as effective and chose to rely on GSV as a data source so that their methods
could easily be replicated. The authors used GSV to categorize the status of residential
buildings according to a visual recovery scale. They initially used a four-point scale —
visibly abandoned, cleared lots, visibly rebuilding, or returned — and then applied a sub-
category scale within the visibly abandoned category — abandoned but no visible signs
of disrepair, obvious signs of abandonment, and extreme signs of abandonment. The
authors found blocks within the study area that were rebuilding and others that were
largely still abandoned. The results suggested the types of services necessary in sub-
neighborhood areas. Curtis and Mills (2011) later used this coded data to study the spatial
relationship between abandoned buildings and crime. They found a high association
between abandoned buildings and crime, even in the middle of a largely recovered
neighborhood, which suggests that abandoned buildings serve as locations which can be
used to hide criminal activity.
Inside the Billboard Map
The prototype system developed for the Billboard Map utilizes a combination of
Web 2.0 technologies to provide citizens with the ability to enter, edit, review and
geographically visualize information about the location and characteristics of billboards
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in Los Angeles County. These technologies include: (1) the GSV service for identifying
the location of billboards; (2) a spatial database back-end for storing billboard and site
activity based on Microsoft SQL Server; (3) an interactive mapping application based on
the Google Maps API and services for presenting billboard information to users,
facilitating data entry, and allowing them to edit or delete data already in the system; and
(4) a user management system for keeping track of accounts and the actions taken by
specific users (i.e. add, edit, delete billboards). All of these services rely heavily on the
asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming paradigm whereby actions
performed by the user through the web interface are transmitted, processed and stored in
the back-end database server as background requests. This common Web 2.0 approach
allows for a smoother user experience than one where every action requires the website to
be reloaded upon every user action.
The Billboard Map is open to the public and will be more successful with greater
input. The inventory will more likely become and remain complete and up-to-date with
more citizen sensors. In designing the website, the desire for broad-based participation
was countered by the desire for accurate data, which led to the consideration of what
steps should be taken to promote more accurate data collection, given that such steps will
invariably discourage some potential users from participating. Options included in-person
training, online training, and online instructions. We opted to make instructions available
on the site but not to require them for participation. Requiring users to register with the
site prior to usage was also seen as a way to increase data quality, because we assumed
that if one cared enough to register with the site then one would be more careful in
entering data than an anonymous visitor. Again, we opted for open access. Because the
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system was designed to be straightforward, and because we put a premium on higher
participation, we decided to allow immediate use of the site by anonymous members of
the public. To make use of the system, a user simply visits the website
http://billboards.usc.edu. On an initial visit, a page containing background information
about the project opens. The user then proceeds to the main mapping interface, and on
subsequent visits the website directs the user directly to the mapping interface.
The main map page features a map frame that opens on the extent of all current
billboard entries, above a table listing the billboard entries. The user can scroll around
and zoom in on the map with the standard Google Maps controls. To the left of the map
is a bar with instructions on using the system, which a user can click to hide for a larger
map view (Figure 20).
Figure 20. Screen capture of home page of Billboard Map website
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GSV is used in the Billboard Map to allow a user to identify the location of
billboards. To begin the process of recording billboards, the user clicks on a location in
the main mapping interface. This action launches a pop-up window in the web browser
displaying the three main features: (1) a window with the GSV viewshed centered at the
geographic point selected by the user; (2) a map window centered on the point; and (3)
attribute information fields including the approximate address of the point (Figure 21).
Figure 21. Billboard Map pop-up window for sign entry
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The website’s program runs a reverse geocoding operation to extract an address from the
latitude and longitude of the point.
Because GSV only provides data along roadways, the nearest available GSV
location to the point chosen by the user is selected and loaded. The GSV location shown
depicts the streetscape as observed by the GSV team when the point was sampled. The
camera direction used defaults to north, regardless of the angle of the street. So, it may be
the case that the user must rotate the camera direction to view up or down the street or
orthogonal towards the building or other built-environment features that line the street.
The current camera direction (i.e. field of view) is presented to the user as an
overlay on the Google Map interface to provide a directional context as to which way the
camera is currently pointed and how far the current zoom focuses the area of interest
(described in the next section). This overlay is in the form of a line pointing directly out
from the currently location of the camera. As the camera direction moves, the overlay
depicting the camera angle updates the direction that the line is pointing. The length of
the line is based on the current zoom of the GSV camera. Each level of zoom (i.e.
zooming in on a distant object) increases the length of the line by the equivalent of fifteen
feet.
A rectangular box overlain on top of the GSV interface is used to identify the
location of billboards in 3-D space in a semi-calibrated fashion. To do so, a user pans,
tilts, and zooms the current field of view in GSV such that this box, termed the area of
interest, is focused on the billboard. The available GSV camera locations are at specific
locations so it may not be the case that a user can zoom to the specific size of the
billboard. Because of these limitations, the user is directed to simply attempt to line up
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the shape of the billboard with the shape of the area of interest as best as possible. As the
user shifts the view of the GSV window, the program’s reverse geocoding engine updates
the approximate address as necessary. Fields are provided to allow the user enter
additional attribute information about the billboard including the owner and identification
number if visible (the user can employ the zoom capability to read small letters on the
billboard), the number of sides it has, the type of sign and whether it is digital (or not).
When the user saves the entry, the program computes the 3D spatial location of
the billboard. This computation uses the camera location of the current GSV camera
position and the camera parameters including the zoom level, the pan (direction the
camera is facing), and the tilt (the pitch of the camera). The spatial location and other
non-spatial attributes are then written to the backend database service via AJAX queries.
The Google Map interface is updated in real-time to show the addition of the newly
created billboard. The user can return to the main map or choose to keep the pop-up
window open, proceeding up, down, or across the street using the GSV interface to
continue recording billboards.
A Microsoft SQL Server is used to store the spatial and non-spatial information
about billboards and users. The locations of billboards are stored as geographic point data
types which facilitate spatial searches for billboards within the extent of the current
Google Maps view. All user interactions with the website are recorded, including adding,
editing, or deleting billboards. All versions of all data are maintained, including
billboards which have been deleted. Deleted items are not removed from the database;
they are flagged as deleted so that they can be filtered out when displaying the current
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active billboards in the system. Similarly, only the latest version of attribute data is
displayed along with active billboards.
The Google Maps API is used to display billboard data on top of base map layers.
A user interacts with Google Maps to navigate and initialize the GSV interface for a
specific location. In addition, the push pins representing the location of billboards can be
move from one location to another to correct the geographic point associated with a
billboard. This is most commonly done when the location of the billboard can be
identified in the Google Maps imagery and the computation of 3-D spatial location from
GSV parameters has assigned the location to an incorrect location.
A user can view the attributes associated with a billboard by clicking on a pushpin
to open an information pop-up window. A user also can edit a sign’s attributes or delete
the entry from this pop-up window. The website requires users to register for a user
account if they wish to edit or delete billboard data. Actions performed by registered user
are tracked and associated with his/her account.
