The Film Industry and Urban Development in Metropolitan Los Angeles

Due north of Culver City and southwest of Hollywood, lies Century City, an icon of midcentury modernism and urban planning (see Figure 2.1). Midcentury modernism in Los Angeles is most closely associated with sleek glass houses in the Hollywood Hills, while Los Angeles midcentury planning evokes images of freeways and the urban renewal scheme that leveled downtown’s Bunker Hill. Absent the freeway building or single - family homes associated with postwar Los Angeles, Century City reconceived West Los Angeles as a mostly residential area into a high - rise center of economic and cultural activity. Continuing to puncture the myth of the jobless suburban fringe, the story of Century City highlights the might of international corporations’ privately - funded developments — in the age of federal urban renewal, no less — in reshaping the economic and urban development of a metropolis.