Sur les pavés, la plage!1
I like to compare different cities by thinking about their physical characteristics, material makeup, the substances that form them— instead of focusing on more obvious differences like the weather, language, or cuisine.
The idea that cities are as much material constructs as they are cultural settings is undoubtedly not new. In 1997, the Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa outlined how flows of matter and energy formed cultures and cities in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, one of my favorite books.
There is a connection between who we are and what we inhabit. For example, how a city is made is defined by what it is made from and, therefore, how we see ourselves.
For instance, in Europe, cities have been carved out of stone for millennia. Thus, they tend to typify or embody cultural permanence and tradition.
East Coast and Midwest US cities are made of brick, stone, and steel to weather snow and rain. To many, they seem more reliable than poetic.
West of the Rockies, cities are paper-thin stage sets built out of slender sticks of wood covered with tar paper and sand. They are stereotypically depicted as stage-sets: fake cities.
Chief amongst these “fakes” is, of course, Los Angeles, a city that is regularly miscast as a centerless, artificial series of suburbs devoid of any traditional culture and thus missing any authentic culture and grounding.
Instead of further promoting cliches about LA by attempting to counter them, which is something of local industry in and of itself, wouldn’t it be more interesting to try and understand why, at almost 240 years of age, Los Angles still seems like a provisional and temporary environment?
One theory that I have is that LA's physical and cultural image is always shifting because of what it is made of, sand. Sand is, after all, LA’s ur-substance, its foundational material ne plus ultra, and therefore I think it defines how we are as a local culture.
Sand is obviously a very ancient, ubiquitous, and ancient material. There is nothing fake about it, but it does imbue Los Angeles with unique qualities like lightness, evanescence, and mutability that set it apart from other cities.
Substrate
LA sits on sand.
Except for some areas of granite, alluvial sand mixed with loose clay makes up most of the geological substrate beneath Southern California.
If LA has an Ego, the Sun, then sand is its Id, its volatile unconscious: shifting, unseen and fugitive: at once nowhere and yet everywhere.
LA’s urban fabric is made of sand: it’s in all the sidewalks that connect up our seemingly endless suburban neighborhoods; it wraps the countless stucco houses scattered across all eighty-eight cities incorporated in the County of Los Angeles, and in the form of glass, it’s draped over all the suburban office towers that randomly pop up next to our freeways and airports.
Whether it is smeared over wire mesh and called an exterior wall or cast into vast formworks to make freeway overpasses, towers, and arenas, or superheated, vitrified, and finally hung from a building frame like a big pixelated mirror, sand is what makes LA most like itself, or even, more like itself.
Anything else brought here to build with that isn’t made, at least in part, of sand isn’t really part of the local vernacular. Redbrick, heavy timber, exotic marble, or redwood siding always seems totally out of place in LA.
Modern Ruins
Last April, under countywide Covid stay-at-home orders, the Venice Beach Skatepark was buried under enough sand and wrapped by a less obvious yellow tape cordon sanitaire to make it temporarily unrideable. This almost land-art-like gesture got me wondering about what sand has to do with Los Angeles as a place and as a culture in the first place.
Was the County’s rush to close the skatepark a public safety ordinance or something else, a sort of unwitting tripling of Venice’s fakeness? Did putting sand on top of another material made of sand (concrete) on top of more sand make it safer or more strange?
Like many other Los Angeles landmarks (notably Abbot Kinney’s nearby canals), Venice’s carnivalesque beachfront is fake. It sits over a real beach that was transformed into someone's idea of what a beach should look like, a more beachy beach. Certainly, most of the sand along the Venice Boardwalk wasn’t even there eighty years ago; the city dredged most of it out of the Ballona Creek lands to make way for Marina del Rey.
In the 1960s, as part of the Ocean Park urban renewal project, the entire sandy foreshore north of the Santa Monica and Venice border at Rose Avenue was re-designed and extended to create a more beach-like area. If you watch the opening credits for Three’s Company (a show that I associate for some reason with my vague memories of the area as a child), you can see what the newly finished bike path and the widened beach looked like circa 1977.
LA, City of Sand
LA isn’t a City of Quartz; it’s a City of Sand.
Sand has a pervasive presence in Los Angeles: it forms our deserts, it lies in the washes that occasionally flood our streets a few times a year, and it is regularly dragged off our public beaches and into our cars, only to be washed off in the shower to begin its journey back to the sea. On very windy winter days, sand blows off the shoreline into long drifts that turn public parking lots near the PCH into miniature Saharas.
Most of our extensive road network is covered in asphalt, a form of tar mixed with crushed gravel— a veritable spider’s web of sparkling mineral dust doused in pitch. Amazingly, almost 15% of Southern California is still dedicated to surface parking. That is equivalent to an area roughly seven times the size of the State of Rhode Island. Think of that: an entire state made of endless parking lots, driveways, off-ramps, and little medians filled with sad ice plants and the occasional, lonely cluster of palms.
