Week 3: Orange & Irvine

This Thursday, I went down to Orange County to visit my friend who goes to Chapman University. She lives in an apartment complex in the city of Orange, off the 22 Freeway and about 10 minutes from her school. The first thing that I noticed right away about how her daily life is different from that of mine at UCLA is that she needs to drive everywhere. For dinner, we drove about 15 minutes to Irvine, to a plaza called Diamond Jamboree. The plaza itself was pretty big, and the restaurants and stores there  clearly catered to an Asian crowd, as it is also situated pretty close to UC Irvine. The place was lively around dinnertime, and it was difficult to find parking and we had to wait a while for a table at the restaurant. After dinner, we headed back to her apartment and a little later, drove to the Westfield Santa Ana mall, even though it was only about 3 blocks away.

The trip made me realise how close to reality Kling, Olin, and Poster's "The Emergnce of Postsuburbia"is. The selection was published back in the 90s, but the general concepts still apply; in fact, they might be even more relevant now. One section is dedicated to the spatial organisation of Orange County, about how there isn't a central business district but rather multiple centers. The plaza that we went to for dinner was like its own little center, with perhaps about a hundred businesses concentrated in that small area. The mall, too, is its own center, with clothing boutiques, bookstores, and restaurants. Such decentralised organisation might be convenient in the sense that, if I want Thai for dinner, Asian groceries and Korean films, I can just go to one place. However, the authors note how the county's spatial segmentation can also lead to it being "economically, ethnically, and socially" segregated. In the past, people would take public transportation with others of various race, age, gender, and ethnicity to a common destination, the central city. It's easy to become trapped in a bubble when everything one needs is clustered in one area. Diamond Jamboree has plenty going on, even on a Thursday night. People are everywhere and it's crowded and noisy - at least for the suburbs. For those of us that grew up in sleepy bedroom communities, however, we can be tricked into thinking that this is excitement. Our car culture, also, does not help. We can now go from point A to point B via freeway without seeing anything in between, as I did when I travelled from Orange to Irvine. We come to think of the world that we do see regularly as everything. It's also so comfortable and easy, now, that we don't think of living any other way. I think that's the scary thing about postsuburbia; it's becoming more diverse when you look at statistics, but in reality, different groups aren't really mixing. We might see them, but we feel no need to engage.