The Urban Architecture of Los Angeles and Grand Theft Auto

The Urban Architecture of Los Angeles and Grand Theft Auto By Mark David Teo Figure 1 Mark Teo, “Naked Los Angeles, comparing The Naked City of the Situationists with Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V,” 2015. Digital Image. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art at the University of Western Australia in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Architecture SUPERVISORS: Darren Jorgensen Rene Van Meeuwen October 16, 2015 Perth, Australia Copyright © 2015, Mark David Teo The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 2 Abstract: “Rockstar’s virtual city Los Santos is based on modern 2011 Los Angeles.” This is an understanding widely adopted by contemporary gamers and is supported through the cognitive experience of playing the game. However, its urban architecture has never been taken to a deeper level of analysis as found in academia. In a response to modernism, postmodern architects have virtualised cities through ideas of cognitive mapping. There is an unidentified shadow of postmodern ideals present in Rockstar’s creation of Los Santos. Therefore postmodern urban theorists such as Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, The Situationists, Kevin Lynch, and Reyner Banham are suitable to act as precedent to discuss Los Santos. Through comparison with these theorists and Grand Theft Auto V, my interpretation of how Los Santos represents Los Angeles is speculated. To this idea, current day urban theorists now have the possibility to create immersive worlds within a playable and executable virtual realm. This perception gained through the identification of postmodern ideals in Los Santos, hopes to spark interest in the relationship between architecture and video games. Keywords: Grand Theft Auto V, Los Angeles, urban theory, architecture, video games, virtual space, the Situationists, Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Collage City, Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Kevin Lynch The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 3 Contents Abstract: ........................................................................................................... 3 Contents ........................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: City Theory and LA ........................................................................ 7 Thinking through Collage ............................................................................... 8 Thinking through Situations......................................................................... 10 City Thinking ................................................................................................. 12 Mapping through Situations ......................................................................... 13 Mapping through Lynch ................................................................................ 14 Los Angeles .................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V......................................................................... 23 New Technology, New representations ......................................................... 25 Rockstar’s Naked City Los Santos ................................................................ 29 South Los Angeles and South Los Santos .................................................... 32 Del Perro and Santa Monica ......................................................................... 35 Downtown ...................................................................................................... 38 Pershing Square and Legion Square ............................................................ 40 The Minimap .................................................................................................. 43 Driving ........................................................................................................... 46 Unitary Urbanism ......................................................................................... 47 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 49 Bibliography ................................................................................................... 52 Images ............................................................................................................ 58 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 4 Introduction Video games today still struggle to be recognised within academia. In academia real world cities are presented and explained, whereas cities in video games are not studied. When the city of Los Angeles is described by Reyner Banham and Mike Davis, LA grows in influence in academia. Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) and Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) act as seminal texts for LA. However when Rockstar Games create Los Santos, there is a lack of formal critique in academia. Instead the texts on the Grand Theft Auto series of video games are sensationalist, citing misogyny, violent influence on children/adults, and even a possible cause for mass murders.1, 2, 3, This paper hopes to give a voice to the city of Los Santos and its depiction of Los Angeles. Los Santos is a parody of 2011 modern Los Angeles. It is a pastiche of the city of Los Angeles, which is selectively shrunk for the experience of the gamer. Los Santos represents Los Angeles through fragmentation, simplification and social stereotypes. The simplification of the modern city is a trope prevalent in postmodern cognitive mapping processes. The Situationists used the drift and psychogeographic mapping to create the cognitive map ‘The Naked City’ (1957) (Figure 3). The book Collage City (1978), by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, uses black and white figureground diagrams (Figure 13). Kevin Lynch Image of the City (1960) creates legible “Target: Withdraw Grand Theft Auto 5 – this sickening game encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women.” Change.org. Last modified Nov 2014. https://www.change.org/p/target-withdraw-grand-theft-auto-5-this-sickening-game-encouragesplayers-to-commit-sexual-violence-and-kill-women 2 “School principals threaten parents with police if kids play “Grand Theft Auto””.Cnet. Last Modified March 2015. http://www.cnet.com/au/news/school-principals-threaten-parents-with-policeif-kids-play-grand-theft-auto/ 3 “Training simulation:’ Mass Killers often share obsession with violent video games.” Foxnews. Last Modified Sept 2013. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/12/training-simulationmass-killers-often-share-obsession-with-violent-video-games/ 1 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 5 images of cities using his five elements (Figure 2). However Rockstar’s process in creating Los Santos is unknown to the public. By an analysis of postmodern cognitive mapping processes, we realise that these theorists have consistently created their own virtual cities as a response to modernism. Similarly Los Santos is a response by parody to modern 2011 Los Angeles. Therefore by an autopsy of postmodern tools, an urban perspective onto Grand Theft Auto V can be undertaken. This thesis is split into two chapters. ‘Chapter 1: City Theory and LA’ looks at postmodern city theory and the way Los Angeles has been theorised. It firstly underlines postmodern ways of thinking of the city by looking at the Situationists and Collage City. Using these thoughts it moves to tools used by the theorists in critiquing the modern order. More relevantly the chapter will end by gaining insight on Los Angeles’s specific urban condition. The second chapter ‘Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V’ juxtaposes Chapter One’s postmodern theories with Grand Theft Auto V. It begins by understanding Los Santos as a new virtual construction of Los Angeles. The way the city has been constructed from fragments is explored. Case studies into game locations including South Los Santos, Del Perro, and Downtown are undertaken, followed by an in-depth look at Legion Square. Analysing ideas of the minimap and driving, we then begin to understand how to experience these Los Santos fragments. Finally the paper finishes by delving into the freedom offered by the virtual. The following brief review aims to contribute to the growing work of games in academia and bring light to gaming from a new perspective. How can video game cities be understood using urban academic theory? Or specifically in this thesis, how can Rockstar's Los Santos be compared to Los Angeles using cognitive mapping and social criticisms of postmodern theorists? The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 6 Chapter 1: City Theory and LA The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 7 The rise of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was followed by a sled of sceptical postmodern theorists. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in Collage City (1978) encouraged the idea of understanding the city through a collaging of urban elements. The Situationists from the late 1950s to the early 1970s also explored the city through fragments. Both trains of thought originated as a response to modernism. They both seek to understand the city opposing ideals of rigidity and utopian designs. They advocated their ethos as a model by which the city can be read. By an analysis of these theorists, this chapter develops an overview for Los Santos to be compared to a postmodern reading of the city. Thinking through Collage Collage City critiques modernist ideals of utopia, arguing that cities are to be thought of a collage or collection of various different elements rather than as a singularity. It understands city objects through urban fabric and texture. It contrasts modernist proposals versus traditional cities such as Vittoria and Uffizi. Collage City then discusses the politics of what is defined as bricolage. Bricolage refers to the different sets of mesh that a city creates and the vast various representations each small piece can have. Bricolage highlights the differences in cities and is compared to the utopian modern ideals of a total design or total city. Bricolage has the intended effect of questioning utopian ideals as they prescribe a regime. The collage city is a postmodern city that can simultaneously be informed by tradition, yet aspire to a utopia. It is a chaotic composite that configures imperfect utopias to achieve greater human possibility. Collage City lets us understand the city as needing to be created more socially through the texture of its collage. The term texture refers to the plan, matrix or pattern, but also includes the materiality and use. From an understanding of the way texture plays a part in the city, an enhanced human expression of the city can be created. Rowe and Koetter proclaim that the architects and planners, who were occupied with the trophies and triumphs of culture, have The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 8 shamefully compromised possibilities and have foregone basic sanitary foundation.4 There has been an unfavourable connection to texture in the described mass building zones of Paris and Amsterdam due to the disregard of the human element. The focus had been placed on trophies and public facades. The buildings have been designed together in a hope to represent their triumphs in culture rather than for the common person. The overarching principles behind construction lay a foundation for non-social design, which changes texture of the city. Rowe also emphasises exclusion. He explores “…the way in which exclusion may gratify the imagination.”5 His idea is that if one is only made partially aware of a subject, then it leaves their imagination available to wander. There is a speculative pleasure available to the hindered city dweller. In contrast, to lay available all situations would be destructive of the speculative pleasure, similar to the banality of the completely illuminated room. Rowe’s critique in Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse highlights the concept. The absolute spatial freedoms of the Ville Radieuse and its derivatives are claimed to be “…without interest; and that, rather being empowered to walk everywhere- everywhere being almost the same…” and “… it would be more satisfying to be presented with exclusions…”5 Exclusion is more empowering than absolute freedom. There is no empowering moment in exploring a prefabricated homogeneity. Instead, rather than a city losing potential from being non-accessible, the aspect of unavailability brings added meaning to the environment. Rather than a singular totalitarian idea, Rowe argues that cities should be a collage of many ideas for purposes of general liberation. There is a relationship between the building and its urban context. Rowe who is concerned with this complex social relation states that architecture should never be fully resolved. Chapter four in Collage City entitled ‘Collision City and the Politics of ‘Bricolage’’ 4 5 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (MIT Press, 1998), 52. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 66. The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 9 introduces the term bricolage and uses it to understand the city. He advocates for urban planners to be bricoleur in order create and facilitate as many possibilities in the city. Through using laboratory specimens of Versaille and the Hadrian’s Villa, Rowe concludes that the city is in need of a bricoleur. Versailles is as a singular idea, an autocratic plan, and unitary model. It is a totality that has been executed through symmetry and politics. Villa Adriana from plan view appears apparently disorganised, and is construed from a variety of different floras and ideas. Villa Adriana is a mix of ideas, whereas Versailles is a concrete one. It has been argued through texture to allow for the joint existence of both the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned.6 However if one is to design through a singular autocratic seed, how can multiple ideas flourish? There is a beauty in a plethora of small ideas creating a larger coherent piece. Thinking through Situations The Situationists believed that capitalism, through the spectacle of wants, had caught society in a trance and that to truly live one must wake from this condition. To do so, we as humans needed to deliberately create situations that would reawaken our true authentic desires. The Situationists thought that the current, mid-twentieth century city was toxic. The advances of technology in the 1950s applied to the city of Paris were merely viewed as an untrustworthy glamorisation of state and corporate power. The city had become increasingly irrelevant to the ordinary person, their lives being much more colourful than their monotone urban fabric. Modernism had introduced new technology into construction and created zones reflecting modern ideals of order and efficiency. Past examples of Le Corbusier’s gleaming white concrete houses of the 1920s such as the Weissenhof Estate or Mies subsequent creation of glass skyscrapers such as The 6 Ibid., 83 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 10 Seagram Building, were exactly the type of architecture that the Situationists refused.7 The Situationists critiqued the new modernist areas of the built environment as they felt it was creating a prefabricated city. Guy Debord from the Situationists claimed that this homogeneity was removing elements of selfexpression. It was believed to destroy its inhabitant’s creativity and ambition. Modernism was viewed as a dystopian vision, creating slaves to the capital and enforcing a totalitarian regime. To stop our slavery the Situationists concluded there needed to be a new way to create cities. They claimed the current trend of modernism had created a form of rigidity of the city where there need not be, casting forth a mask on itself and hiding the inner soul. Simon Sadler’s Situationist City (1998) is an attempt to construct their theories in a coherent manner through tracing the history of fragments left behind by the Situationists.8 Sadler’s interpretation of the Situationists beliefs, was that that there was life teeming underneath the city that had yet to be acknowledged. His interpretations, based on Debord’s scripts, is that “If one