Methods
After the website was functional, it was publicized in online media sources. I sent
emails to blogs and websites that cover local land use and landscape topics that ranged
from focused to general coverage of billboard issues. At the narrow end was the website
of the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, an activist organization that specifically focuses
on Los Angeles billboard regulation and at the broad end was the L.A. Times. In between
were sites such as Curbed LA, which covers real estate and land development in Los
Angeles and Scenic America, which covers the landscape effects of outdoor advertising
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nationally. Over 300 entries were added within the first three months of the website’s
operation. The location information reveals that the signs are spread throughout the
central Los Angeles urban region, from the Westside east through Mid-Town,
Hollywood, and Silver Lake, with many in the separate municipal jurisdiction of West
Hollywood and to the east in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. A few eastern
outliers are in the cities of Burbank, Pasadena, and unincorporated areas east of
Downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena (Figure 22). This provided a large enough sample
to test the effectiveness of the site and the accuracy of the entries. This section describes
a test of the spatial data quality of these entries.
Figure 22. Location of Entries in the Billboard Map
I conducted field visits to the over 300 signs entered in the first three months of
the website’s existence. Two key pieces of data were important in the effort to locate
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these signs: the address and the visual image of the sign. The address, as described above,
was extracted by the site’s reverse geocoding engine from the latitude and longitude
provided by Google Maps according to the user’s clicks. The visual image was taken
from GSV, as directed and zoomed in by the user. Other pieces of information that were
helpful in locating the sign were the name of the billboard company, corporate ID
number of the sign, and the type of the sign, but this information was entered by users
only occasionally. Locating the signs was more difficult than expected, as the address
was often incorrect, and many city blocks have numerous billboards. The photographs
proved to be the most helpful piece of evidence, although the lag in GSV data rendered
incorrect results, as a number of signs that were shown in photographs had since been
removed.
A Trimble Geo XH handheld GPS receiver was used in the field to obtain a
latitude and longitude coordinates for the location of each sign. I stood as near as possible
to the sign and recorded the location for a minimum of sixty seconds. In some cases, I
could stand directly under a sign. In other cases, I could not: fences or other physical
barriers kept me from getting close to signs, and buildings blocked the line of sight
between the Trimble and GPS satellites, preventing a reading at the exact sign location. I
manually recorded the following attribute data on each sign: address, sign company,
corporate ID number, type of sign, whether it was digital, and whether it was lit. I also
recorded the number of blocks away from the address of the sign as recorded in the
website. I took notes as necessary, such as if two sign entries from the website were
duplicate entries of one sign.
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The quality of the website’s data was assessed by comparing web points’
locations with the actual location of the signs using ArcMap. Prior to running the
analysis, I cleaned the data in two ways. First, I removed those points for which a
successful distance collection was not possible in the field, including web entries for
nonexistent signs and duplicate entries. This left 281 viable entries from the Billboard
Map that could be tested. Second, I corrected the location of the field data points using
aerial imagery — 4” pixel resolution natural color photographs from the 2012 Los
Angeles Regional Imagery Acquisition Consortium (LAR-IAC) dataset. I used these high
quality photographs, because they allowed me to correct the location of field data in the
cases that I could not take a GPS reading directly under a sign. The 4” pixel resolution is
high enough to pinpoint a billboard from above, which is not normally possible given
their narrow widths. I moved each field data point so that it was on its intended sign at
the shortest distance to the corresponding website entry. The data were then compared
Figure 23. Sample image showing four layers of data loaded in ArcMap
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and analyzed in ArcMap, using four layers of map data: a shapefile of website entry
points, a shapefile of field survey points, a parcel map of Los Angeles County, and the
LAR-IAC orthophotographs (Figure 23).
Results
Positional Accuracy
The first result sought was the distance between website entries and actual signs.
This can be accomplished a few different ways in ArcMap. I chose to create a new
feature layer of lines running from web points to their corresponding field data points
using the “XY to Line” tool, because the result would be not just the distance calculation
but also a separate shapefile of lines. The lines would provide the distance calculation I
sought, as well as a visual confirmation that the correct process had been run (Figure 24).
Figure 24. Sample image with lines connecting web and field data points in ArcMap
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Table 4 shows the results of this calculation. In the first row, it lists the number of
website entries with perfect locational accuracy, meaning they had a distance of zero
between the website entry location and field location. 12 of the 281 entries, 4%, had this
level of locational accuracy. Moving down from the first row, the figure shows the
Table 4. Distance between web points and corresponding field data points
Distance (ft)
Number of
Entries
Percent
(%)
Cumulative
Number
Cumulative
Percent (%)
0 12 4 12 4
.001-9.999 41 15 53 19
10-19.99 68 24 121 43
20-29.999 31 11 152 54
30-39.999 35 12 187 66
40-49.999 24 9 211 75
50-59.999 12 4 223 79
60-69.999 15 5 238 84
70.79.999 11 4 249 88
80-89.999 2 0.7 251 88.7
90-99.999 5 2 256 90.7
100-109.999 2 0.7 258 91.4
110-119.999 2 0.7 260 92.1
120-120.999 1 0.4 261 92.5
130-139.999 3 1 264 93.5
140s 0 264 93.5
150s 3 1 267 94.5
160s 1 0.4 268 94.9
170s 1 0.4 269 95.3
180s 1 0.4 270 95.7
190s 2 .7 272 96.4
200s 4 1.4 276 97.8
300s 0 276 97.8
400s 1 0.4 277 98.2
500s 0 277 98.2
627 1 0.4 278 98.6
1166 1 0.4 279 99
1748 1 0.4 280 99.4
2879 1 0.4 281 99.8
281 100 281
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number of signs, listed by ten-foot increments. It shows that 41 entries, 15%, had a
distance of > zero but < 10 feet between than the web entry and actual sign, 68 entries,
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24%, had a distance of > 10 or more but < 20 feet between the web entry and actual sign,
31 entries, 11%, had a distance of > 20 but < 30 feet between than the web entry and
actual sign, and so on. Overall, 211 signs (75%) were located within 50 feet and 256
(91%) were located with 100 feet of their true locations using the website.
Attribute Accuracy
The second result sought was whether the sign entries were located within the
correct parcels, and if not, how many parcels away from the correct parcels they were.
ArcMap is capable of determining if a point is within the boundary of an areal feature or
an adjacent areal feature, but parcels are often separated by streets and sidewalks. To
assure the findings were accurate, a manual analysis was necessary. I zoomed in on the
Figure 25. Sample image of ArcMap with web point separated from corresponding
field data point by one parcel
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data in the map, located the web entry point and correct parcel, and counted the number
of parcels, if any, from one point to the other (Figure 25).
Table 5 shows the results of this analysis. One hundred and forty of the 281
entries, 50%, were placed within the correct parcel, 247 of the entries, 88%, were located
in the correct parcel or within one parcel of the correct one, and 275
Table 5. Parcel analysis of web and corresponding field data points, counted by
number of parcels between web and field data points
Distance (ft) Number
Correct
Parcel
Percent
(%)
Correct
or +1
Parcel
Percent
(%)
Correct or
+2 Parcels
Percent
(%)
0 12 12 100 12 100 12 100
.001-9.999 41 30 73 41 100 41 100
10-19.99 68 40 59 65 96 68 100
20-29.999 31 16 52 28 54 31 100
30-39.999 35 13 37 32 86 35 100
40-49.999 24 11 46 23 50 24 100
50-59.999 12 6 50 12 24 12 100
60-69.999 15 6 40 11 28 15 100
70.79.999 11 4 36 9 25 11 100
80-89.999 2 0 1 50 2
100
90-99.999 5 0 3 60 4
80
100-109.999 2 1 50 1 50 2 100
110-119.999 2 0 2 100 2
100
120-120.999 1 0 1 100 1
100
130-139.999 3 1 33 2 67 3 100
140s 0
150s 3 0 1 33 3
100
160s 1 0 1 100 1
100
170s 1 0 0 1
100
180s 1 0 0 1
100
190s 2 0 1 50 2
100
200s 4 0 1 25 4
100
300s 0
400s 1 0 0 0
500s 0
627 1 0 0 0
1166 1 0 0 0
1748 1 0 0 0
2879 1 0 0 0
281 140 50 247 88 275
98
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entries, 98%, were located in the correct parcel or within two parcels of the correct one.
