Week Two • Aaron’s Exploration of The Grove

This week, rather than go out myself, I decided to stay at home to read and comment on a fellow classmate's  blog post. I've read several posts today and found myself drawn to Aaron’s (who goes by Boo) experience in The Grove. However, his exploration of The Grove, which has become, as he wrote, “synonymous with the World Famous Farmer's Market" was brief as he focused more on the cultural micro-communities surrounding the area: the Fairfax District, Little Ethiopia, Museum Row, and Korea Town.

You can find his post here to read it in full.

While there were several aspects of Aaron's post that I liked, there were a few details I felt were lacking in elaboration. The following is a copy of my comment on the blog post itself (for some reason, after many attempts, I couldn't comment directly to Aaron's post, so I ended up posting a link to this post on his blog):

Hi there Aaron (Boo), my name is Sara and it was a pleasure to read what you had to say about The Grove. There were many points to it that I found insightful and your relation back to our reading this week was a perfect example of you taking that step in observing an area with fresh eyes, especially one you're already extremely familiar with. As you said, in the hustle and bustle we tend to dismiss the details of our surroundings and even take it for granted by not fully appreciating the landscape and people of the communities that are part of our every day. We also tend to forget to take a break from our seemingly hectic lifestyles to just stop and look, really look, at what makes up our community, our neighborhood, our surroundings, and just the locations we frequent. We don't observe our every day places the way we do when we travel to somewhere new, but with this project, it gives us the chance to be both tourists where we haven't been and, especially, where we have.

As I continued to read your post, I loved how you took our weekly reading and related it your findings. This shows that you have an understanding of the concept we read about and was able to agree or disagree with it based on your observations of the Los Angeles metropolitan region as a whole. In this case, you disagreed with the book's notion that a city, as you put it, "consists of a set of rings, with the center ring being the industrial, or business class" and "immediately out from that ring...is an area of deterioration". At least, disagree in regards to only the Los Angeles area. You then proceed to very briefly explain your thoughts as to why the Los Angeles metro region doesn't fit this description by stating that these these "zones" within Los Angeles "overlap", therefore not allowing "for the typical formation of the different area of the city".

There's only one problem I have with this. It's vague, very vague, and I don't have a lot to go on in regards to evidence of overlapping "zones". What I mean by this is that I would have liked to see elaboration. How do these "zones" overlap? Exactly what to you mean by "zones"; are you referring to cities within the L.A metro region, neighborhoods, districts, communities, or all of them? And when you say that these "zones" overlap, I would have liked to read more about your thoughts or speculations on how this overlapping affects the area and Los Angeles as a whole.

There's also another small thing I would like to point out and that's your lack of specification of what "readings" you're talking about. From a student who is also taking the Cities and Social Difference course, I know, but for further clarifications it would be nice if you lead into it by stating where you read your information from and by whom. In this case, you would be telling your audience that you are referring to the book The Blackwell City Reader. 

One last thing I'd like to address is your lack of detail in describing what The Grove, specifically, is like. When I read the title of your post was going to be about The Grove, that's what I expected. Instead, I was reading more about the ethnic micro-communities surrounding it. Now I haven't  been to this part of Los Angeles so maybe these micro-communities are a part of The Grove, but from how you worded it in your post, it sounds as if they are separate. What you can think about for the next time you blog about a location, describe what the place is: is it a city, a neighborhood, a district, a street, etc.? This will help clarify what the area of topic is for people who are not local to L.A. or have not explored that part of this metropolitan area. Concluding, it would have been nice to read what you saw or what you thought relating to how these micro-communities and The Grove affected each other if they affect each other in any way.

Overall, I enjoyed reading your post and can't wait to read more about your ventures out to different areas in Los Angeles.   

Happy blogging~