peeled away this official representation of modernity and urbanism, the spectacle, the reality consisting of images, products, activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy, one will discover the authentic life of the city…”9 The Situationists wanted to see through the planning and capital of society. They wanted to depict the true essence of the city. Through looking at the true essence of the city, theoretically the Situationists could design a city that could create an unlimited deployment of new passions. The Situationists had idealised that their architecture could one day liberate the ordinary citizen into a “world of experiment, anarchy, and play.”10 To understand the city in a more phenomenological way they employed a self-created technique called the psychogeographic drift. Psychogeography was considered playful and Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 1 Sadler, The Situationist City, 16 9 Ibid. 7 8 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 11 cheap by the Situationists and contrasted to the academic or high art experience of museums. They wanted to read the city as a populist, to understand what their common person would see. Instead Sadler interprets that if they had read the city from a stifling, pompous and enclosed world of high culture it would not reflect the true life or flavours of the city. Hence the idea of psychogeography would reflect the city’s hidden social geography located underneath the academic facade of what they considered to be the scientific taxonomy of physical factors.10 The Situationists would drift from “area to area, in the hope of finding provocative interloctors or strange and moving encounters.”11 They would map out their experiential journeys and record their thoughts. Their maps attempted to reveal the social geography, a real, theorized space as the product of a natural society.12 Through these maps, journeys and thought processes, the Situationists rebelled against the modernist geography and tried to reveal the inner soul of Paris. City Thinking When understanding Los Angeles it is important to recognise how the city has previously been conceived. The Situationists and Collage City both theorised in works that contradict the trending modernist mentality. The Situationists rejected modernist proposals and aimed to discover Paris’s social psychogeography. Rowe and Koetter advocated for a bricolage in the master design of a city. Both postmodern ideas are ways to subjectively understand a city. They create a framework that has been filtered from reality. When diagnosing Los Angeles and Los Santos, these ideas will become useful as interpretational sifters to shake the city into digestible form. Ibid., 69. Peter Wollen, 2004. Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art. (New York: Verso, 2004), 30. 12 Kristin Ross. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. In Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 85. 10 11 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 12 Furthermore following their new thought processes, the Situationists attempted to construct the city through a new blueprint. The Guide psychogèographique de Paris (1965) [The Psychogeographic guide to Paris] by Debord and Naked City (1957) by Asgar Jorn13 served as alternate maps of Paris. Both men had drifted the city and recorded their experiences, representing their surreal disorientations of the city by scattering and rotating pieces of maps. In this way it is as though there is a blueprint of Paris that has been engaged upon by the Situationists and reconstructed by their thought processes. Within the context of Los Angeles and Los Santos, an understanding of a mapping process then becomes vital. A mapping process directly links to ways of understanding the built environment. A map is a virtual statement of a city. When diagnosing Los Santos a critique of its map is essential. Therefore the next two sections will delve into the Situationists and Kevin Lynch’s seminal mapping ideas. Mapping through Situations The Situationist views on mapping clashed with the cartography of the modern. Modernity was seen as omnipotent, a direct overview of the street, one that would never be witnessed in the ordinary denizen. Contrastingly the maps of the Situationists were human scale reconstructions of imagination, stitching together a participation of space that was, as Sadler puts it “terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural.”14 The Situationists suggested “possible living environments” and “declared an intimacy with the city[,] alien to the average street map.”14 The view of the city they wanted to represent would be akin to having guidelines for areas with an undefined objective. They would attempt to introduce the pedestrian to the city’s social cores and have the areas themselves tell a unique story to the wandering individual. Hence the city would be a theatre itself, its actors 13 14 Figure 3, page 18 Sadler, The Situationist City, 82 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 13 clad with the makeup of hot summer pavements, playing their natural roles on the streets. The psychogeographic drift offered a new way of exploring the urban vernacular. Debord’s and Jorn’s goals were to “put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lay beneath its surface.” 15 They note that through the twist and turns of Paris, it would be impossible without omnipotent assistance for a private person to escape the labyrinth of the city.16 To bypass the dictated order of the city, the Situationists generated their own versions of maps. These would be used in order to guide the user in a more phenomenological manner. These maps are made up of fragmented, cut and torn parts of the original Paris map. They would appear to have no order, and work to undo the structure and order of regular maps. It would include the rich experiential zones, and leave blank the intermission areas of the city. The Situationists hoped the maps would highlight situations within the Parisian city. Mapping through Lynch Kevin Lynch was an influential American urban planner. His seminal work Image of the City (1960) underlines how the citizen reads the city through imageability. Lynch writes that “there seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images.”17 He wanted to find clarity and a method to understand the city. His method was devised through a series of interviews with locals, where the imageability of the city would depend entirely on the clarity of locals’ knowledge. This local image of the city would be a combination of the many layers of city perceptions and not just a single objective view. The Ibid. Guy-Ernest Debord, “De l’architecture sauvage,” introduction to Asger Jorn , Le Jardin d’Albisola Turin: Pozzo 1974. trans. Thomas Y. Levin as “On Wild Architecture,” in Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957 – 1972 Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. in Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 174-175. 15 16 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 14 variants were all dependent on each other, emotional, physical or otherwise.17 It would be a social read of the city. For the purposes of creating a tangible social read of the city, Lynch developed five elements. Lynch’s five elements are: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Figure 2 Kevin Lynch, “Figure 14. The visual form of Los Angeles as seen in the field,” Scanned image. Source: Lynch, Kevin. The Image Of The City. Cambridge: MIT press, 1960. 151. Lynch’s interviewees paid close attention to paths. He attributes this due to the pedestrian intimacy with the street map. The street map determines directions to a location using paths. Therefore through an obligation to the street map, it becomes a requirement of the populace to navigate via paths. Paths are defined as channels through which the observer can move. They usually consist of streets, sidewalks, railroads, and canals. Described by Lynch, they can be construed as a network of religious or potential means of travel through the urban environment, 17 Kevin Lynch, The Image Of The City (MIT Press, 1960) 46. The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 15 and are “The most potent means by which the whole can be ordered.”18 Lynch writes about paths generating clarity and how some paths can create confusion. One type of confusion caused is by misaligned paths. When writing about Boston, Lynch notes that there was one such misleading curve that disorientated many of the populace. The curve from Massachusetts Avenue at Falmouth Street was not scribed by many interviewees. Instead they had assumed Massachusetts Avenue to be straight and wrongly sensed right angle intersections with many of its connecting streets. These streets were drawn parallel rather than in their correct orientation. Therefore due to the single misleading curve on a key path, the rest of the city became disorientated. Frequently as a result of these inaccuracies, maps drawn were skewered. The misaligned path caused confusion with the legibility and clarity of the city. Edges are the linear elements that are not considered paths but make distinctions from one zone to another. Shores, edges of developments and walls are examples of edges. Inclusively, edges may be also be seams, and join two related regions together. They may also be penetrable or impenetrable, and act as visual anchors for the city.19 In Los Angeles20 a clear Lynchian edge when visualising the city would be the shore along the water’s edge.21 The shore acts as a clear identifier for the populace to identify and image the city. Another edge would be the highway surrounding downtown as shown in Lynch’s diagram of LA. Darkened black by Lynch, the Harbor Freeway and Hollywood Freeway stand prominent as edges of the district.19 Another element is districts. Districts form the medium to large volumes of the city, and observers mentally enter within their bounds. Lynch’s observers usually structure their city in terms of districts, identifying them as one of the most Lynch, The Image Of The City, 96. Ibid., 40-41. 20 Greater Los Angeles region is used. 21 Lynch, The Image Of The City, 33. Fig. 14. 18 19 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 16 important imageability aspects, on par with paths.19 The downtown zone acts as a district in Los Angeles.21 It is understandable as a physical zone due to its ‘skyline’. Though relatively small in the 1950s, the taller building types denoted the area as district. Nodes are specific points that intensely hold directions of multiple paths or shifts in one experience to another. They can be junctions or crossings, and when the nodes become the focus and epitome of an area they can stand as a symbol and be called cores. They are related to districts and can sometimes be within the crossing of one district to another. In the heart of Los Angeles, Lynch has determined Pershing square to act as a node and core.22 The fifth element landmarks, are a point reference, an external mark that the observer uses to understand his or her place in the city. Sometimes they are iconic buildings, sometimes mountains or monumental areas, but in all cases they are distinct and regularly give identity to the city. In the context of Los Angeles, Lynch understands Los Angeles City Hall to be a landmark through its figure-background contrast and spatial location. Lynch uses the five elements to create diagrammatic maps of the city. These maps represent the imageability of a city. They are mapped by social mechanisms rather than a non-pedestrian satellite view. The idea of making a map from an emotive process is also present within the Situationists. The Situationists believed that as traditional planning had grown up under a modern rationalist umbrella, the intricacies of the city had largely been ignored. Guide psychogèographique de Paris and the Naked City23 are landmark images that demonstrate the importance of these intricacies. The images brought to attention the civil practices of the city. Similarly Lynch’s method for diagramming cities was directly related to a populist understanding; he would talk with the inhabitants and extract data based on field reconnaissance from interviews. His interpretations were derived directly from the data of a social understanding of each city. Both of these methods would determine 22 23 Ibid. Figure 3, Page 17 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 17 an emotional response to the city. Both methods would also generate new types of cartography; The Situationists, a jagged rotated city and in Lynch’s case, a diagrammatic city that represented the image of the city. Figure 3 Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, The Naked City: illustration de l’hypothése [sic] des plaques tournates en psychogeographic [sic], 1957, screenprint. Found in Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 60 Los Angeles In Lynch’s overview of Los Angeles, the city has been diagrammed according to interviews. However Lynch’s studies were focused on Boston, and LA received less depth than is required for a deep city analysis. Understanding LA is essential when discerning Los Santos, as Los Santos is based on LA. Therefore in addition to Lynch, texts specifically based on Los Angeles will be invoked. Authors such as Reyner Banham and Mike Davis have written seminal texts on LA. Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies celebrates the city through a favourable depiction of the city’s four ecologies. Comparatively in City of Quartz: Excavating The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 18 the Future in Los Angeles, Davis takes multiple examples of ruined public spaces and depicts the city as a dystopian landscape. Both authors depict the same city with contrasting representations. Where Banham’s critics would name his work a postcolonial appreciation of LA, Davis’ critics have denoted his work as an exaggerated scepticism of LA.24 Lynch writes about the lessened priority of downtown. When the elements of Lynch had been applied to Los Angeles it was as though the heart of the city was not really in the city at all. Lynch writes “the central area is still by courtesy ‘downtown’ but there are several other basic cores to which people are oriented.” LA did not conform to a city centre like other cities. In fact Lynch noted that “great numbers of citizens never enter the downtown area from one year to the next.”25 There is a form of decentralisation in LA. Banham also recognises that Los Angeles as a city does not strive as the conventional city with its life concentrated at city centre. Instead it thrives outside the walls of glass skyscrapers. LA has its essence bleed inwards from the outside, where its culture shapes the city more than the skyline. His opinion of downtown was it was “neither very attractive nor historically rewarding”.26 Furthermore, Banham’s obligatory chapter on downtown is indifferently named “A note on downtown” and is the shortest chapter on the book, spanning only eleven pages. He expands early in the chapter that the book only has the aforementioned note on downtown because “that is all downtown [deserves]” Instead the book’s chapters revolve around the various other cultures found in LA. Both Lynch and Banham seem to agree on the decentralisation of downtown in Los Angeles. The decentralisation of downtown is further emphasised by Banham writing that LA displays its true culture by the beach’s front shore. Banham writes “The Rooksby, Edward. “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Book Review).” Capital&Class 32 (2008): 151–154. 25 Lynch, The Image Of The City, 33 26 Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 19-21 24 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 19 Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city.” and even going as far to say “Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world”.27 It is in this way that the culture of the beach becomes a “symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society”, where man’s needs are reduced to “usually a pair of frayed shorts and sun-glasses”.27 Away from the draconian skyscrapers of modernism, it is here on the yellow roads of sand that all men in LA become equal and stand on common ground, frayed shorts and all. The “Sun, sand, and surf are held to be [the] ultimate and [most] transcendental values”,27 the surfboards being “… the prime symbolic and functional artefact”,28 proudly displayed upright on beaches as the clear fiberglass trophies of LA. The beach ecology screams aloud and is as evident as LA’s left arm, its social geography being mapped to the body as clearly as tattoo on skin. In Banham’s Four Ecologies it becomes clear, that “The beach is what life is all about in Los Angeles.” 