The table shows that every entry was located in the correct parcel or within two parcels of
this one except for those in which the distance was > 400 ft and in one case that was off
by 90 ft.
The next determination was whether the website assigned the correct address to
each point. Again, I conducted a manual analysis. Ninety-six of the 281 entries, 34%,
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Table 6. Analysis of address accuracy of web entries
Distance (ft) Number
Correct
Address
Percent
(%)
Correct
Parcel
If correct
parcel,
Correct
Address
0 12 4 33 12 4
.001-9.999 41 22 54 30 21
10-19.99 68 25 37 40 23
20-29.999 31 11 35 16 8
30-39.999 35 13 37 13 12
40-49.999 24 10 42 11 8
50-59.999 12 4 33 6 4
60-69.999 15 2 13 6 2
70.79.999 11 2 18 4 2
80-89.999 2 0 0 0
90-99.999 5 0 0 0
100-109.999 2 0 1 0
110-119.999 2 0 0 0
120-120.999 1 0 0 0
130-139.999 3 1 33 1 0
140s 0
150s 3 0 0 0
160s 1 1 100 0 0
170s 1 0 0 0
180s 1 0 0 0
190s 2 0 0 0
200s 4 0 0 0
300s 0
400s 1 0 0 0
500s 0
627 1 0 0 0
1166 1 1 0 0
1748 1 0 0 0
2879 1 0 0 0
281 96 34 140 84
were given the correct addresses by the system (Table 6). This average held even when
the location of the point was perfect — of the 12 signs that were placed exactly on the
sign, only four, 33%, were given correct addresses by the system. Entries < 10 but more
than zero ft from the correct location had a 54% chance of having been assigned the
correct address, but at every other 10 ft increment up to 70 ft, the points had a 33-42%
chance of having been assigned the correct address.
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I intended to count the number of parcels between the correct address and the
address of the parcel given by the website. However, this calculation was impossible,
because in a large percentage of cases the website provided a non-existent address.
Other Spatial Data Quality Factors
The temporal quality of the website’s data is in large part dependent upon the
temporal quality of the GSV data. Although the website allows a user to enter a sign
whether or not it is actually shown in GSV, the site is intended to be used through GSV.
Google claims to update its GSV dataset every 18 months. the inventory of billboards
created by the City of Los Angeles pursuant to OSSPIP, on the other hand, is conducted
every three years. The temporal quality of the website can therefore be estimated to be at
least twice as good as that of the city’s data.
In the first few months of operation, the website collected some 300 sign entries.
Soon after this, the website lost its GSV functionality, rendering the website defunct for
new data collection. According to the OSSPIP inventory, there are 9,025 signs within the
municipal boundaries of Los Angeles. These numbers suggest that the website collected
about 3% of the off-site signs in the city, but the actual completeness is even lower than
this, because a number of these entries were duplicates of each other, located in another
city, or otherwise invalid and therefore were removed from the dataset prior to the spatial
data accuracy calculations.
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Discussion and Conclusions
The ramifications of these results depend upon the intended use of the data.
Community members may use the data in different ways than institutional actors.
Community members may be concerned about the status of individual signs but may also
care about the amount of signage and the legal status of the signs at a neighborhood level.
In fact, this broad level view may be shared by city commissions and councils charged
with developing policy as to signage. At a finer scale, LADBS, the city department
charged with enforcing sign ordinances could use the data for considering permit
applications, issuing citations and otherwise regulating signage. In an interview with an
LADBS supervisor, I asked if he imagined being able to use information collected by the
public for the city’s inventory. He said he would love to have the inventory online, so if
someone had a question or complaint about a sign, they could check the status. This
project envisioned a greater public role. The website was designed to test whether the
public could help create and maintain the inventory itself, instead of filling its current
role as filers of complaints.
For LADBS, the positioning of the point within the correct parcel would be
paramount. Permits are granted based on parcels, and each parcel is identified by a
unique number — the Assessor’s Parcel Number. This provides a much more accurate
description than a street address, because a single parcel can have numerous street
addresses associated with it. The results of the positional accuracy assessment show the
quality of the Google Maps data and the functioning of the website in using GSV
combined with user selection. As explained above, a user directed the website’s map to a
particular location and zoomed in on a sign with the Street Viewer. GSV then provided
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latitude and longitude coordinates for the point. Approximately one in five (19%) of the
entries were positioned within 10 ft of the actual sign, 43% were positioned within 20 ft,
66% were positioned within 40 ft, and 79% were located within 60 ft of the actual sign.
This level of positional accuracy was good enough to put the point for each entry within
the correct parcel 50% of the time, and in the correct or an adjacent parcel 88% of the
time. The website’s ability to place a sign within a correct parcel was good, but likely not
good enough to be considered viable for LADBS’s purposes in regulating signage.
On the scale of individual signs, community members would likely find the
address of parcels more helpful than the Assessor’s Parcel Number. The address data
reveals the functioning of the website’s reverse geocoder. The results show that the
reverse geocoder provided a correct result only 34% of the time, whether or not the point
was quite near or quite far from the physical position of the sign. In order to improve the
address functionality, a future iteration of the system could be based on a parcel map. As
in the positional accuracy test described above, the parcel could be identified as the area
in which the point is positioned, and the system could then take the address that is
associated with the parcel, rather than from the Google Maps data. The limitation to this
is the geographical extent of parcel data that is available. Even though the address may be
off, however, community members would likely be able to use the visual of the map to
locate a sign that they are interested in. In this sense, just having the map itself is hugely
helpful.
Similarly, the website’s data is useful at nearly any scale larger than the individual
parcel. The signs were positioned on the correct block 97% of the time (Table 7).
Therefore the website is useful for considering signage on particular neighborhoods,
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streets and even individual blocks. Community members, activist groups, and city
commissions and councils could use the data at these scales in analyzing the amount of
Table 7. Block accuracy of web entry points
Block
Accuracy Number Percent (%) Side of Street Accuracy Number
Percent
(%)
Correct side of street 201 72
Correct block, in street 35 12
Correct Block 273 97
Correct block, wrong side of
street
37 13
One block away, correct side
of street
4 1
One block away, in street 0
One block
away
5 2
One block away, wrong side
of street
1 0
Two blocks away, correct
side of street
0
Two blocks away, in street 0
Two blocks
away
2 1
Two blocks away, wrong
side of street
2 0
Many blocks
away
1 0 Many blocks away 1 0
281 100 281 100
signage and the extent of the problem of illegal signs. These considerations come up in
deciding new signage decisions, such as whether to allow signage on new developments,
and in creating policy and sign ordinances going forward.