Sand defines our myths about the region as a playground (or a paradise), playing into our darkest nightmares. I can catastrophize all day about entire blocks sucked into middle earth by earthquake-driven liquefaction (when sandy soils suddenly turn soft and form sinkholes.) Or after an intense winter storm, I imagine getting buried under silty landslides in the Hollywood Hills or Malibu, as hillside or beachfront houses slip off some sandy cliff into the Pacific or onto someone’s final morning commute.
Heat Island
More lately, I have found a new paranoid fear: the possibility of cooking to death during a high-pressure induced heat wave, like the one we experienced last week.
Because so much of Los Angeles is horizontally covered by sand (embedded in concrete and asphalt), the Urban Heat Island Index (UHII) over LA is one of the worst in the nation.
In the diagram below, the yellow, orange, and red areas are more urban, less planted, and hence more likely to be covered in sand and therefore less green and shady. As a result, these areas suck up and hold, or insolate, more heat during the day, while the green zones throw off heat through shading, heat absorption, and exposure to cooling ocean breezes.
Annually (or now bi-annually) high-pressure heat domes floating over the Southland cause silica, stone, and concrete to trap solar energy during the day.
These mineralogically formed materials then release that stored heat at night, which means that when temperatures drop after sunset, the red, orange, and yellow parts of LA don’t cool down as quickly as the green parts.
This leads to excessive air conditioning use overnight. Spikes in energy consumption, in turn, cause our power grids to fail, and then, like clockwork, a wave of heat-induced maladies and sometimes even deaths follow.
When configured into large urban canopies, solar panels can also shade parking lots and rooftops. By creating LA-wide local energy networks enabled by citywide solar systems, we could offset blackouts and decentralize power usage. Weirdly, one solution to too much sand on the ground is to add more vitrified sand, in the form of solar panels, overhead to shade and power the city.
Building with Sand
In LA, you will find silica in all sorts of natural as well as engineered situations.
When bound with other aggregates by water and cement, it shows up in our concrete overpasses, shopping malls, and stadia. When sand is lavishly laid down or poured as precast concrete, it makes airport runways, hospitals, and parking garages.
Pre-cast concrete makes million square foot retail distribution centers visible from space, appearing on satellite imagery like giant tile chips laid on a field.
Domestically too, sand is everywhere in LA.
Underfoot we pour sand finished concrete onto our driveways and in garden patios. It hides underwater in backyard pools and jacuzzis, concealed by layers and layers of smooth troweled plaster—slowly moving, cracking, and leaking. With every minor tremor and rumble, all those aquamarine, kidney-shaped oases promise to one day spill their precious fluid back into the aquifer. As I wrote in February, once emptied, those pools become ideal, reliable land-surfing surrogates for ocean waves.
And that is why a buried Venice Skatepark was so very strange— since a skatepark itself is a simulation of a series of emptied backyard swimming pools welded together by concrete walkways.
So a concrete skatepark built over an artificial beach (made with sand from a local wash) and then filled with even more sand during lockdown was just far too self-referential (or “meta”) to witness during a pandemic.
‘I Love LA’ = ‘I Love Sand.’
I have various personal associations with sand.
When I was seven or maybe eight years old, I spent entire summers building sandcastles and skimboarding over the sand at low tide near the Scripps Pier. Then, I spent another decade propping up my surfboards or burning my feet in the sand on beaches from Rincon to Ensenada.
When the surf was flat in junior high, my friends and I hoisted ourselves over schoolyard fences to skateboard for hours over asphalt playgrounds, or else we rode down shotcrete sprayed flood control channels of all shapes and sizes.
If I had grown up in a different city or a different epoch, say a city made of red clay tile roofs and red brick veneer walls— like Melbourne, Australia circa 1950— or in Tokyo, during the Edo period (1603–1868, when structures were made of heavy wood frames and delicate paper screens) perhaps I would have other building material fetishes. But I didn't; I grew up in Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s, and therefore I remain obsessed with LA’s most mineral character.
To Live and Die in LA
Martin Amis wrote in Time’s Arrow that “Time, [is] the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.” While Amis is not entirely wrong, what makes a place, materially, is what also makes us of that place and thus citizens of that point in time.
To live and die in LA, at the edge of a continent that is eroding every day into the Pacific, in a city that faces existential crises driven by regular natural catastrophes, is to understand that a life led here is never more than an impression of permanence, a performance of longevity.
The most honest lesson that Los Angeles can teach us is to accept our temporary spot on time’s ceaseless arc. The only truth that this super-thin, flimsy stage set of a city, this metropolis built on shifting sand, can reveal is how very fragile we are.
“On top of the pavers the beach!” is my inversion of “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the pavers the beach!”) a call to arms for student protests and strikes held across France in May 1968.
As young revolutionaries tore up street pavers to build barricades against De Gaulle’s gendarmerie, they realized that the stones were set over sand, the most typical base for pavement.
Therefore "Under the paving stones, the beach!" became a rallying call for not only a student-led revolution but a demand for de-urbanization, a return to nature, and therefore freedom.