27 Contrasting to the open landscapes of beach, Davis’ image of LA is as a securitised fortress. Davis’ claims that LA lies on the bad edge of postmodernity with an uncanny capacity to blend urban design, architecture and police apparatus into a single surveillance stream.29 Davis mentions developer Alexander Haagen’s strategy for recolonizing metropolis markets as a “… shopping mall surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower.”29 He then argues of this situation creating a panopticon. The shopping mall becomes a prison. Through Davis’ eyes the LAPD surveillance tower could be seen as a landmark for those who inhibit the district of shopping centres. The shopping mall then becomes a securitised district in which one is to walk into. Once inside the mall, the landmark of the LAPD surveillance tower acts as a point of reference for all participants of the space. As a landmark, the LAPD surveillance tower guides participators’ mental identification of the district into a zone where they are Ibid. Ibid., 31 29 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. (Vintage Books, 1990), 223-226 27 28 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 20 continually being watched. This landmark identifies the users, akin to a prisoner being watched and identified in a jail. Davis notes how the term ‘street person’ has a stigma of contemporary opprobrium. Previous nodes of accessibility, with edges towards public parks can now be seen as separate districts on a social level, the district's home to the notoriety of the “homeless and wretched”.29 There is a “militarization of city life” “grimly visible at the street level.”29 The condition being exuberated by the “burgeoning middle-class demands for security”.30 It becomes as though ‘middleclass demands of security’ creates the commodity of surveillance as a ‘positional good defined by income access’. This in turn antagonises against the ‘homeless and wretched’ areas of public space. In short the chase of security, forces public space to be neglected and slip through the cracks of urban fabric. Instead the panopticon of shopping malls is preferred and it is there that public space becomes sentenced to its death. Highways are important in Los Angeles. Lynch indicates that traffic and the highway systems were dominant aspects of many interviews. Users wrote of highways being a daily ritual going from “exciting” to “tense and exhausting”. There were frequent references to the fun of overpasses, and large interchanges, creating “kinaesthetic sensations of dropping, turning and climbing.”31 Through Lynch, the freeway acts as almost a modern playground for the adult, the ‘kinaesthetic sensations’ mimicking that of a child. Banham also agrees with the importance of the freeway. He notes that there are many markers and characteristics about LA and while some are close, others are spread far away. It then becomes a given that the freeway is the network that ties everything together and hence is of significant importance. Banham writes it is “what the tutelary deity of the City of Angels should wear upon her head” as though there is a deity of LA to wear the highway as William Cunningham and Todd Taylor, ‘A Summary of the Hallcrest Report’. The Police Chief (1983): 31. 31 Lynch, The Image Of The City, 42 30 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 21 a tiara.32 Banham’s depiction of the highway crowns the city with the importance of the road. Los Angeles is depicted as being both a relaxing beach city, and a militarised fortress. By Banham’s standards, LA can be enjoyed through the beach. The beach is a place of relaxation and recreation. Contrastingly, Davis’ considers LA to host prisons through its shopping malls. LA is thought of both as a place of private security, and as an open shore. The panopticons and open sands both depict representations of the zones of Los Angeles. Two more representations of Los Angeles areas are on Downtown and the highway. Downtown is portrayed by both Lynch and Banham to not be a centrepiece of the city. Lynch denotes by his elements that downtown is not an imageable part of the city. If a zone is not imageable, then by extrapolation it can hardly be important. Furthermore, Banham in his book based on LA ecologies, intentionally lacks in depth discussion on downtown in favour of other ecologies. Instead ecologies such as autopia, which denote the high use of roads and the highway, are expressed. These presentations give a representation of Los Angeles by which Los Santos can be compared to in chapter two. Lynch’s five elements constitute a framework by which cities can be analysed. He writes that the process outlined in the book is only that in itself, a process.33 Likewise the Situationists developed the process of drifting, and have used it for creating their own maps. The fragmented maps of Guide psychogèographique de Paris and Naked City23 reflect the process of the drift. In both scenarios the maps are directly derived from the postmodern tools, and these tools are derived from the way of thinking. Essentially each theorist creates a virtual idea of how the city could be viewed. By juxtaposition between postmodernist thinking and Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar’s ideals in creating Los Santos can be analysed. 32 33 Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of For Ecologies, 18 Lynch, Image Of The City, 14 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 22 Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 23 Figure 4 Vira-cocha, “A comparison of size between Los Santos and California,” 2013. Digital Image. Source: Gaming Stackxchange, posted 25 Sept 2013, accessed 10 Sept, 2015, http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/131253/grand-theft-auto-5-los-santos-civilian-population. The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 24 New Technology, New representations The Grand Theft Auto series originated from game developer DMA Design (Now Rockstar North but indicated as popularly known Rockstar or Rockstar Games) in 1997. Since then it has become largely popular and today has eleven major titles and four expansion packs. Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is an actionadventure video game which has become infamous for its violent gameplay. This violent gameplay is reflected by the game's title that is an American colloquial term for vehicle theft. The latest instalment of the series, called Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV), follows three protagonists as two try to escape the ghosts of their past criminal lives, while an amateur gangster watches and follows in their footsteps. Players eventually take control of all three characters while playing out a customisable script, similar to the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure book series for children. Figure 5 Dave “Interactive slider between Third Street Promenade and Prosperity Street Promenade,” HTML 5 Applied Image. Source: “Grand Theft Auto in Real Life,” gtaist, posted Jan 27, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.gtaist.com/grand-theft-auto-in-real-life/ The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 25 Online media ripple with admiration for Rockstar’s technological prowess depicted in Los Santos’ realism. Before the release of Grand Theft Auto V, user TreeFitty painstakingly identified 161 referenced places, buildings, or landscapes from Los Angeles using solely the original 2011, one and a half minute trailer.34 An online article by Kotaku juxtaposes Del Perro to Santa Monica. 35 GTAist compares Downtown Los Santos to Downtown LA through an interactive slider as shown in Figure 5. Playstation demonstrates by video a bike ride split screen comparison through LA and Los Santos beaches.36 In each case, the realistic graphical qualities of Grand Theft Auto V are cited, with their conclusions being that Los Santos represents Los Angeles. Furthermore CorridorDigital, a digital effects youtube-founded company, has released a video eerily depicting a Grand Theft Auto life using real life as fauxgraphics.37 The physical environment is used to simulate playing in the virtual world as seen in Figure 6. There is a swap of reality and the virtual. The viewer is tricked into watching the ‘character’ move through Los Santos’s Galileo Observatory, Canals, and Vinewood Hills. However in reality the player moves through Los Angeles Griffith Observatory, the Canals, and Hollywood Hills. The film’s influence helps one question the relationship between fact and fiction in video games. These correlations of the experience in LA and Los Santos show the virtual’s capability for capturing the iconic attributes of life. As a gaming platform, both its technology and virtual texture are foundational factors in what constitutes Los Santos. When Rowe and Koetter were writing Collage City pre-1978, the fax machine and photocopier were two TreeFitty, “GTA 5 Landmarks and Other Buildings,” iGTAV, last modified Sept 04, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015. http://www.igta5.com/landmarks-and-other-buildings 35 Luke Plunkett, “GTA V’’s Los Santos vs The Real Los Angeles,” Kotaku, Feb 02, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://kotaku.com/gta-vs-los-santos-vs-the-real-los-angeles-1683384124 36 Playstation Access, “GTA V vs Real Life: How Realistic Is Grand Theft Auto V?,” Youtube, posted Sep 17, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqYrnoj4O9s 37 CorridorDigital, “Real GTA”, Youtube, posted June 08, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=0ZZquVylLEo 34 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 26 innovations that had been gaining traction in the previous decade. Many fax machines and photocopier models at the time had capacity to only print in a pure black or white shade. The figure ground diagrams by Rowe and Koetter are constituted in a black and white image of the city’s fabric. The diagram, while obviously impacted by Giambattista Nolli’s map for Rome, can also be described in terms of the history of technology. Through a simplification of the city it shows relationships between the built and unbuilt space. In this light one can see how the limited colour and value range of technology influenced the thought process of Collage City. Figure 6 CorridorDigital “Real imitating the Virtual,” Screencap of video, 0:51/3:22. Source: “Real GTA,” Youtube, posted Jun 08, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=0ZZquVylLEo Similarly to the limitations of technology influencing Rowe and Koetter, Rockstar games are also influenced through the technology of their own time. Since the development of the game the timeline of technology has enabled environments The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 27 to be virtually created from 2D to 3D. In 2001 Grand Theft Auto III became the first Grand Theft Auto instalment to be in 3D. Compared to the original bird's eye view from Grand Theft Auto 1, the change in technology since Grand Theft Auto III allows viewers to understand the game from a more immersive third person point of view. This new advance in technology literally gave a new dimension to the game, and enabled players to experience the fictional cities in more depth. Through technology the newest adaptation Grand Theft Auto V (2015 for PC) boasts the most developed and detailed city of the series. By using virtual taxis as a measuring tool it has been estimated that Grand Theft Auto III has 4.01 km2 of playable space, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) has 8.89 km2, and Grand Theft Auto V has 45.52 km2.38 Using these figures Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos then has more than three times the combined area of all its 3D predecessors. Furthermore each fragment of the newer virtual city becomes more detailed and executed through the increased technology found in today’s latest generation consoles. The Playstation 2 in which Grand Theft Auto III was released, boasts up to 5 million flexible polygons.39 The Playstation 4 that Grand Theft Auto V released a port for, can withstand 1,600 billion flexible polygons.40 A difference of more than 320x the amount of polygons on screen can be rendered, which creates a substantial difference in the quality and realism of the environment. Through these polygons, can Los Santos have a texture akin to Los Angeles? Through Rowe and Koetter, texture can be thought of taking elements of a human visage within a city. The façade is not enough for a deep textural reasoning. As Los Santos is a fictional theatrical construction it could be said that the human texture is missing in the virtual realm of Grand Theft Auto V. One could identify the “GTA Map Size Comparison,” 4FuN gaming, accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivELtVTjIyQ 39 TigerSuperman, “When Comparing the Dreamcast to the PS2, was the PS2 really stronger?,” Gamespot, accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-discussion1000000/when-comparing-the-dreamcast-to-the-ps2-was-the-ps-29413628/ 40 Shredenvain, “XB1/PS4 Polygon Pushing Power,” last modified Oct 06, 2015, https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/xb1-ps4-polygon-pushing-power.55222/. 38 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 28 virtuality of the game and reduce every face to three triangulated points in space. They could not see the construction of Los Santos’ perspective through the screen and instead only see pixels, a falsified attempt to generate three dimensions in the monitors simple two dimensional surface. In this way of Los Santos being fictional, is it still possible for one to still feel texture through its intangible touch? Using ideas of relativity, perhaps there is a possibility games can have a texture of a true city. Philosopher Brain Massumi writes on relativity in his book Parables of the Virtual (2002). He frames the actions of football players to be of the upmost importance when one is submerged in the game. When the ball has been kicked, he refers to it not as a simple localised action, but instead as if one exists within the rules of the game, the kicking of the ball creates a global event. Suddenly through reasons of relativity, the game of football can generate a new world of experience. The football match becomes virtually palpable in the mind. Can this logic not also apply to video games? Specifically can these ideas of relativity apply to Los Santos? If one accepts the rules of virtuality that come with the video game, then the pixels, polygons, and absence of physical form disappear in the mind of the player. The virtual game world becomes an authentic real world. For the serious gamer the virtuality of the game is not of unidimensional pleasure, but instead is of as real of a reality as a fan or player partaking in their favourite sport. Through relativity games can have the texture of a real city. Rockstar’s Naked City Los Santos Los Santos can be revealed as a way of perceiving Los Angeles. This idea is similar to the way the Situationists interpreted Paris via their maps. By defining Psychogeography, the drift enabled the Situationists to have the relevant tools for generating their own representation of Paris. ‘The Naked City’ by Debord41 is one of these images. ‘The Naked City’ is composed of nineteen separate fragments of a 41 Figure 3, Page 17 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 29 map of Paris. ‘The Naked City’ is flat black and white, with directions and movement hinted by red arrows. The colour, size, abstraction and playfulness of the arrows highlight the emphasis on movement and on exploration as being more important than the parchments of map itself. The pieces of the collaged Paris cutouts are carefully curated to strengthen the Situationists’ goal of an experiential and narrative map. ‘The Naked City’ was the Situationists’ virtual