The spatial data quality of completeness is paramount when looking at the data in
the broad scale of total numbers. As noted, in the first few months of operations, the
website collected a number equal to 3% of the total off-site signs in Los Angeles
according to the OSSPIP inventory. However, a portion of the user entries were not
technically off-site signs that city inspectors would have identified — a significant
portion were in West Hollywood, a separate municipal jurisdiction from Los Angeles,
some entries were duplicates, and others featured nonexistent signs. The website
inventory therefore has less than 3% of the total of signs that LADBS would identify as
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off-site signs in Los Angeles. However, this 3% is not spread evenly over the city. Some
neighborhoods have zero entries while others show a high density of signs. This suggests
that when a user was interested in using the site, it is because he was interested in a
particular area. The GSV interface lets a user move virtually down a street and a number
of users entered many entries along a portion of one street, including Santa Monica
Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. Thus, the 3% number is misleading because some
neighborhoods have good coverage while others have none. This finding echoes the
finding of OSM data, in which urban locations had nearly complete coverage while rural
areas were less thoroughly mapped (Girres & Touya, 2010; Haklay, 2010). A visual
comparison on the OSSPIP data and the Billboard Map data reveals that the Mid-City,
Hollywood, and Westside areas of Los Angeles were more thoroughly mapped than other
areas of the city that have a similarly thick coverage of signs (Figure 26). Unfortunately,
the website was only functional for four months, so considering the completeness of the
data going forward is speculation.
The fact that users chose to enter signs that are not technically billboards speaks
to the effectiveness of using lay persons to collect data that is subject to the detailed and
technical specifications of the city’s sign ordinances. On the other hand, it suggests that
the community members view signage differently than institutional actors. This finding
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Figure 26. Map showing distribution of Billboard Map entries and signs in OSSPIP
suggests that community members do not distinguish between signs with the fine-toothed
comb of regulators. Instead, they view signage as a whole and look to the totality of
advertising in the landscape of their neighborhoods. This finding is explored in the next
chapter on the empowering and emancipatory potential of volunteered geographic
information.
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CHAPTER SIX: THE EMANCIPATORY POTENTIAL OF NEOGEOGRAPHY:
LEARNING FROM THE BILLBOARD MAP
In this final chapter, I consider the potential of neogeography and VGI as an
emancipatory tool in urban settings. This project is situated in both critical urban theory,
information theory and PPGIS. Critical urban theory stems from Marxist theory and,
though much of the work in this field focuses on the processes of capital, it shares the
underlying Marxist viewpoint that an emancipatory potential always lies within the
oppressive structures of the capitalist system and that the work of analysis can uncover
and nurture this potential (Brenner 2009). PPGIS is inherently concerned with the
emancipatory potential of GIS. The field grew out of the critical consideration of GIS as a
tool for domination by state and private elites (Schuurman 2000), and it grew into the
experimentation and use of GIS for community empowerment (Corbett and Keller 2005).
Information theory is concerned with the creation and uses of information, as well as the
ideas and myths that accompany its spread through society. This project is directly
concerned with the creation and maintenance of a consuming landscape by political and
industry elites. The consuming landscape is the manifestation of capitalist advertising
messages — information — and the bodies that take them in and enact them. The
Billboard Map web mapping project is considered here as a counter to this spatial
hegemony. In the next section, I discuss public space in Los Angeles, relying on theories
of public space as both a space of capital’s influence as well as a space of emancipatory
potential. I then provide a backdrop for analyzing neogeography by discussing PPGIS
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and how the concerns and lessons of work in PPGIS can directly inform the analysis of
neogeography and use of VGI in institutional settings. Next, I put this work together by
thinking through the Billboard Map project with respect to the considerations raised in
PPGIS work. Finally, I conclude with an example of the emancipatory potential of
neogeography. I take a result from usage of the Billboard Map that would be interpreted
under the traditional spatial data quality rubric as an error and I reinterpret it as a lesson
that community users can teach state actors about how they see billboards and other off-
site advertising in their neighborhoods.
Public Space and Los Angeles
Throughout this project, I have noted that public space is often studied in terms of
the privatization of civic and cultural centers and an ensuing corporatization or
“Disneyfication” (Sorkin 1992, 228) of public space. Much of this work focuses on the
quality of public space in places of congregation, such as malls, public parks, or sporting
venues. I have argued for the consideration of the day-to-day public space of city streets
and landscapes. Although the streets are idealized and occasionally exemplified as sites
of struggle, they are more commonly the spaces wherein private lives are lived in public.
They are the taken-for-granted public spaces, and this project has shown that they are just
infused with corporate and elite structures of power as Disneyfied city centers.
Harvey (2006) is one of the few geographers to interpret city streets as public
spaces, analyzing the redesigned streets of mid-19th century Paris as a hybrid private-
public sphere in which private capital infused the public streets with its broad boulevards,
expensive shops and restaurants, and elegantly dressed bourgeois. Los Angeles never
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experienced a full bourgeois makeover as Harvey finds in Paris. Los Angeles was from
the beginning a public space of private capital due to the city’s structure being laid by
private railways (Fogelson 1967/1993) and the early dotting of the landscape with
billboards (Gudis 2004). The landscape of signs became thicker over time to become the
consuming landscape that defines the city today.
Like the Paris streetscapes that Harvey (2006) describes, billboards spread the
visual imagery of private capital into the landscape. Billboards do not just contribute to a
“way of seeing” (Cosgrove 1985) the urban landscape; they interact with viewers, share
information, and play a role in developing the consuming pubic. The effect of advertising
on the urban landscape is so strong and the coverage so thick as to undermine the
distinction between public and private in city streets. Indeed, the consuming landscape
gives spatial evidence to Gramsci’s (1971) argument that the very distinction between
public and private is a bourgeois conception. Billboards are privately owned structures,
usually sitting on privately owned land, holding advertising messages for private capital.
Yet they are only valuable, indeed they only exist, because they display their messages
into public space, where it is taken in and enacted by the urban populace.
Lefebvre (1974/1991) views space as both a product and producer of capitalist
relations. This broad-level theoretical claim is directly relevant to cityspace. The urban
landscape is the product of the political economy of place while it produces these very
same capitalist relations. In Los Angeles, the dialectical relationship between the space as
product and space as producer manifests in the landscape of outdoor advertising.
Billboards are individual microcosms of the cyclical restructurings that characterize space
in a capitalist system (Swyngedouw 2000). Billboards creates the political economy that
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allow their own continued existence. They exemplify the reflexivity of informational
systems: “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made,
through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (Hayles 1999,
8), such as Escher’s hands drawing themselves into existence. Combining critical urban
theory with information theory, the capitalist landscape of billboards is recognized as a
landscape of information, a reflexive informational system of advertising messages and
consumption that continually creates and recreates itself.
But these constant productions of space are not perfect reproductions. “[S]pace is
always being produced and transformed under capitalism; it is never fixed, static, or
pregiven” (Brenner 2009a, 62). Speaking of macro processes and large scale shifts, Soja
(1978, 178) writes “Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive
postures, a complex mix of continuity and change.” A key feature that differentiates
billboards and other off-site signs from on-site signs is that they change their messages;
for example, a billboard might advertise a brand of beer one month, then a new movie the
next, whereas an on-site sign for a restaurant is static. The changing faces of billboards
draw attention anew, while on-site signs assimilate into the urban backdrop. As the
change-rate for ads drops, the more attention billboards require of urban residents. Digital
billboards increase the “flux” (Hack 2011) of the urban environment exponentially,
dropping the change rate of advertising messages from a number of weeks or months to a
number of seconds.
