At last, LA gets itself on the map

While there are undoubtedly a few diehard Angelenos who are intimately acquainted with the hundreds of cities, neighbourhoods and other unincorporated areas that are generally termed “LA” by the rest of the world, I think it’s fair to say that when a great many of this city’s residents wake up in the morning, they don’t have the foggiest idea where they are, administratively speaking.

Which brings me to the Big News out here on the West Coast this week: the Los Angeles Times, currently struggling to emerge from bankruptcy, has taken it upon itself to end all this confusion by embarking on a task of historic significance - telling its readers where the hell they live.

Which, quite frankly, would be a gigantic waste of time and money in almost any other city I can think of. But here in LA, it’s not only welcome, but overdue.

So far the newspaper’s team of mapmakers has trudged (metaphorically, for the most part) up and down 30,000 city blocks and officially named no fewer than 113 neighbourhoods - most of which, astonishingly, had never been identified with any precision before.

Angelenos themselves have been helping out - the latest draft of the map was posted online this week and provoked 1,500 comments from readers, as a result of which nearly 100 neighbourhood boundary lines were changed.

Before long, a consensus on even the farthest corners of LA’s sprawl will surely emerge, and the city will suddenly begin to seem a lot less incomprehensible than it used to. In other words, the internet will do to LA the exact opposite of what was inflicted on it 50 years ago by the car.

Neither here nor there

While the map might be great for those Angelenos who live in LA proper, it doesn’t offer any guidance for those who live in the parts of LA that aren’t technically in LA. And that’s an awful lot of places.

Take Beverly Hills - it’s surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles, but it’s not in it. Neither is the Sunset Strip, which is in the fully autonomous City of West Hollywood (“WeHo” covers all of 1.9 square miles and likes to pass its own laws, such as one that insists that all dogs must be termed “companions”, not pets).

And while Hollywood might be one of the few famous parts of Los Angeles that is actually in LA - although for a while it tried very hard not to be - most of the so-called Hollywood studios are not. Warner Bros and Disney, for example, are in the City of Burbank. Confused? Thought so.

Princely

Los Angeles’s failure to annex places such as Beverly Hills and West Hollywood means that the map of the city resembles a big sponge, with holes all over the

place where rival mayors run their own rival micro-governments and even impose their own

taxes. Maybe it’s just because I’m a Brit that I find this so strange. To me, it’s as if Knightsbridge were to cede from London, install Prince Harry as mayor and make it illegal not to own a Range Rover.

Disaster scenario

The map of LA is of course just the latest example of how online contributions from members of the public are completely changing the news business - whether it’s mobile-phone paparazzi pictures or tweets from the scene of an unfolding disaster.

All of which has made me think of how different the terrible story of Air France Flight 447 might have been. This was a rare occasion of a news story with no information. No pictures, no sound, nothing.

But what if there had been, say, wi-fi service in the cabin? Would investigators even need to find the black boxes? Or would the pre-crash tweets fill in the blanks? Or what if - God forbid - people had been holding a video conference at their seats during that storm?

The thought of it is enough to make even someone with my journalistic curiosity wonder if some things are best left off the grid.