understanding of how Paris should be traversed. Figure 1 Mark Teo, “Naked Los Angeles, comparing The Naked City of the Situationists with Los Santos,” 2015. Digital Image. The Situationists wanted to understand Paris by making a map subject to the will of the psychological experience.42 Similarly Rockstar’s mapping concepts can be viewed through the process of games being designed as a played space. Games are 42 See page 11 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 30 designed to be a psychological experience.43 The idea of psychogeography is translated into game design as developers create geography for the player to experience. Games are rigorously play-tested to see how new users interact with the environment. The game is then continuously reformatted with results of playtesting to create a more immersive experience. Los Santos is no doubt an iteration of thousands of hours of play-tests to create an immersive city. Similar to ‘The Naked City’, Los Santos exists to create a psychological experience. Thomas F. McDonough writes in his article ‘Situationist Space’ about the importance of capturing iconic attributes of the city. McDonough notes that the title ‘The Naked City’ was an appropriation of an American 1948 detective noir film entitled The Naked City. He quotes Parker Tyler describing the American movie in The Three Faces of the Film saying “In Naked City it is Manhattan Island and its streets and landmarks that are starred. The social body is thus, through architectural symbol, laid bare (“naked”)…” This description alludes that the title of the pyschogeographic map ‘The Naked City’ references the movie directly through the symbolism of ‘starring’ important places. Instead of ‘starring’ Manhattan streets, it is rather the icons of Paris that have been ‘starred’. A viewing of the map indicates Parisian landmarks such as the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Gare de Lyon, and the Pantheon, to be highlighted, showing their ‘starred’ importance. In Los Santos, iconic zones such as Downtown, South Los Angeles and Santa Monica have been included. The architectural symbols and districts are then “laid bare (“naked”)” in the structure of the map. Three regions that constitute Los Santos are, South Los Santos, Del Perro, Downtown and Legion Square. These regions represent South Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Downtown and Pershing Square. John Hopson, “Behavioral Game Design,” Gamesutra, accessed Oct 06, 2015, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php. 43 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 31 South Los Angeles and South Los Santos The South Los Angeles region consists of 25 neighbourhoods, whereas South Los Santos is a mesh of 5 districts. South Los Santos’ districts are Davis, Strawberry, Chamberlain Hills, Rancho, and Banning. The corresponding archetypes in Los Angeles are Compton, Inglewood, Crenshaw, Watts, and Wilmington. The name Rancho most likely comes from the 1843 original Rancho La Tajuta Mexican land grant on which Watts, Los Angeles is built upon. Rancho has both high gang activity and high crime rate. The two fictional gangs, the Los Santos Vagos and the Varrios Los Aztecas reside in this area. South Los Angeles can be best understood through its reputation and history. Mike Davis’ City of Quartz is notable for distinctively envisioning tensions that painted the scenario in which the 1992 Los Angeles riots occurred. The riots are iconic of the area. They involved a series of arsons, riots and lootings that started within South Central Los Angeles. They had been the largest riots the city had witnessed since the Watts Riot of 1965. From the 1992 riot was there was estimated property damage of over $1 billion, 53 people killed, and 2,000 injured.44 These events and reputation paint the scheme for which the canvas of South Los Santos is rendered within Grand Theft Auto V. South Los Santos hosts a large housing project complex on the south. These project houses are uncanny in their appearance to Nickerson gardens in Watts, Los Angeles. The Nickerson Gardens are a famous townhouse completed in 1955 by William Nickerson, Jr.45 In addition, they are a recognised haunt of the Bounty Hunter Bloods gang.46 In Los Santos the housing complex is made of white brick, barred windows, and cell like divisions. This virtual construction reflects the physical form of the Nickerson Gardens as seen in Figure 7. Furthermore the Stan Wilson, “Riot anniversary tour surveys progress and economic challenges in Los Angeles," CNN, accessed Sept 10, 2015. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/25/us/california-post-riot/index.html?hpt=us_t4 45 Dennis Freeman, "Nickerson Gardens Targeted for Redevelopment". Los Angeles Sentinel, March 25, 2004, 11. 46 Hector Becerra, “A quiet night’s menace,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 17, 2007, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-gangstory17nov17-story.html 44 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 32 project houses in Los Santos hosts the Los Santos Vagos gang. There is gang notoriety in both Los Santos’ white unnamed project houses and the Nickerson Gardens. Furthermore Rancho is a trigger point for a random crime encounter in Grand Theft Auto V. In games it is common to have programmed encounters with events relative to an area. These programmed encounters are given with a probability aspect to imitate reality. In Rancho, there is a programmed encounter of a bike theft. In this scenario a random criminal steals the bike of a civilian, and the player needs to chase the criminal and return the stolen bike to the victimised owner. Through this programmed encounter as a narrative the game pontificates the region as being dangerous. There is a similarity of reputation and violence in South Los Angeles that is reflected in South Los Santos. Rockstar use the emotional landmark of violence and gangs as an anchor point in which to portray South Los Santos. Figure 7 “A Comparison of Nickerson Gardens (Left) with South Los Santos housing complex (Right)” 2015. Digital Collage. Source: Left, genius.com. Image of Nickerson Gardens, accessed 6 Sept, 2015, http://genius.com/3869626. Right, Cableline Network “GTA V All Gang locations,” Screencap of video, 2:49/7:03, Youtube, posted Sep 22, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D78aiRYVhzQ Baldwin Village in Los Angeles is a community part of the Crenshaw district. It was renamed after the prosperous Baldwin Hills neighbourhood nearby. Chamberlain Hills is part of South Los Santos. When viewing the figure-ground diagram of Los Santos, Chamberlain Hills can be shown as dense white blocks with The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 33 courtyards as seen in Figure 8. In-game these blocks are low rise apartment buildings. The low rise construction in Chamberlain Hills appears to represent the iconic Baldwin Village community in Los Angeles. The solids and voids visible in the figure-ground zone of Chamberlain Hills are typical of the Baldwin Village apartment community. Furthermore, Baldwin Village appears in 2001 film Training Day as a dangerous area in which the protagonist is afraid of being trapped inside due to gang violence. Franklin a protagonist in Grand Theft Auto V was born in Chamberlain Hills. He is part of one of ‘The Families’ gang, specifically the ‘Chamberlain Gangster Families’ (CGF). If Franklin harms any of the CGF gang in the area he will be attacked by the district. In film the area is shown as a place of hostility. This danger is reflected in the game through the unbalanced see-saw of violence and peace. The reputation of Baldwin Village is mimicked in Chamberlain Hills. In this way, this is one district that Rockstar have depicted in South Los Santos. Together with the other four zones of South Los Santos, Rockstar attempt to portray South Los Santos as South Los Angeles. Figure 8 Mark Teo, “Comparison of Baldwin Village with Chamberlain Hills,” 2015. Digital Collage. Sources: Google Earth, Los Santos Figure-Ground Diagram, and Satellite view of Los Santos. The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 34 Del Perro and Santa Monica47 Del Perro in Grand Theft Auto V is a parody of Santa Monica in California. Santa Monica is a beachfront city in the Los Angeles County, California. It is a famed resort town and is home to Hollywood celebrities, surfers, and executives. The accompanying Grand Theft Auto V manual writes that "Del Perro is a laidback, trendy beachfront community made up of hip tanned new-agey-type yuppies and hip tanned new-agey-type homeless people. Bums on Del Perro beach have a higher standard of living than most of the rest of the United States." The bold statements of Rockstar in their descriptions of Del Perro enforce and mock the opulent and surf lifestyle of Santa Monica. Taking a specific street for inspection, Prosperity Street Promenade clearly draws from Third Street Promenade as reference, see Figure 10. Third Street Promenade is identified as an upscale dining, shopping and entertainment complex. Supporting the upscale shopping in Third Street, Rockstar name their recreation of the street as Prosperity Street Promenade, which clearly uses the word prosperity as a play on the opulent reputation of the shops. Where Third Street boasts more than 100 shops, its virtual counterpart holds only 29. There is a clear difference in shops and Los Santos does not try to assimilate every detail. H&M nor any other large retail chain appears in the virtual reconstruction. In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi and Brown understand that the silhouette of the enormous Chippendale highboy is visible before the building itself. 48 The sign for the building takes priority over the actual function. Likewise in Prosperity Street Promenade, its character is defined by an overall sign rather than the specifics. Third street promenade as an image can be defined by its pedestrian pathway, centre landscaping, and a procession of palm trees. Similarly Prosperity Street Promenade It must be noted that Santa Monica in California is politically not part of the Greater Los Angeles district. Nonetheless socially, Santa Monica and LA are frequently bundled due to their proximity and culture. Banham also groups Santa Monica into greater Los Angeles in Four Ecologies. 48 Robert Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1972), 9. 47 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 35 carries similar imageability. It includes the same dual pedestrian pathways, centre landscaping and iconic palm trees. The street tries to take powerful characteristics of the original and embodies a general feel of the original, rather than a complete copy. Figure 9. “Comparison of Astro Theatre in Los Santos (Left) with AMC in Santa Monica (Right),” 2015. Digital Collage. Source: Left, “Astro Theaters,” Screencap in GTA V, gtawiki, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Astro_Theaters. Right, “[AMC],” Screenshot, Google Streetview, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.google.com.au/maps/search/AMC+santa+monica/@34.0161949,-118.4980942,18z AMC in Santa Monica is a cinema located on the corner of Arizona Ave and Third Steet Promenade. In Prosperity Street Promenade there is a cinema at one of the corners along the intersection of Red Desert Avenue. The cinema is part of Grand Theft Auto’s fictional franchise Astro Theaters. Prosperity Street Promenade’s Astro Theater draws physical and symbolistic similarities to AMC’s Santa Monica as seen in Figure 9. Astro Theater is predominately a box with prominent arches at both fronts. Similarly AMC also can be perceived as a box with prominent arches at both street faces. However it must be noted that Astro Theatre is coloured a dark brown, whereas AMC is a light cream pink. Furthermore the canopy on the Astro theatre is considerably less outstanding than in the AMC theatre. Both the colour difference and the subtle change in architecture could be considered to be a design factor for the cinema as a symbol. The darker colour contrasts to both the bright yellow Astro cinema logo and the film listings. Also the The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 36 reduction of the canopy strengthens both the entrances and the cinema signs. The abatement in unnecessary elements reinforces the greater symbol. From a distance the Astro theatre reads more like a stereotypical cinema than AMC Santa Monica. Figure 10 “Comparison of Prosperity Street Promenade (Left) with Third Street Boulevard (Right),” 2015. Photo Collage. Source: Left, “Several views of Prosperity Street Promenade,” Cropped, gtawiki, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 ,http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Prosperity_Street_Promenade. Right, Wedding Mapper, “[Prosperity Street],” Photograph, accessed 10 Sept, 2015 http://www.weddingmapper.com/wedding_vendors/ca/santa_monica/parks_recreation/32 This idea of bold communication is demonstrated in the famous concept of the Venturi’s duck’s and decorated sheds. The duck was named after a roadside building in Eastern Long Island that looked like a duck. Using this example Venturi hoped to emphasise the image of the building over the process or form.49 As the building looked like a duck, it was a bold symbol alluding to the sale of ducks and eggs. The other idea is the decorated shed. The decorated shed is a generic structure that is only identifiable due to signs.49 Without the signs or applied ornamentation they cannot be understood. In the case of Astro theatre and AMC Santa Monica, it can be suggested that they are both decorated sheds. Without signage or ornamentation, neither can be instantly recognised as a cinema. Nonetheless there 49 Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, 64-65 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 37 is an idea of a symbol and bold communication in Astro Theatre. Astro Theatre can be considered to have greater decorations than AMC Santa Monica. Its design emphasizes the sign through the reduction of lesser elements and change in colour. It aims to be read as a cinema with as much ease as possible. The cinemas are both sheds, but Astro Theatre recognises its purpose and is designed for greater communication. As a symbol it helps define Prosperity Street Promenade, which in turn supports the characterisation of Del Perro. Del Perro as a smaller fragment of Santa Monica then reflects Santa Monica through symbolism. Downtown Downtown in Los Angeles is defined by four borders of highway. The south region is syndicated by Santa Monica freeway, west by Harbor freeway and Transit Way, north by Santa Ana Freeway, and east by the Los Angeles river. Similarly Downtown in Los Santos is divided by four main borders. Its regions are split: South Olympic Freeway, West La Puerta Freeway, North Del Perro Freeway, and east Los Santos Storm Drain. The freeway and orientation of the Los Santos borders are clearly abstracted from Los Angeles. Although LA’s downtown is bordered by four main paths, the variation in direction and curve makes it difficult to visualise as seen by Lynch and imageability. 50 However the Los Santos edges do not include complex curves or variations. Instead it is placed simply along a north to south and east to west axis. Downtown Los Santos is easier to visualise due to the straight boundaries. As described by Lynch, straight roads create greater imageability.50 The roads of the highway are made more coherent in Los Santos. As Banham and Lynch have both described, the highway is an essential element of Los Angeles. In this case the highway affects both the city as a whole and the boundaries. By a more imageable construction of the freeway, the entire city then becomes more imageable. 