The constant recreations of space create points of entry, possibilities for change,
in the consuming landscape. In the contradictory and chaotic capitalist environment, the
social spaces of community and individualism coexist with the spaces of
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commodification and consumption, and the bumps and jostles that occur create new
versions of space (Lefebvre 1974/1991). Even more, they create an unending potential
for real change, what Lefebvre envisions as explosions of space. This potentiality exists
throughout capitalist space, which means it exists along streets and sidewalks of everyday
life in the urban landscape. According to this model, therefore, the potential for change
exists throughout the consuming landscape of Los Angeles, in theory and even in
practice.
Public Participation GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information
PPGIS
5
can be characterized as the practice of spatial emancipation. It represents
an academic intervention into the hegemonic spatial relations of capitalist society and the
use of geographic technologies to maintain the spatial hegemony. In the 1990s, human
geographers took a critical eye to the largely uncritical use of GIS that was growing in the
discipline as well as across the public and private sectors. These early debates (e.g.
Pickles 1995) launched a wide array of work that continues into the present, whose
defining feature is the use of GIS to empower those communities and persons across the
5
PPGIS is a broadly employed term that describes the many different ways in which GIS
is used with direct community involvement. Efforts to reach the public, by for example
making geographic data publicly available or creating guides for non-experts to use GIS,
led to its moniker “Public” Participation GIS. The mainstay of the work through the
1990s and 2000s moved to more focused outreach with disempowered groups. As noted,
the focus away from a broad public to more particular groups of the public led to the use
of the term Participatory GIS. Critical GIS highlights the connection to social theory that
underlies the theoretical work of GIS and Society. Each of these terms is also variously
employed as an overarching term to describe all guises of critical work using and
analyzing GIS today. I employ the term PPGIS herein: the majority of writings on the
topic employ this term, and its meanings and possible ambiguities have been well
analyzed.
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globe that lack access to this resource (Sieber 2006). In a recent discussion of PPGIS,
Weiner and Harris (2007, 469) note that scholars employ a variety of methods to
document local knowledge and empower community voices, ranging “from conventional
field-based participatory development methods that primarily utilize digital mapping, to
Internet-dependent spatial multimedia … [as well as] geo-visualization, sketch mapping,
satellite image and air photo interpretation, GPS transect walks, mental mapping
exercises, spatial multimedia, and, in the case of some contemporary work, even virtual
GIS.”
Critical work in PPGIS is directly relevant to the analysis of VGI and in many
ways is the necessary precursor and backdrop to its analysis. In her review of VGI
literature, Elwood (2008, 177) states, “What is notable in this literature is a shared
tendency to conceptualize data as socially produced and embedded.” Because of this
focus, she argues, research using VGI should be informed by PPGIS. Elwood (2008, 180)
states that PPGIS, “points to the difficulty of integrating spatial data that originate from
different epistemologies, as ‘local knowledge’ and ‘official knowledge’ often do,” while
she posits that VGI will tackle the challenge of actually integrating such data. Much
scholarly focus on VGI concerns the use of spatial data generated by the public and
governmental bodies for public service provision and disaster response (Elwood,
Goochild, and Sui 2012). Further, private entities are stepping into this realm with
business models based on harvesting VGI for public entities. As such, Elwood’s (2008)
assessment and concerns are only growing in relevance.
In the following paragraphs, I note the concerns that PPGIS scholars have raised
and addressed in their work. The field is so diverse and wide-ranging, in terms of
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methods, actors, places, and institutional settings, that those who have taken on the
daunting task of review have organized the field by issues and themes, rather than types
of work. Sieber’s (2006) comprehensive literature review of PPGIS is based on four
themes that are implicated across all types of this work. These broad themes — people
and place, technology and data, process, and outcome and evaluation — each contain
numerous concerns that point to similar questions in VGI. I organize this brief description
of the lessons learned and concerns raised in PPGIS according to Sieber’s four themes.
Under the ‘people and place’ rubric are the topics of context, stakeholders and
other actors, and the public. This theme thus reminds us to consider that each place is
characterized by a particular mix of cultural and spatial characteristics, such as laws,
gender norms, infrastructure, institutional norms, to name just a few aspects that will
factor into whether and how a GIS will be successfully employed in a given place. The
consideration of the “public” in PPGIS is another aspect of Sieber’s (2006) ‘people and
place’ theme. The “public” in PPGIS speaks to the early efforts to reach the general
public by for example creating instructional guides on using GIS or making government-
held data publicly available. Geographers now focus less on one ‘public’ and more on
which ‘publics’ should be considered in designing a particular GIS project. “Public” here
is not used as a distinction in opposition to the government actors; rather, government
actors should be considered as one among many possible publics. Schlossberg and
Shuford (2005) review literature on public participation across numerous scholarly
domains, including planning, management, and citizen participation to identify key
questions to consider in answering the “who?” question and find the answers fall into
three groups: “those affected by a decision or program,” those who can have relevant
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knowledge or information, and “those who have power to influence and/or affect
implementation." They also note that any one project or decision will not yield more than
one “public”, that such publics may be “geographic, economic, professional, social, or
political,” and that the groups could change throughout the life of the project.
One interesting and important manifestation of the “which publics?” question is
the role of scale in PPGIS. Because mapping tools have traditionally been expensive and
require a magnitude of skill to employ, scholars have acted as a conduit to community
groups, providing them access to technology and data. Hall et al. (2010, 763) note, “[t]he
PPGIS literature is replete with descriptions of expert-led or facilitated use of standard
GIS software by grassroots community members in application contexts as varied as
documentation of neighborhood improvements, involvement in community planning, and
participation in fisheries management, among others.” Ghose (2007) argues that such
efforts have led to uneven results. She shows that the scale of planning processes have
moved from the city-wide level down to neighborhood, which has enabled neighborhood-
level community groups to engage in decision-making processes. However, such
participation is not open to all community groups; rather, it is often limited to “lead”
community groups, with access to decision-makers and other resources. Further, she
notes that funding and planning can be funneled from different scales directly to the
neighborhood-level – i.e. HUD directly funds community projects, just as the city does.
This creates a variety of scalar alliances that may potentially be formed.
Sieber’s (2006) ‘technology and data’ theme gets at the inherent risk of PPGIS:
empowering communities using an expensive system that even practitioners find difficult
to master by subsuming local knowledge into the binary code of points, lines, and
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polygons carries a great risk of marginalizing those one is seeking to help. Scholars
(Harris and Weiner 1998; Corbett and Keller 2005) refer to this as the ‘empowerment-
marginalization’ nexus. Dunn (2007) suggests practitioners not be led by the technology
itself but consider GIS as a malleable system that should be employed only when and to
the extent that a given context and issue will benefit from it. This could require writing
code that adapts a GIS to local needs, teaching community members to use a mapping
application, adding videos or other media to a dataset, or providing community members
access to existing datasets. Representation of local knowledge should be carefully
considered, and copyright and other legal issues should be resolved from the outset. In a
related vein, Sieber’s (2006) ‘process’ theme looks to the on-going concern of
successfully using a GIS to achieve goals over time. Whether the project involves
implementing a GIS system in a community or non-profit group, working towards on-
going participation in policy and decision-making structures by local groups, the
practitioner must plan for the future while considering existing roles, resources and
needs. This means not just designing the technological system that will best fit the needs
and skills of future users, but also matching the GIS to the types of participatory
behaviors that the community will be undertaking (Schlossberg and Shuford 2005). Part
of planning, therefore, involves considering the goals of the project or system.
