Consuming landscape, consuming machine: State, capital, and outdoor advertising in Los Angeles

In 2002, the City of Los Angeles instituted a series of regulatory mechanisms aimed at controlling outdoor advertising, including a ban on new billboards and an inventory of existing off-site signs. These ordinances had massive, unforeseen effects on the cityscape as outdoor advertisers fought the laws in courtrooms through litigation and in the landscape by defiantly erecting new signs. This project studies the litigation these laws spawned, the history and findings of the inventory project, and the on-going efforts to erect new signage through illegal and legal channels. Secondly, this project describes a counter-mapping project of billboards, relying on volunteered geographic information (VGI) gathered through online mapping of community members. Ultimately, the project finds that the political and urban development of outdoor advertising matches the process of urban growth machine model, in which public and private elites coordinate to grow the city. Here the growth machine is focused on the privatized urban landscape of billboards and other off-site signs. Through the Billboard Map website, the project finds that community members see outdoor advertising differently than government actors, and they thereby offer an avenue to change perceptions of signage regulation and even the urban landscape itself.