50 Lynch, Image of the City, 32 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 38 There is a huge disparity between the size and functions of both downtowns. Downtown Los Angeles includes 50,000 people, 500,000 jobs, 65 city blocks and 16 distinct neighbourhoods.51 In contrast Downtown Los Santos includes zero people and zero jobs in a single player game. The 65 city blocks are reduced to 26. The 16 distinct neighbourhoods are reduced to 4 districts. There is a clear difference in the sizes of these two zones. To be representative Los Santos must streamline Downtown Los Angeles. There is a clear distinction when one drives into the downtown of Los Santos. All of both north and south entrances require the player to drive over a bridge. The bridge acts a catalyst to let the player know they have entered the city. It defines the downtown as a space distinct from the previous zone. The east and west also have similar framing devices for downtown. The west entrances are located underneath the freeway. In this fashion as the player drives through, the three physical barriers of the freeway above and supports to the left and right, frame downtown. Downtown is then framed as the player arrives in from the west entrance through this makeshift concrete entrance. The east entrance is similar, in that the giant skyscrapers are visible from a distance upon crossing the storm drain and are accentuated from the contour of the landscape. There a huge shift in typology evident from all directions, the skyscrapers are erected tall and are representative of a modern city. Compared to the scattered suburban outskirts, downtown cohesively comes together in a collage of glass and steel, its elongated shadows enveloping and determining a distinct zone flavour. In many cities a skyline typology represents the area of downtown. Los Angeles and Los Santos are no exceptions. In Los Angeles this typology of the skyscraper is one of the most defining aspects of downtown. In Los Santos the idea is mimicked, and though a fragment of its LA counterpart, Los Santos Downtown skyscrapers are engaging to David Meagher, “Downtown LA: America’s fastest growing city,” The Australian, Aug 07, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/travel/downtown-la-americas-fastest-growing-city/storye6frg8rf-1227469817746. 51 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 39 the player. To further strengthen the relationship of both cities’ downtowns the next section will look at a specific region, Pershing Square. Pershing Square and Legion Square Lynch’s analysis of Los Angeles is limited to a small pilot study in Image of the City. Sample sizes of approximately two and a half miles by one a half miles (or ~4km x 2.5km) were taken as a sample size.52 Due to the small sample size of his case studies, Lynch’s study of Los Angeles seems to omit many key districts found in both Banham’s Four Ecologies, and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V. Examples of landmarks not identified in Lynch’s study include Santa Monica’s Beach, the culture of “The Hills”, or even LA’s famous Hollywood Sign. Instead of these largely known landmarks, Lynch maps the importance of Perishing Square. “Perishing Square is consistently the strongest element of all”, 53 “Perishing Square in Los Angeles…” “… perhaps the sharpest point of the city image.”54 His diagram titled The distinctive elements of Los Angeles, in Image of the City considers Perishing Square as the most important element in Los Angeles (Figure 2) .55 In Grand Theft Auto's Los Santos, Perishing Square is known not by the real world alias, but instead as Legion Square. It is located in the commercial downtown district, bordering Mission Row (Skid Row) on the east and Pillbox Hill (Bunker Hill) on the west. The park mimics the spatial qualities and implementation of Pershing Square’s 1992 $14.5 million redesign and renovations by landscape architects Ricardo Legorreta and Laurie Olin. The new design includes icons such as a ten story purple bell tower, fountains and various public artworks. It is significant in Downtown Los Santos as it is the only block in the district to be dedicated to the sole purpose of park space. It is symbolic as Grand Theft Auto V’s real estate as a gaming platform is constrained. Therefore to have a complete Lynch, Image of the City, 14. Ibid., 36. 54 Ibid., 75. 55 Lynch, Image of the City, 151. 52 53 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 40 downtown block dedicated to Pershing Square would be a design decision by Rockstar. This design decision would most likely be based on virtual space versus importance. From this extrapolation, Pershing Square in Los Angeles must have a momentous cultural importance to exist as a block in Downtown Los Santos. Pershing Square has a history of being the result of social tendencies. The current Pershing Square in LA faces harsh criticisms of poor design.56 Born as Block 15 in 1849 as a singular block on a grid, it manifested as a public park by the city council when it was left undeveloped due to being unattractive during an economic slump.57 During the 1950s it was notorious for being a venue for public preaching and outspoken oratory. However the city's reaction to the public speech had them disengage the zone from the protestors through design. This reaction was enacted with the 1992 $14.5 million redevelopment. Yellow, purple and beige walls now edge the square with large pink cylinders lining the main road facing Hill St, hindering visual connections and accessibility. Mike Davis’ outcry about the loss of public space is evident. There are currently arched seating and railings intended to deter homeless from habituating or sleeping. It is frequently cited that locals call the palm tree lined area in the northeast corner “urinal alley” due to frequent urination.58, 59, 60 In response to the notoriety of Perishing Square, the corporation AEG is currently sponsoring a $700,000 redesign of the complex.61 “Pershing Square” Yelp, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 http://www.yelp.com/biz/pershing-squarelos-angeles. 57 Nathan Masters, “From Plaza Abaja to Pershing Square: L.A.'s Oldest Park Through the Decades,” KCET, May 9, 2012, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/from-plaza-abaja-to-pershing-squarelas-oldest-park-through-the-decades.html. 58 “nourish Los Angeles”, Skyscraperpage, Last Modified April 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/printthread.php?t=170279&pp=20&page=691. 59 “Pershing Square,” Triposo, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 http://www.triposo.com/poi/W__80579943. 60 Heather Lynn, “Pershing Square”, Blogspot, Oct 28, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://heatherlynnmc.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/pershing-square.html. 61 Adrian Glick Kudler, “Los Angeles Plans to Completely Re-Envision Pershing Square,” Curbed, Feb 01, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, 56 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 41 Los Santos emulates social aspects and does more than create a geographic likeness to Los Angeles. The reputation of Pershing Square bleeds into the fictional reality of Legion Square. The square is always crowded during the day time, featuring many artists and small stores you can interact with. There are several ingame missions initiated by conversing with the ‘stranger’ Barry on his makeshift table in Legion Square. Barry is a politician and gives pseudo political sermons on the benefits of marijuana legalisation to the characters. To entice the general public he attempts to lobby people directly by giving out free samples of his home grown marijuana. Grand Theft Auto V fearlessly associates and categorises Legion Square as a drug zone. The game does not pull any punches, and lets viewers see the city as a stereotypical idea of itself. It adds a layer of social immersivity to the user experience. The new layer of social immersivity represents the city in exaggerated ways that are difficult to portray in formal texts. Lynch’s book Image of the City was released in 1960s and so his interviewees would have been familiar with the 1950s version of Pershing Square. As previously stated in this time it was notorious for being a venue for public preaching and outspoken oratory. The most vivid of Kevin Lynch’s descriptions is that “Sometimes subjects showed fear of the old and eccentric people who use it”, which is immediately followed by “Nevertheless, this is a highly identifiable image, strengthened by the presence of… Biltmore Hotel.”62 Following the brief description of the park there are several paragraphs dedicated to indicating Pershing Park as being a fine example of the element of the node. It can be noted that due to Lynch’s focus on the elements, there is a lesser importance on the true nature of the zone. While the real Pershing Square and the virtual Legion Square are visually similar, the ways in which Lynch and Rockstar Games represent them are different. Legion Square presents a negative stereotypical homeless, artist, and drug induced http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/02/los_angeles_plans_to_completely_reenvision_pershing_square. php. 62 Lynch, Image of the City, 37. The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 42 hub. It is ostentatious in the way it constructs the square, exaggerating dark sides of social fabric to more immersively engage the player. It represents the city through parody to give a greater layer of depth to the simulation of life. On the other hand, Pershing Square presented by Kevin Lynch is posed to function as the greatest node in the samples he takes of Los Angeles. In Los Santos, however, the square is not some idealised place within a greater idea of the city. It is instead a place where one is able to experience an engaging representation of the social conditions of Los Angeles. The Minimap For Pershing Square to be legible as a node the element must be experiential and have strong imageability. However rather than focus on a node, let us zoom out to an urban scale of experience and peer at Lynch’s wayfinding for the sake of understanding how Los Santos can be perceived. Coined at the start of Image of The City, wayfinding is a form of spatial problem solving related to imageability. This type of spatial thought highlights the strategic link between the environmental image and the mental picture held by the individual.63 Lynch lists examples of wayfinding devices as maps, street numbers, route signs, and bus placards. He notes the symptoms of disorientation as anxiety and terror. It is as though being lost manifests itself as a physical sickness. The term ‘lost’ in English means more than a misplacement of physical being, it foreshadows utter disaster. An imageable city would not allow for utter disaster to occur. Therefore as an evolutionary response, one must keep the city as powerful as an image as possible.63 This significance of imageability should cause any city designer to keep in mind ideals of legibility. Los Santos aims to be as legible as possible for the sake of playability. Within many games there exists a head-up display (HUD) that is available at all times. The head-up display exists for the sole purpose of providing information to the user. It Ibid., 4 63 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 43 displays knowledge to the user that may or may not be self-evident within the gameplay. In the Grand Theft Auto V world, the head-up display is minimalized and shows the minimap, health and stamina bars. 64 Health and stamina bars function as bar graphs indicating the amount of vitality and fortitude remaining. The head-up display is part of Los Santos’ approach to being legible. Figure 11. Wu, “GTA V Minimap,” 2015, Cropped Screenshot. Source: “Bad Cop: Grand Theft Auto V Review,” The Flashy Review, posted Sep 21, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.theflashyreview.com/bad-copgrand-theft-auto-review/. More importantly in the context of city legibility is the head-up display feature of the minimap. Minimap is a jargon term described by gamers that outlines a small map given to the player in the head-up display. Its origin comes from being a small minature map, hence minimap. It is akin to having a transportation global positioning system (GPS) in the car. Furthermore the Grand Theft Auto V GPS minimap is synced directly to all shops and services within the game as though it were an omnipresent deity tracking knowing all services and events. These events are represented on the map using specific iconography that represents their 64 See Figure 11, in Images The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 44 purpose. The gun shop has an icon of a gun. The politician in Pershing Park has a mission symbol, denoting he has a task for the player. The way in which these icons are clearly labelled helps define and indicate the surrounding opportunities. Lynch considers the physical unmoving map to be a wayfinding device. The GPS minimap hyperextends the functionality of its predecessor, it is a modern wayfinding device. The icons and minimap help direct the player to create a legible and easier to understand environment. As one drives in Los Santos they are directed by the omnipresent minimap. Figure 12. Rob Jackson, “Google Glass GPS,” 2015, Screenshot of Video, 0:42/3:52. Source: “Google Glass: Navigation,” Youtube, posted May 9, 2013, accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZdkIVS53Uw The minimap exists beyond the GPS of a car. It lies in a permanent state at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Out of the automobile and walking the streets, the minimap is always present to assist the player in navigating the environment. The idea is currently seen bleeding into reality as in 2011 Google publicly released Google Glass with GPS and HUD displays as seen in Figure 12. The technology innovation is aimed to create a more efficient life. In the Grand The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 45 Theft Auto series it already exists. When hunted by police, the minimap displays police icons on the map with their line of sight. By showing the line of sight it helps the player to avoid being caught. If police are scouting towards the player’s zone, the player can move away on an omniscient path to avoid detection. The user experiences Los Santos on a consciousness higher than reality. In addition the minimap displays where players can receive their missions. As previously noted, in Pershing Park the politician gives players a mission. Missions are given by artificial characters and are the key aspect in progressing the game forward. As the minimap denotes symbols for the missions, it acts as a wayfinding device for characters to progress through their lives. Driving “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original.”65 It is a commonly spread story among LA historians that Banham learnt to drive in LA. It emphasis the idea that, without being able to drive one cannot truly understand the way in which Los Angeles was originally intended to be explored. To drive in LA is to experience it in its true vernacular. Through driving you become aware of different fragments. In the film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Banham brings the viewer through LA as a narrative using the car as the main transportation medium. Gas stations and Drive-ins become the recommended public monument as Banham drives from one zone to another. He indicates that driving the freeway is an expression it itself, and also that the fragments are reachable through it. Los Angeles has each change of district and typology is experienced through the car. While driving he narrates “Up here you see the most weird [and] extraordinary pieces that you can hardly see from down below.” 65 Accessing and exposure to districts is expressed to be available Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Short Documentary, performed by Reyner Banham. (1972; BBC Films.) 65 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 46 through driving on the highway. The automobile becomes the place in which Los Angeles is experienced. Driving acts a facilitator in viewing the fragments of the city. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has always focused on driving. The title refers to stealing cars and through the games there is a recurring focus on the automobile. The dark overtone of stealing cars from the title contrasts to name Los Angeles. There is an interest gained from the irony. ‘Los Angeles’ translates to ‘The Angels’ in Spanish. ‘Los Santos’ translates to ‘The Saints’. The game title of stealing cars creates tensions within the city of The Saints. The game is implied to be experienced through the stealing of cars from the saints or angels. In game, at the press of a button near a driver’s seat, the character initiates an automated theft from the Los Santos citizen. Let the player take the city for themselves. The player will rob the city through the automobile. Los Santos emulates Los Angeles. By driving the player will experience the city. Unitary Urbanism The player experiences Los Santos through driving and the minimap. These are tools that have allowed the user to witness the freedom within Los Santos. Understanding the tools of psychogeography and the drift, enabled the Situationists to generate their own ideal city. “The Situationists foresaw a city constituted of grand situations, between which the inhabitants would drift, endlessly.”66 The city would be that of play, and would allow its observers to continuously wander. This city embodying these ideals would be planned on the principle of unitary urbanism. Sadler writes that the city of unitary urbanism would be built upon the ordinary person’s participation. The architecture would be subject to the will of the psychological experience.66 Debord proclaims that their ideals of Unitary Urbanism would “be infinitely more far-reaching than the old domination of architecture over 66 Sadler, The Situationist City, 117-118 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 47 the traditional arts.”67 The city of the social urban project would do more than showcase architecture to the world. It would exemplify the other arts of the people, in turn reducing the dictatorship of architecture as the main framework of the city. The architecture of unitary urbanism would be mixed smoothly with other arts. It would be greater than any passive built form. The multiple aesthetics of the various arts would flash bang the potential endless drifters into a state of experiment and play. The Let’s Play genre is an association usually pertaining to youtube videos where users record themselves playing games with added audio commentary. In episode 53 of TmarTn2’s Let’s Play online series, gameplay is shown where the user seems to embody experiment and play. After waking up in Los Santos, the character controlled by pseudonym ‘TmarTn’ decides he needs to ‘do good’ for the holiday period of Christmas by giving a 1.5 million dollar army tank (virtual) to an arbitrary player. As Grand Theft Auto V exists in the virtual, the inhabitants on the online platform exist through their avatars only. Therefore TmarTn can only be known by his avatar pseudonym and not a formal biological one. What follows next in the recording is TmarTn accidentally flying a heavy lift tandem transport helicopter and crashing while carrying another player’s car, resulting in the death of both avatars. On respawn (Verb used to describe when characters are resurrected) the other player known as babybright, is not angry or spiteful at TmarTn, but instead returns to him in a car offering a free ride. In light of this act of generosity and goodwill, TmarTn directs babybright to the Del Perro pier for the surprise of a free 1.5 million dollar rhino tank. Babybright then immediately takes hold of the tank, drives into downtown with TmarTn, and begins killing dozens of other players and police. The idea of a world full of experiment, anarchy and play are evident through the city of Los Santos. 67 Guy Debord, Theory of the Derive: And Other Situations Texts. (1997), 52 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 48 Wreaking havoc and engaging in deadly rampages are integral parts of the Grand Theft Auto experience. The game invites users to feel free within Los Santos. They are able to cause as much destruction as possible without restriction. As seen in the case of TmarTn and Babybright, players are liberated from their physical counterpart. They live and play within the city of Los Santos unhindered by the constraints of the physical. Even death itself is not an obstacle within the virtual, players are reincarnated or simply 'respawned’ back into the world. The manual dexterity and skill of driving both a heavy lift tandem transport helicopter, and a tank, are also given to the players. The skills are assigned to the avatars, and the player only needs to direct their intent through the controller in order to pilot the vehicle. Los Santos provides the skills to play. The Situationists dreamt of a city where the dweller is unhindered by the built form. Within the virtual world a freedom not available in reality is gained. The concept of the drift and its notions of fun can be seen in the intrinsic concept of play in a video game. Los Santos is a giant virtual playground in which users from all over the world are emancipated to gather and play in. By dwelling into these freedom ideals, one becomes able to draw many parallels between video games and The Situationists. Conclusion Jorn of the Situationists writes that, “We do not recognize the existence of architecture... Cologne Cathedral is nothing but an empty magical sculpture, whose aim is purely psychological- just like a glass of beer is architecture.”68 With this glass of beer, the Situationist idea of architecture is no longer represented by the built form; instead architecture is as a container for events to occur. Grand Theft Auto V acts as a container for Los Angeles to become Los Santos. The game is as a framework designed for the player to explore. Maltz, A. and Malvin Wald. The Naked City (1948), cited in M. Christine Boyer. TwiceTold Stories: The Double Erasue of Times Square. in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, and Jane Rendell, eds. Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City London: Routledge, 1996. 7781. 68 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 49 The Los Santos conceptualisation of modern Los Angeles is omnipresent and mocking; it is an extension of its former city. Banham has noted how Los Angeles is a city built on transport. The act of driving on the highway is a true experience of the city. He has claimed that the highway should be the tiara the Angeleno deity should use to crown herself.69 In the city of saints and angels, Los Santos, the player aims to steal automobiles. They traverse and explore on stolen vehicles, while murdering citizens. They use a GPS system applied as an all seeing minimap. Police appear on the map with their positions and vision localised. Their authority taunted. The player is able to know all and subsequently alter their criminal destiny. In Image of the City, Lynch argues that a strong mental image in the minds of the city dweller would be beneficial in determining how easily understood a city is. Los Santos includes drug dealers in Legion Square. It houses gangs in South Los Santos. Grand Theft Auto V clearly creates imageable areas of the city. These areas are starred regions of Los Angeles. As seen by ‘The Naked City’, a postmodern critique allows citizens to be guided through to the essential elements of the city. Correspondingly the fragments of Los Angeles are amalgamated to create a denser and more enjoyable city. Los Santos is a bricolage of its reference city. Using the Situationists, Rowe, and Koetter, Banham, and Davis, this thesis has examined the way that Rockstar Games has imaged the city of Los Santos. The Situationists protested the rigidity of the modern city. They advocated for freedom against the shackles of a prefabricated life. Online gaming experiences as shown by TmarTn are only made possible by the unique laissez faire virtual system. Rockstar have found the starred icons of Los Angeles and squashed the city into digestible form. Rowe and Koetter in Collage City put forth a critique of modernity and call for cities to be created as a bricolage. So it is that Rockstar Games create a city out of fragments, with places such as South Los Angeles becoming virtual spaces of South 69 See Chapter 1, Page 19 The Urban Architecture of Grand Theft Auto 50 Los Santos. Rockstar act as a bricoleur of a city, creating a design with fragments of an existing city. Rockstar appears to have created a city that is described by postmodern criticisms of modernity. This thesis is my interpretation of Rockstar’s representation of Los Angeles. By drawing from The Situationists who dreamt of a city of fun, expression, and anarchy, we understand the postmodern response in which Los Santos lets players discover Los Angeles in ways unavailable to reality. The cognitive mapping process in ‘The Naked City’, is reflected in Los Santos. The social cultures identified by Banham and Lynch in LA have been included in Los Santos. Its fragments are weaved together in virtual construction. Collage City argued for the bricoleur in creating cities. Rockstar have amalgamated Los Angeles. At the end of Lynch’s seminal cognitive mapping book, he closes with great enthusiasm for further studies. It would be “…interesting to apply these methods to environments of different scale or function other than cities.”70 Should we apply Lynch’s methodologies to virtual cities? 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The Urban Architecture of Los Angeles and Grand Theft Auto By Mark David Teo Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1 Mark Teo, “Naked Los Angeles, comparing The Naked City of the Situationists with Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V,” 2015. Digital Image. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art at the University of Western Australia in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Architecture SUPERVISORS: Darren Jorgensen Rene Van Meeuwen October 16, 2015 Perth, Australia Copyright © 2015, Mark David Teo  Abstract: “Rockstar’s virtual city Los Santos is based on modern 2011 Los Angeles.” This is an understanding widely adopted by contemporary gamers and is supported through the cognitive experience of playing the game. However, its urban architecture has never been taken to a deeper level of analysis as found in academia. In a response to modernism, postmodern architects have virtualised cities through ideas of cognitive mapping. There is an unidentified shadow of postmodern ideals present in Rockstar’s creation of Los Santos. Therefore postmodern urban theorists such as Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, The Situationists, Kevin Lynch, and Reyner Banham are suitable to act as precedent to discuss Los Santos. Through comparison with these theorists and Grand Theft Auto V, my interpretation of how Los Santos represents Los Angeles is speculated. To this idea, current day urban theorists now have the possibility to create immersive worlds within a playable and executable virtual realm. This perception gained through the identification of postmodern ideals in Los Santos, hopes to spark interest in the relationship between architecture and video games. Keywords: Grand Theft Auto V, Los Angeles, urban theory, architecture, video games, virtual space, the Situationists, Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Collage City, Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Kevin Lynch  Contents Abstract: 3 Contents 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1: City Theory and LA 7 Thinking through Collage 8 Thinking through Situations 10 City Thinking 12 Mapping through Situations 13 Mapping through Lynch 14 Los Angeles 18 Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V 23 New Technology, New representations 25 Rockstar’s Naked City Los Santos 29 South Los Angeles and South Los Santos 32 Del Perro and Santa Monica 35 Downtown 38 Pershing Square and Legion Square 40 The Minimap 43 Driving 46 Unitary Urbanism 47 Conclusion 49 Bibliography 52 Images 58 Introduction Video games today still struggle to be recognised within academia. In academia real world cities are presented and explained, whereas cities in video games are not studied. When the city of Los Angeles is described by Reyner Banham and Mike Davis, LA grows in influence in academia. Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) and Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) act as seminal texts for LA. However when Rockstar Games create Los Santos, there is a lack of formal critique in academia. Instead the texts on the Grand Theft Auto series of video games are sensationalist, citing misogyny, violent influence on children/adults, and even a possible cause for mass murders. “Target: Withdraw Grand Theft Auto 5 – this sickening game encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women.” Change.org. Last modified Nov 2014. https://www.change.org/p/target-withdraw-grand-theft-auto-5-this-sickening-game-encourages-players-to-commit-sexual-violence-and-kill-women, “School principals threaten parents with police if kids play “Grand Theft Auto””.Cnet. Last Modified March 2015. http://www.cnet.com/au/news/school-principals-threaten-parents-with-police-if-kids-play-grand-theft-auto/, “Training simulation:’ Mass Killers often share obsession with violent video games.” Foxnews. Last Modified Sept 2013. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/12/training-simulation-mass-killers-often-share-obsession-with-violent-video-games/, This paper hopes to give a voice to the city of Los Santos and its depiction of Los Angeles. Los Santos is a parody of 2011 modern Los Angeles. It is a pastiche of the city of Los Angeles, which is selectively shrunk for the experience of the gamer. Los Santos represents Los Angeles through fragmentation, simplification and social stereotypes. The simplification of the modern city is a trope prevalent in postmodern cognitive mapping processes. The Situationists used the drift and psychogeographic mapping to create the cognitive map ‘The Naked City’ (1957) (Figure 3). The book Collage City (1978), by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, uses black and white figure-ground diagrams (Figure 13). Kevin Lynch Image of the City (1960) creates legible images of cities using his five elements (Figure 2). However Rockstar’s process in creating Los Santos is unknown to the public. By an analysis of postmodern cognitive mapping processes, we realise that these theorists have consistently created their own virtual cities as a response to modernism. Similarly Los Santos is a response by parody to modern 2011 Los Angeles. Therefore by an autopsy of postmodern tools, an urban perspective onto Grand Theft Auto V can be undertaken. This thesis is split into two chapters. ‘Chapter 1: City Theory and LA’ looks at postmodern city theory and the way Los Angeles has been theorised. It firstly underlines postmodern ways of thinking of the city by looking at the Situationists and Collage City. Using these thoughts it moves to tools used by the theorists in critiquing the modern order. More relevantly the chapter will end by gaining insight on Los Angeles’s specific urban condition. The second chapter ‘Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V’ juxtaposes Chapter One’s postmodern theories with Grand Theft Auto V. It begins by understanding Los Santos as a new virtual construction of Los Angeles. The way the city has been constructed from fragments is explored. Case studies into game locations including South Los Santos, Del Perro, and Downtown are undertaken, followed by an in-depth look at Legion Square. Analysing ideas of the minimap and driving, we then begin to understand how to experience these Los Santos fragments. Finally the paper finishes by delving into the freedom offered by the virtual. The following brief review aims to contribute to the growing work of games in academia and bring light to gaming from a new perspective. How can video game cities be understood using urban academic theory? Or specifically in this thesis, how can Rockstar's Los Santos be compared to Los Angeles using cognitive mapping and social criticisms of postmodern theorists?  Chapter 1: City Theory and LA  The rise of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was followed by a sled of sceptical postmodern theorists. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in Collage City (1978) encouraged the idea of understanding the city through a collaging of urban elements. The Situationists from the late 1950s to the early 1970s also explored the city through fragments. Both trains of thought originated as a response to modernism. They both seek to understand the city opposing ideals of rigidity and utopian designs. They advocated their ethos as a model by which the city can be read. By an analysis of these theorists, this chapter develops an overview for Los Santos to be compared to a postmodern reading of the city. Thinking through Collage Collage City critiques modernist ideals of utopia, arguing that cities are to be thought of a collage or collection of various different elements rather than as a singularity. It understands city objects through urban fabric and texture. It contrasts modernist proposals versus traditional cities such as Vittoria and Uffizi. Collage City then discusses the politics of what is defined as bricolage. Bricolage refers to the different sets of mesh that a city creates and the vast various representations each small piece can have. Bricolage highlights the differences in cities and is compared to the utopian modern ideals of a total design or total city. Bricolage has the intended effect of questioning utopian ideals as they prescribe a regime. The collage city is a postmodern city that can simultaneously be informed by tradition, yet aspire to a utopia. It is a chaotic composite that configures imperfect utopias to achieve greater human possibility. Collage City lets us understand the city as needing to be created more socially through the texture of its collage. The term texture refers to the plan, matrix or pattern, but also includes the materiality and use. From an understanding of the way texture plays a part in the city, an enhanced human expression of the city can be created. Rowe and Koetter proclaim that the architects and planners, who were occupied with the trophies and triumphs of culture, have shamefully compromised possibilities and have foregone basic sanitary foundation. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (MIT Press, 1998), 52. There has been an unfavourable connection to texture in the described mass building zones of Paris and Amsterdam due to the disregard of the human element. The focus had been placed on trophies and public facades. The buildings have been designed together in a hope to represent their triumphs in culture rather than for the common person. The overarching principles behind construction lay a foundation for non-social design, which changes texture of the city. Rowe also emphasises exclusion. He explores “…the way in which exclusion may gratify the imagination.” Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 66. His idea is that if one is only made partially aware of a subject, then it leaves their imagination available to wander. There is a speculative pleasure available to the hindered city dweller. In contrast, to lay available all situations would be destructive of the speculative pleasure, similar to the banality of the completely illuminated room. Rowe’s critique in Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse highlights the concept. The absolute spatial freedoms of the Ville Radieuse and its derivatives are claimed to be “…without interest; and that, rather being empowered to walk everywhere- everywhere being almost the same…” and “… it would be more satisfying to be presented with exclusions…”5 Exclusion is more empowering than absolute freedom. There is no empowering moment in exploring a prefabricated homogeneity. Instead, rather than a city losing potential from being non-accessible, the aspect of unavailability brings added meaning to the environment. Rather than a singular totalitarian idea, Rowe argues that cities should be a collage of many ideas for purposes of general liberation. There is a relationship between the building and its urban context. Rowe who is concerned with this complex social relation states that architecture should never be fully resolved. Chapter four in Collage City entitled ‘Collision City and the Politics of ‘Bricolage’’ introduces the term bricolage and uses it to understand the city. He advocates for urban planners to be bricoleur in order create and facilitate as many possibilities in the city. Through using laboratory specimens of Versaille and the Hadrian’s Villa, Rowe concludes that the city is in need of a bricoleur. Versailles is as a singular idea, an autocratic plan, and unitary model. It is a totality that has been executed through symmetry and politics. Villa Adriana from plan view appears apparently disorganised, and is construed from a variety of different floras and ideas. Villa Adriana is a mix of ideas, whereas Versailles is a concrete one. It has been argued through texture to allow for the joint existence of both the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned. Ibid., 83 However if one is to design through a singular autocratic seed, how can multiple ideas flourish? There is a beauty in a plethora of small ideas creating a larger coherent piece. Thinking through Situations The Situationists believed that capitalism, through the spectacle of wants, had caught society in a trance and that to truly live one must wake from this condition. To do so, we as humans needed to deliberately create situations that would reawaken our true authentic desires. The Situationists thought that the current, mid-twentieth century city was toxic. The advances of technology in the 1950s applied to the city of Paris were merely viewed as an untrustworthy glamorisation of state and corporate power. The city had become increasingly irrelevant to the ordinary person, their lives being much more colourful than their monotone urban fabric. Modernism had introduced new technology into construction and created zones reflecting modern ideals of order and efficiency. Past examples of Le Corbusier’s gleaming white concrete houses of the 1920s such as the Weissenhof Estate or Mies subsequent creation of glass skyscrapers such as The Seagram Building, were exactly the type of architecture that the Situationists refused. Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 1 The Situationists critiqued the new modernist areas of the built environment as they felt it was creating a prefabricated city. Guy Debord from the Situationists claimed that this homogeneity was removing elements of self-expression. It was believed to destroy its inhabitant’s creativity and ambition. Modernism was viewed as a dystopian vision, creating slaves to the capital and enforcing a totalitarian regime. To stop our slavery the Situationists concluded there needed to be a new way to create cities. They claimed the current trend of modernism had created a form of rigidity of the city where there need not be, casting forth a mask on itself and hiding the inner soul. Simon Sadler’s Situationist City (1998) is an attempt to construct their theories in a coherent manner through tracing the history of fragments left behind by the Situationists. Sadler, The Situationist City, 16 Sadler’s interpretation of the Situationists beliefs, was that that there was life teeming underneath the city that had yet to be acknowledged. His interpretations, based on Debord’s scripts, is that “If one peeled away this official representation of modernity and urbanism, the spectacle, the reality consisting of images, products, activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy, one will discover the authentic life of the city…” Ibid. The Situationists wanted to see through the planning and capital of society. They wanted to depict the true essence of the city. Through looking at the true essence of the city, theoretically the Situationists could design a city that could create an unlimited deployment of new passions. The Situationists had idealised that their architecture could one day liberate the ordinary citizen into a “world of experiment, anarchy, and play.”10 To understand the city in a more phenomenological way they employed a self-created technique called the psychogeographic drift. Psychogeography was considered playful and cheap by the Situationists and contrasted to the academic or high art experience of museums. They wanted to read the city as a populist, to understand what their common person would see. Instead Sadler interprets that if they had read the city from a stifling, pompous and enclosed world of high culture it would not reflect the true life or flavours of the city. Hence the idea of psychogeography would reflect the city’s hidden social geography located underneath the academic facade of what they considered to be the scientific taxonomy of physical factors. Ibid., 69. The Situationists would drift from “area to area, in the hope of finding provocative interloctors or strange and moving encounters.” Peter Wollen, 2004. Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art. (New York: Verso, 2004), 30. They would map out their experiential journeys and record their thoughts. Their maps attempted to reveal the social geography, a real, theorized space as the product of a natural society. Kristin Ross. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. In Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 85. Through these maps, journeys and thought processes, the Situationists rebelled against the modernist geography and tried to reveal the inner soul of Paris. City Thinking When understanding Los Angeles it is important to recognise how the city has previously been conceived. The Situationists and Collage City both theorised in works that contradict the trending modernist mentality. The Situationists rejected modernist proposals and aimed to discover Paris’s social psychogeography. Rowe and Koetter advocated for a bricolage in the master design of a city. Both postmodern ideas are ways to subjectively understand a city. They create a framework that has been filtered from reality. When diagnosing Los Angeles and Los Santos, these ideas will become useful as interpretational sifters to shake the city into digestible form. Furthermore following their new thought processes, the Situationists attempted to construct the city through a new blueprint. The Guide psychogèographique de Paris (1965) [The Psychogeographic guide to Paris] by Debord and Naked City (1957) by Asgar Jorn Figure 3, page 18 served as alternate maps of Paris. Both men had drifted the city and recorded their experiences, representing their surreal disorientations of the city by scattering and rotating pieces of maps. In this way it is as though there is a blueprint of Paris that has been engaged upon by the Situationists and reconstructed by their thought processes. Within the context of Los Angeles and Los Santos, an understanding of a mapping process then becomes vital. A mapping process directly links to ways of understanding the built environment. A map is a virtual statement of a city. When diagnosing Los Santos a critique of its map is essential. Therefore the next two sections will delve into the Situationists and Kevin Lynch’s seminal mapping ideas. Mapping through Situations The Situationist views on mapping clashed with the cartography of the modern. Modernity was seen as omnipotent, a direct overview of the street, one that would never be witnessed in the ordinary denizen. Contrastingly the maps of the Situationists were human scale reconstructions of imagination, stitching together a participation of space that was, as Sadler puts it “terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural.” Sadler, The Situationist City, 82 The Situationists suggested “possible living environments” and “declared an intimacy with the city[,] alien to the average street map.”14 The view of the city they wanted to represent would be akin to having guidelines for areas with an undefined objective. They would attempt to introduce the pedestrian to the city’s social cores and have the areas themselves tell a unique story to the wandering individual. Hence the city would be a theatre itself, its actors clad with the makeup of hot summer pavements, playing their natural roles on the streets. The psychogeographic drift offered a new way of exploring the urban vernacular. Debord’s and Jorn’s goals were to “put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lay beneath its surface.” Ibid. They note that through the twist and turns of Paris, it would be impossible without omnipotent assistance for a private person to escape the labyrinth of the city. Guy-Ernest Debord, “De l’architecture sauvage,” introduction to Asger Jorn, Le Jardin d’Albisola Turin: Pozzo 1974. trans. Thomas Y. Levin as “On Wild Architecture,” in Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957 – 1972 Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. in Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 174-175. To bypass the dictated order of the city, the Situationists generated their own versions of maps. These would be used in order to guide the user in a more phenomenological manner. These maps are made up of fragmented, cut and torn parts of the original Paris map. They would appear to have no order, and work to undo the structure and order of regular maps. It would include the rich experiential zones, and leave blank the intermission areas of the city. The Situationists hoped the maps would highlight situations within the Parisian city. Mapping through Lynch Kevin Lynch was an influential American urban planner. His seminal work Image of the City (1960) underlines how the citizen reads the city through imageability. Lynch writes that “there seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images.”17 He wanted to find clarity and a method to understand the city. His method was devised through a series of interviews with locals, where the imageability of the city would depend entirely on the clarity of locals’ knowledge. This local image of the city would be a combination of the many layers of city perceptions and not just a single objective view. The variants were all dependent on each other, emotional, physical or otherwise. Kevin Lynch, The Image Of The City (MIT Press, 1960) 46. It would be a social read of the city. For the purposes of creating a tangible social read of the city, Lynch developed five elements. Lynch’s five elements are: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 2 Kevin Lynch, “Figure 14. The visual form of Los Angeles as seen in the field,” Scanned image. Source: Lynch, Kevin. The Image Of The City. Cambridge: MIT press, 1960. 