Sieber’s (2006) fourth theme, ‘outcomes and evaluations’ underlies the complex
and difficult task of evaluating a PPGIS project. PPGIS goals take many material forms
— maps, databases, system implementations, instructional pamphlets, etc. Deeming any
one of these “successful” is complicated even in a purely professional setting. The PPGIS
context adds complicating factors for evaluation: output may be created by non-expert
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community members who do not have the skill levels of professionals, and non-
professionals may use data differently and judge its quality differently than experts.
Sieber (2006) and Corbett and Keller (2005) note that goals may vary within a
community as well as over time. Weiner and Harris (2007) note that participation of
community members in planning decisions via PPGIS projects has often been used by
those in power to add a sheen of legitimization to fully top-down processes. Further,
Sieber (2006) notes, researchers will often have their own professional goals for the
outcome of a project that can be quite different from a community’s goals. Accordingly,
standards of judgment may need to be more flexible and context-based than in traditional,
scientific settings. Yet the goals of PPGIS are not simply material; Sieber (2006, 501)
notes, “[t]he ostensible goal of PPGIS is empowerment.
Corbett and Keller (2005) offer a framework for assessing empowerment that is
based on two connotations of the term — one that looks to psychological changes within
a an individual and one that looks to changes to the individual’s social influence or
power:
1. Empowerment is an increase in social influence or political power.
Conversely, disempowerment is a decrease in social influence or political
power.
2. Empowerment capacity refers to aspects of the deeper process of change in
the internal condition of an individual or community that influence their
empowerment (Corbett and Keller (2005, 93).
The framework assesses individual and community separately, and it considers four
catalysts of empowerment: information, process, skills, and tools.
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The Billboard Map
In this section, I apply the ideas and concerns of the PPGIS literature to the
Billboard Map. My focus here is on the effects of capital and the state on the process of
data collection using Internet-based mapping technologies. Because the Internet by form
and function is a coordination of state and private capital, relying on the Internet for a
public-based project will necessarily involve capital and the state to some degree. I
organize the following discussing by themes of capital, state, and the coordination of
state and capital, rather than Sieber’s (2006) four themes, because this project is
specifically focused on the role of the capital and the state in creating the consuming
landscape. Sieber notes that her themes overlap, and because each is infused with issues
of state and capital, the issues she finds in PPGIS work can be identified and productively
considered by a focus on capital and the state.
One of the great promises of web-based participation methods is the ability to
access the public in ways that traditional PPGIS methods do not (Dragicevic 2004).
Mapping technologies and data can now be accessed from personal computers and even
smartphones, which presents the opportunity of scaling up to the general public, and
answering the “which publics?” question of PPGIS research in broad and multi-faceted
ways. An increase in the number of voices can be deceptive given the uneven distribution
of computing technology amongst different socioeconomic levels and racial and ethnic
constituencies. Those who already have personal empowerment through skills, access to
technology, and social connections may be more likely to access VGI technologies, while
community groups with access to VGI technologies may still speak for the broadest range
of deprived persons, even in an age of neogeography. Clearly, the “which publics?”
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question looks to resources and information available as well as possible outcomes. As
noted in the previous chapter, the entries collected by the Billboard Map are more dense
in the Westside, Hollywood and Mid-City areas of the city (Figure 22). This distribution
mirrors the distribution of private wealth across the city, suggesting that the users of the
Billboard Map were likely to have access to personal resources. The effect on the
Billboard Map is more complete coverage of signs in areas with higher personal wealth.
The Billboard Map is based on the Google Maps API, which means that it is
entirely functional at the whim of Google. Since 2005, Google has made its Google Maps
API available to the public for easy integration into map mashups. This has been a boon
to neogeographers, yet it raises concerns. Capital clearly plays a role in the Billboard
Map, as in other neogeography made possible by the Google Maps API, because the base
map and on-going map functionality is dependent upon a private company with a drive
for profit. According to its terms of service, a website may use the Google Maps API so
long as it credits Google Maps on every map image (Google 2013). Each map mash-up is
therefore an advertising space for Google Maps. More broadly, it is potentially
calamitous for one private company to become such a singularly important hub of
information (Farman 2010). Google can and does occasionally and entirely at its own
discretion revise its terms of service. This includes the options of increasing the
profitability of its API while rolling back its availability by, for example, requiring a site
to display ads or to pay a fee for use. In the extreme, Google could rescind the easy
availability of the API, which would render countless maps, including the Billboard Map,
defunct.
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Google may not be the only corporation benefitting from the Billboard Map. Any
collection of community knowledge, billboards or otherwise, could be helpful to private
capital. Another aspect of the issue of community maps benefitting capital is seen in the
transformation of early, not-for-profit VGI projects into private capital.
ChicagoCrime.org, started by a community member for the benefit of the community, has
since been transformed into the for-profit site, EveryBlock (Holvaty 2008). Similarly,
OpenStreetMap is a not-for-profit project, but its founder went on to form a for-profit
company, CloudMade, that used freely available OSM maps and added value to them for
profit (CloudMade 2013). One billboard activist I spoke with wanted me to explain the
purpose of this project before she would agree to be interviewed. She admitted that she
was concerned that billboard companies would benefit from the data collected by the
project. Billboard companies benefit from up-to-date knowledge of their competitors’
actions, just as community members do.
Wilson (2012) describes the birth and expansion of the technologies supporting
mobile VGI as a state-capital partnership. In the United States, the FCC mandated that
cellular service providers make all cell phones compatible with the emergency response
system, such that the geolocation of the phone can be determined when a call had been
placed. Industry saw this forced investment in infrastructure as a massive opportunity to
develop technologies and business models based on that infrastructure. Leszczynski
(2012) historically positions this as an example of the neoliberal restructuring of the state.
As the state “rolls back” from mapping, private industry steps in. The state-capital
partnership seen here echoes the critical history of mapping, whereby maps are seen as a
tool of imperialism that aid in the control of space, and such imperialist mapping is
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undertaken not only by nations with political agendas but by capital in pursuit of
materials, markets and growth (Stoddard 1981). Farman (2010) argues that Google’s
seemingly neutral mapping should be historically positioned in line with traditional
hegemonic map-making as an arm of imperialism.
Whereas private capital’s benefitting from community knowledge may be an
unintentional consequence of VGI projects, the benefit of the state is often the intention
of VGI projects. Many VGI projects provide a platform for data collection directly or
indirectly useful to the state. Like these, the Billboard Map contains information that
could be directly integrated into city and state databases of billboards and, indeed, the site
was originally designed for this purpose. Yet there is unease associated with the
subsumption of VGI into the state apparatus. Wilson (2011) notes at least three effects in
his study of a community survey project in Seattle in which resident volunteers used
hand-held GPS units to catalog “deficits” and “assets” of their community, according to
pre-defined categories. First, such surveying practices change how volunteer surveyors
experience their neighborhood. “This technology of assessment becomes implicated in
their visioning of the urban scene” (Wilson 2011, 370). Second, the resident himself
becomes an extension of the state, increasing the state’s number of surveilling eyes. For a
small community project, the number of new eyes is limited; for a project such as the
Billboard Map, which hopes to engage the public at large, the number of potentially
surveilling eyes increases dramatically. Third, when citizens report problems instead of
complain about problems, they becomes partners of the state rather than adversaries.
Incorporating citizens into the regulatory work of the state serves to decrease citizen
frustration with the state and funnel it into community self-regulation. More broadly, VGI
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for state regulation runs counter to the creative, independent spirit inherent to
neogeography.
When the state relies on residents to collect geographic data, it is, in essence,
relying on the free labor of crowdsourcing. Of course, this is the business model of many
Internet companies, such as Facebook or Twitter or specialized startups like CitySourced
(see next page), which rely on user posts to create content for their sites. This is true in
the realm of Internet mapping as well. Google’s popularity lets it rely on the free labor of
its user base for source data: Google Maps acquires corrections and additions to its base
maps in the United States from volunteered user submission, and Google retains
ownership of these data improvements. The state’s reliance on volunteered labor, in the
vein of modern web models, can be interpreted, following Leszczynski (2012), as a
further example of the rolling back of the state under neoliberalism. Here, it is the state
convincing community members to volunteer the work that it had previously undertaken,
rather than industry seizing an economic opportunity. Even when the VGI is used for the
state, private capital often benefits. The technology by which community members
volunteer their work provides an economic benefit to industry; for example, numerous
municipalities across the United States, including Los Angeles, employ a VGI system for
complaint and report submission which is run by the for-profit company CitySourced
(Milian 2010). The community is creating value for private capital while performing the
unpaid work of the state.
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The Billboard Map: Learning from the Community
The literature reviews of urban and information theory show the coordination of
state and capital in creating the urban landscape, what I highlight as a consuming
landscape of advertising messages and city residents who take in and enact those
messages. Similarly, the reviews of PPGIS and the Billboard Map reveals the issues that
arise in creating community information with Internet mapping technologies, which
inherently involve the coordination of state and capital. Despite these points of concern,
the underlying message of critical urban theory (Brenner 2009b) and the goal of VGI and
PPGIS projects such as the Billboard Map, is community emancipation or empowerment
(Corbett and Keller 2005; Sieber 2006). Lefebvre (1974/1991) describes the possibilities
of emancipation in somewhat abstract terms. PPGIS work, on the other hand, enacts and
studies specific engagements with communities and uses of GIS to open up the structures
of hegemony. The sign entries created by the users of the Billboard Map can be
considered as data that might help the state regulate billboards. The city has limited
funding for the enforcement of sign laws, and “citizen censors” (Goodchild 2007) could
aid the city in identifying illegal signs. Indeed, the Billboard Map was initially envisioned
as just such a tool.
The previous chapter analyzed the locational accuracy of Billboard Map entries
and concluded that the current functioning of the website does not provide data to the
level of accuracy that the city would require in enforcing sign laws. However, the
Billboard Map has uses beyond creating data for the city’s inventory. If we consider the
project from the point of view of neogeography rather than institutional mapping, we can
ask what the website tells us beyond the limited types of data the city would take from it.
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Even though the project was designed using the city’s parameters for sign data and
employs Google Maps, the project presents possibilities for empowerment and even
emancipatory potential. In this sense, the project gives credence to Farman’s (2010)
argument that Google Maps is a tool with subversive and creative potential, although
some claim that it is an example of the “master’s tools” and will therefore undermine any
allegedly emancipatory project that relies upon it.
The signs that users chose to add to the Billboard Map reveal a key finding as to
the consuming landscape of Los Angeles. One aspect of spatial data quality is the
completeness of a dataset, including whether relevant data are missing and irrelevant data
are included. As described in the previous chapter, the spatial data quality of the
Billboard Map is compromised because it is an incomplete dataset. Many signs that are
technically billboards are not included in the dataset. Of the signs that are included, many
do not belong because they are not technically billboards. The rules regarding signage are
complex. The cityscape is filled with off-site signs that are regulated under different
aspects of the city’s sign code. Many signs that are off-site signs in the consuming
landscape of Los Angeles are not included in the OSSPIP inventory. However,
community users chose to enter some of these in the Billboard Map. These include signs
that are technically in other cities, such as West Hollywood, but which are prominent in
the greater Los Angeles cityscape as well as signs within the boundaries of Los Angeles
but which were not included in the OSSPIP survey, such as signs on temporary
construction walls and on-site signs illegally showing off-site ads.
These entries in the Billboard Map show that Los Angelenos consider the consuming
landscape more holistically than state agents. Residents do not experience the consuming
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landscape in the categorical way that the city institutions do. This finding leads us to
consider the other types of signs that are not included in the OSSPIP inventory but which
nevertheless display off-site messages into the landscape. These types of signs include
the following: street furniture signs (Figure 27); ads on busses (Figure 28); temporary
construction wall signs (Ordinance No. 179267) (Figure 29); on-site signs illegally
displaying off-site ads (Error! Reference source not found.); and ads spray-painted on
sidewalks (
Figure 31. Ad Painted on the Sidewalk).
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Figure 28. Bus ad
Figure 27. Bus stop sign
Figure 29. Temporary Construction
Wall sign
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Figure 30. Sign Permitted as On-Site,
Displaying Off-Site Ads
Figure 31. Ad Painted on the Sidewalk
In the eyes of the consuming public, the Los Angeles landscape is thick with the entirety
of these signs. The public, but not state agents, see all of these signs, without regard to
their permitting type or legal status. In fact, the public sees more of these signs than city
inspectors do — the Billboard Map includes numerous traditional billboards that should
have been included in the OSSPIP inventory but were left out for no apparent reason. Of
the 281 Billboard Map entries that were analyzed for this project, 33 are off-site signs
that seemingly should have been counted, 11 were supergraphics erected pursuant to
development agreements, and eight were on-site signs that were illegally displaying off-
site advertisements. The remaining 14 were typical pole billboards that the inspectors
somehow missed.
These findings suggest that though the public has a broad view, seeing many signs
that the city inspectors missed due to the thousands of “citizen sensors” across the city,
the public does not necessarily put as much import on the technical specifications of the
rules as opposed to the government employees tasked with enforcing the rules. In fact,
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agents of the state that deal with the regulation of signs seem aware of this. CalTrans
employee Jerone Edwards reports that nearly all complaints he has received from the
public as to billboards focus on the advertisements on the signs, rather than the technical
specifications of the signs themselves. But the elite of the city government, the decision-
makers, are unaware that residents do not focus on the distinctions between signs in the
landscape. Or perhaps they choose to ignore this fact.
Evidence from the Wilshire Grand project, described in Chapter 4, is instructive
here. When City Council member Jan Perry presented the project to the PLUM
committee, she argued in favor of the signage approvals. One of her arguments was,
“What is being proposed by the developers is not a billboard.” Again, at the City Council
hearing, she said, “What the developer proposes is not a billboard.” She offered no
definition of “billboards” or any explanation for this argument. Plainly, she believes that
billboards have a negative connotation. As this argument appeared in her public
statements, it seems she believes the public is generally opposed to billboards. Her words
were therefore an attempt to distance the project from billboards in the public mind in
order to secure their approval by the City Council without a major public backlash.
Further, the words were directed at other City Council members, allaying their fears of a
public backlash. I believe her comment is a political bait-and-switch move, but we would
be missing some of the instructive points from her words if we were to simply write them
off.
The legal landscape of signage in the city is carved up by various types of signs,
as described above. These various types of signs exist as different types because the city
has chosen to put them into the numerous separate legal containers. But there is slippage
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between legal categories. The city’s actions as to one type of sign are not irrelevant to its
actions as to other signs. This is true even in the realm of the law. As we saw in Chapter
2, the lawsuits that plagued the city in the wake of its 2002 sign laws were based on the
city’s attempt to draw these distinctions. They show that these distinctions matter more in
the idealized world of the law than in the physical space of the legal landscape. For
instance, the Metro Lights case stemmed from the city’s approval of thousands of new
off-site signs on kiosks and bus stop shelters just months after it banned other off-signs in
the city. Metro Lights’ legal argument was that the off-site signs on kiosks and bus
shelters undercut the purposes of the sign ban to the extent that it rendered the ban
unconstitutionally under-inclusive. This “under-inclusive” argument is made in the
language of constitutional law, but it speaks to a geographic point: signs such as these are
not inherently different from each other. They each spread corporate advertising
messages into the city landscape. Indeed, it is this fact that is the distinguishing
characteristic. To focus on distinctions based on other characteristics, such as whether the
message is emanating from a bus kiosk or a pole, is to shift focus from the fact that the
signs have much more in common than they do otherwise.
Counting signs based on the technical numbers of sign regulations therefore
provides only a partial view of off-site signage in the city. The OSSPIP inventory, as
described in Chapter 3, does not include all off-site signs in the city’s landscape, and
therefore it offers an incomplete picture of the consuming landscape of Los Angeles. A
map with all off-site signs in the city would offer a more complete idea of the depth of
the consuming landscape. The city does not possess such a map, and it has no plans to
create one. Indeed, the years the city delayed in starting OSSPIP and the effort it put into
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keeping its data private, suggests that the city would avoid creating an inventory and map
of all off-site signs. But what the city government will not create, the community could.
Indeed, city residents are perfect sensors for this job. As the Billboard Map evidence
shows, residents see the various technical types of signs as a single advertising landscape.
This points towards the emancipatory potential of the Billboard Map. By bringing
people together towards a common goal of mapping their shared landscape, the site
reveals the community’s view of the consuming landscape. The site was intended to aid
the state in regulation, but it has shown that the state views the landscape differently than
the residents of Los Angeles. The previous chapters reveal the state’s contradictory
relationship with the consuming landscape — it seeks to grow the landscape, to develop
consumers, but it must also keep private capital in check to maintain its legitimacy. This
project suggests that one of the mechanisms employed by the state to grow the
consuming landscape while maintaining legitimacy is to create multiple categories for
off-site signage. Carving up off-site signage for regulation purposes lets the city talk
tough on billboards while it allows new signs on kiosks, ban supergraphics while it
approves new wall-sized signs in development contracts, and cite some sign owners for
breaking the law while the it makes illegal contracts with favored sign companies.
Categorizing lets the city count some signs under the guise of a complete off-site
inventory that ignores thousands of off-site signs in the landscape.
The geography of the city reveals the complete consuming landscape that is not
shown in the OSSPIP inventory. The day-to-day experience of the city shows the
landscape of signage, not categories of signs. Lefebvre (1974/1991) argues that the
experience of the city, amongst and within the contradictory processes of capitalist
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society, creates openings for change. These contradictions are shown in the Billboard
Map. The difference between the hegemonic production of space and the communities’
production of space is shown in the difference between the community’s mapping of
cityspace and the city’s. This difference does not just exist in the virtual landscape of the
city. It exists in the physical space of the city, but it is revealed virtually. Further, the
website has the potential to make the gap between hegemonic and day-to-day cityspace
wider by making it more obvious to city residents. By mapping the off-site signs in their
communities, city residents become more aware of the consuming landscape. This alters
their experience of the city and, in the model of Lefebvre, it alters cityspace itself though
the changed production of space.
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REFERENCES
Secondary Sources
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224
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Interviews
David Ambroz, June 23, 2011
Michael Bostrom, July 18, 2011
Barbara Broide, July 20, 2011
Hector Buitrago, September 1, 2011
Sean Burton, September 9, 2011
Frank Bush, September 1, 2011
Diego Cardoso, May 9, 2012
Jerone Edwards, August 30, 2011
Ken Fong, July 8, 2011
Dennis Hathaway, June 2, 2010 and May 29, 2013
Jeff Isaacs, September 12, 2011
John Keho, September 13, 2011
Kevin Keller, April 6, 2012 and August 16, 2012
Chris Koontz, August 19, 2011
Blake Lamb, August 12, 2011
Cindy Montanez, August 10, 2011
Randal Morrisson, August 22, 2011
Mark Mullen, May 4, 2012
Meg Rosequist, July 8, 2011
Kip Rudd, August 8, 2011
Marie Rumsey, April 12, 2012
225
Daniel Tarica, May 25, 2012
Lisa Trifiletti, September 28, 2011
Jane Usher, August 2, 2011
Tal Vidgerson, June 18, 2012
Jacob Wexler, March 29, 2012
Michael Woo, July 26, 2011
Luke Zamperini, April 13, 2010 and June 22, 2011
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In 2002, the City of Los Angeles instituted a series of regulatory mechanisms aimed at controlling outdoor advertising, including a ban on new billboards and an inventory of existing off‐site signs. These ordinances had massive, unforeseen effects on the cityscape as outdoor advertisers fought the laws in courtrooms through litigation and in the landscape by defiantly erecting new signs. This project studies the litigation these laws spawned, the history and findings of the inventory project, and the on‐going efforts to erect new signage through illegal and legal channels. Secondly, this project describes a counter‐mapping project of billboards, relying on volunteered geographic information (VGI) gathered through online mapping of community members. Ultimately, the project finds that the political and urban development of outdoor advertising matches the process of the urban growth machine model, in which public and private elites coordinate to grow the city. Here the growth machine is focused on the privatized urban landscape of billboards and other off‐site signs. Through the Billboard Map website, the project finds that community members see outdoor advertising differently than government actors, and they thereby offer an avenue to change perceptions of signage regulation and even the urban landscape itself.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Sedano, Elisabeth Jane
(author)
Core Title
Consuming landscape, consuming machine: state, capital, and outdoor advertising in Los Angeles
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Geography
Publication Date
07/16/2014
Defense Date
11/18/2013
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
growth machine,OAI-PMH Harvest,online mapping,outdoor advertising,privatization,urban development,volunteered geographic information,web mapping
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application/pdf
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Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
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Advisor
Wilson, John P. (
committee chair
), Banerjee, Tridib K. (
committee member
), Sellers, Jefferey M. (
committee member
)
Creator Email
lisa.sedano@gmail.com,sedano@usc.edu
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-443679
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UC11287144
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etd-SedanoElis-2703.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-443679 (legacy record id)
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etd-SedanoElis-2703.pdf
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443679
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Dissertation
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Sedano, Elisabeth Jane
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Tags
growth machine
online mapping
privatization
urban development
volunteered geographic information
web mapping