151. Lynch’s interviewees paid close attention to paths. He attributes this due to the pedestrian intimacy with the street map. The street map determines directions to a location using paths. Therefore through an obligation to the street map, it becomes a requirement of the populace to navigate via paths. Paths are defined as channels through which the observer can move. They usually consist of streets, sidewalks, railroads, and canals. Described by Lynch, they can be construed as a network of religious or potential means of travel through the urban environment, and are “The most potent means by which the whole can be ordered.” Lynch, The Image Of The City, 96. Lynch writes about paths generating clarity and how some paths can create confusion. One type of confusion caused is by misaligned paths. When writing about Boston, Lynch notes that there was one such misleading curve that disorientated many of the populace. The curve from Massachusetts Avenue at Falmouth Street was not scribed by many interviewees. Instead they had assumed Massachusetts Avenue to be straight and wrongly sensed right angle intersections with many of its connecting streets. These streets were drawn parallel rather than in their correct orientation. Therefore due to the single misleading curve on a key path, the rest of the city became disorientated. Frequently as a result of these inaccuracies, maps drawn were skewered. The misaligned path caused confusion with the legibility and clarity of the city. Edges are the linear elements that are not considered paths but make distinctions from one zone to another. Shores, edges of developments and walls are examples of edges. Inclusively, edges may be also be seams, and join two related regions together. They may also be penetrable or impenetrable, and act as visual anchors for the city. Ibid., 40-41. In Los Angeles Greater Los Angeles region is used. a clear Lynchian edge when visualising the city would be the shore along the water’s edge. Lynch, The Image Of The City, 33. Fig. 14. The shore acts as a clear identifier for the populace to identify and image the city. Another edge would be the highway surrounding downtown as shown in Lynch’s diagram of LA. Darkened black by Lynch, the Harbor Freeway and Hollywood Freeway stand prominent as edges of the district.19 Another element is districts. Districts form the medium to large volumes of the city, and observers mentally enter within their bounds. Lynch’s observers usually structure their city in terms of districts, identifying them as one of the most important imageability aspects, on par with paths.19 The downtown zone acts as a district in Los Angeles.21 It is understandable as a physical zone due to its ‘skyline’. Though relatively small in the 1950s, the taller building types denoted the area as district. Nodes are specific points that intensely hold directions of multiple paths or shifts in one experience to another. They can be junctions or crossings, and when the nodes become the focus and epitome of an area they can stand as a symbol and be called cores. They are related to districts and can sometimes be within the crossing of one district to another. In the heart of Los Angeles, Lynch has determined Pershing square to act as a node and core. Ibid. The fifth element landmarks, are a point reference, an external mark that the observer uses to understand his or her place in the city. Sometimes they are iconic buildings, sometimes mountains or monumental areas, but in all cases they are distinct and regularly give identity to the city. In the context of Los Angeles, Lynch understands Los Angeles City Hall to be a landmark through its figure-background contrast and spatial location. Lynch uses the five elements to create diagrammatic maps of the city. These maps represent the imageability of a city. They are mapped by social mechanisms rather than a non-pedestrian satellite view. The idea of making a map from an emotive process is also present within the Situationists. The Situationists believed that as traditional planning had grown up under a modern rationalist umbrella, the intricacies of the city had largely been ignored. Guide psychogèographique de Paris and the Naked City Figure 3, Page 17 are landmark images that demonstrate the importance of these intricacies. The images brought to attention the civil practices of the city. Similarly Lynch’s method for diagramming cities was directly related to a populist understanding; he would talk with the inhabitants and extract data based on field reconnaissance from interviews. His interpretations were derived directly from the data of a social understanding of each city. Both of these methods would determine an emotional response to the city. Both methods would also generate new types of cartography; The Situationists, a jagged rotated city and in Lynch’s case, a diagrammatic city that represented the image of the city. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 3 Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, The Naked City: illustration de l’hypothése [sic] des plaques tournates en psychogeographic [sic], 1957, screenprint. Found in Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. (London: The MIT Press, 1998), 60 Los Angeles In Lynch’s overview of Los Angeles, the city has been diagrammed according to interviews. However Lynch’s studies were focused on Boston, and LA received less depth than is required for a deep city analysis. Understanding LA is essential when discerning Los Santos, as Los Santos is based on LA. Therefore in addition to Lynch, texts specifically based on Los Angeles will be invoked. Authors such as Reyner Banham and Mike Davis have written seminal texts on LA. Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies celebrates the city through a favourable depiction of the city’s four ecologies. Comparatively in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davis takes multiple examples of ruined public spaces and depicts the city as a dystopian landscape. Both authors depict the same city with contrasting representations. Where Banham’s critics would name his work a postcolonial appreciation of LA, Davis’ critics have denoted his work as an exaggerated scepticism of LA. Rooksby, Edward. “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Book Review).” Capital&Class 32 (2008): 151–154. Lynch writes about the lessened priority of downtown. When the elements of Lynch had been applied to Los Angeles it was as though the heart of the city was not really in the city at all. Lynch writes “the central area is still by courtesy ‘downtown’ but there are several other basic cores to which people are oriented.” LA did not conform to a city centre like other cities. In fact Lynch noted that “great numbers of citizens never enter the downtown area from one year to the next.” Lynch, The Image Of The City, 33 There is a form of decentralisation in LA. Banham also recognises that Los Angeles as a city does not strive as the conventional city with its life concentrated at city centre. Instead it thrives outside the walls of glass skyscrapers. LA has its essence bleed inwards from the outside, where its culture shapes the city more than the skyline. His opinion of downtown was it was “neither very attractive nor historically rewarding”. Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 19-21 Furthermore, Banham’s obligatory chapter on downtown is indifferently named “A note on downtown” and is the shortest chapter on the book, spanning only eleven pages. He expands early in the chapter that the book only has the aforementioned note on downtown because “that is all downtown [deserves]” Instead the book’s chapters revolve around the various other cultures found in LA. Both Lynch and Banham seem to agree on the decentralisation of downtown in Los Angeles. The decentralisation of downtown is further emphasised by Banham writing that LA displays its true culture by the beach’s front shore. Banham writes “The Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city.” and even going as far to say “Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world”. Ibid. It is in this way that the culture of the beach becomes a “symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society”, where man’s needs are reduced to “usually a pair of frayed shorts and sun-glasses”.27 Away from the draconian skyscrapers of modernism, it is here on the yellow roads of sand that all men in LA become equal and stand on common ground, frayed shorts and all. The “Sun, sand, and surf are held to be [the] ultimate and [most] transcendental values”,27 the surfboards being “… the prime symbolic and functional artefact”, Ibid., 31 proudly displayed upright on beaches as the clear fiberglass trophies of LA. The beach ecology screams aloud and is as evident as LA’s left arm, its social geography being mapped to the body as clearly as tattoo on skin. In Banham’s Four Ecologies it becomes clear, that “The beach is what life is all about in Los Angeles.” 27 Contrasting to the open landscapes of beach, Davis’ image of LA is as a securitised fortress. Davis’ claims that LA lies on the bad edge of postmodernity with an uncanny capacity to blend urban design, architecture and police apparatus into a single surveillance stream. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. (Vintage Books, 1990), 223-226 Davis mentions developer Alexander Haagen’s strategy for recolonizing metropolis markets as a “… shopping mall surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower.”29 He then argues of this situation creating a panopticon. The shopping mall becomes a prison. Through Davis’ eyes the LAPD surveillance tower could be seen as a landmark for those who inhibit the district of shopping centres. The shopping mall then becomes a securitised district in which one is to walk into. Once inside the mall, the landmark of the LAPD surveillance tower acts as a point of reference for all participants of the space. As a landmark, the LAPD surveillance tower guides participators’ mental identification of the district into a zone where they are continually being watched. This landmark identifies the users, akin to a prisoner being watched and identified in a jail. Davis notes how the term ‘street person’ has a stigma of contemporary opprobrium. Previous nodes of accessibility, with edges towards public parks can now be seen as separate districts on a social level, the district's home to the notoriety of the “homeless and wretched”.29 There is a “militarization of city life” “grimly visible at the street level.”29 The condition being exuberated by the “burgeoning middle-class demands for security”. William Cunningham and Todd Taylor, ‘A Summary of the Hallcrest Report’. The Police Chief (1983): 31. It becomes as though ‘middle-class demands of security’ creates the commodity of surveillance as a ‘positional good defined by income access’. This in turn antagonises against the ‘homeless and wretched’ areas of public space. In short the chase of security, forces public space to be neglected and slip through the cracks of urban fabric. Instead the panopticon of shopping malls is preferred and it is there that public space becomes sentenced to its death. Highways are important in Los Angeles. Lynch indicates that traffic and the highway systems were dominant aspects of many interviews. Users wrote of highways being a daily ritual going from “exciting” to “tense and exhausting”. There were frequent references to the fun of overpasses, and large interchanges, creating “kinaesthetic sensations of dropping, turning and climbing.” Lynch, The Image Of The City, 42 Through Lynch, the freeway acts as almost a modern playground for the adult, the ‘kinaesthetic sensations’ mimicking that of a child. Banham also agrees with the importance of the freeway. He notes that there are many markers and characteristics about LA and while some are close, others are spread far away. It then becomes a given that the freeway is the network that ties everything together and hence is of significant importance. Banham writes it is “what the tutelary deity of the City of Angels should wear upon her head” as though there is a deity of LA to wear the highway as a tiara. Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of For Ecologies, 18 Banham’s depiction of the highway crowns the city with the importance of the road. Los Angeles is depicted as being both a relaxing beach city, and a militarised fortress. By Banham’s standards, LA can be enjoyed through the beach. The beach is a place of relaxation and recreation. Contrastingly, Davis’ considers LA to host prisons through its shopping malls. LA is thought of both as a place of private security, and as an open shore. The panopticons and open sands both depict representations of the zones of Los Angeles. Two more representations of Los Angeles areas are on Downtown and the highway. Downtown is portrayed by both Lynch and Banham to not be a centrepiece of the city. Lynch denotes by his elements that downtown is not an imageable part of the city. If a zone is not imageable, then by extrapolation it can hardly be important. Furthermore, Banham in his book based on LA ecologies, intentionally lacks in depth discussion on downtown in favour of other ecologies. Instead ecologies such as autopia, which denote the high use of roads and the highway, are expressed. These presentations give a representation of Los Angeles by which Los Santos can be compared to in chapter two. Lynch’s five elements constitute a framework by which cities can be analysed. He writes that the process outlined in the book is only that in itself, a process. Lynch, Image Of The City, 14 Likewise the Situationists developed the process of drifting, and have used it for creating their own maps. The fragmented maps of Guide psychogèographique de Paris and Naked City23 reflect the process of the drift. In both scenarios the maps are directly derived from the postmodern tools, and these tools are derived from the way of thinking. Essentially each theorist creates a virtual idea of how the city could be viewed. By juxtaposition between postmodernist thinking and Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar’s ideals in creating Los Santos can be analysed. Chapter 2: Theorising GTA V  Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 4 Vira-cocha, “A comparison of size between Los Santos and California,” 2013. Digital Image. Source: Gaming Stackxchange, posted 25 Sept 2013, accessed 10 Sept, 2015, http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/131253/grand-theft-auto-5-los-santos-civilian-population.  New Technology, New representations The Grand Theft Auto series originated from game developer DMA Design (Now Rockstar North but indicated as popularly known Rockstar or Rockstar Games) in 1997. Since then it has become largely popular and today has eleven major titles and four expansion packs. Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is an action-adventure video game which has become infamous for its violent gameplay. This violent gameplay is reflected by the game's title that is an American colloquial term for vehicle theft. The latest instalment of the series, called Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV), follows three protagonists as two try to escape the ghosts of their past criminal lives, while an amateur gangster watches and follows in their footsteps. Players eventually take control of all three characters while playing out a customisable script, similar to the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure book series for children. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 5 Dave “Interactive slider between Third Street Promenade and Prosperity Street Promenade,” HTML 5 Applied Image. Source: “Grand Theft Auto in Real Life,” gtaist, posted Jan 27, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.gtaist.com/grand-theft-auto-in-real-life/ Online media ripple with admiration for Rockstar’s technological prowess depicted in Los Santos’ realism. Before the release of Grand Theft Auto V, user TreeFitty painstakingly identified 161 referenced places, buildings, or landscapes from Los Angeles using solely the original 2011, one and a half minute trailer. TreeFitty, “GTA 5 Landmarks and Other Buildings,” iGTAV, last modified Sept 04, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015. http://www.igta5.com/landmarks-and-other-buildings An online article by Kotaku juxtaposes Del Perro to Santa Monica. Luke Plunkett, “GTA V’’s Los Santos vs The Real Los Angeles,” Kotaku, Feb 02, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://kotaku.com/gta-vs-los-santos-vs-the-real-los-angeles-1683384124 GTAist compares Downtown Los Santos to Downtown LA through an interactive slider as shown in Figure 5. Playstation demonstrates by video a bike ride split screen comparison through LA and Los Santos beaches. Playstation Access, “GTA V vs Real Life: How Realistic Is Grand Theft Auto V?,” Youtube, posted Sep 17, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqYrnoj4O9s In each case, the realistic graphical qualities of Grand Theft Auto V are cited, with their conclusions being that Los Santos represents Los Angeles. Furthermore CorridorDigital, a digital effects youtube-founded company, has released a video eerily depicting a Grand Theft Auto life using real life as faux-graphics. CorridorDigital, “Real GTA”, Youtube, posted June 08, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=0ZZquVylLEo The physical environment is used to simulate playing in the virtual world as seen in Figure 6. There is a swap of reality and the virtual. The viewer is tricked into watching the ‘character’ move through Los Santos’s Galileo Observatory, Canals, and Vinewood Hills. However in reality the player moves through Los Angeles Griffith Observatory, the Canals, and Hollywood Hills. The film’s influence helps one question the relationship between fact and fiction in video games. These correlations of the experience in LA and Los Santos show the virtual’s capability for capturing the iconic attributes of life. As a gaming platform, both its technology and virtual texture are foundational factors in what constitutes Los Santos. When Rowe and Koetter were writing Collage City pre-1978, the fax machine and photocopier were two innovations that had been gaining traction in the previous decade. Many fax machines and photocopier models at the time had capacity to only print in a pure black or white shade. The figure ground diagrams by Rowe and Koetter are constituted in a black and white image of the city’s fabric. The diagram, while obviously impacted by Giambattista Nolli’s map for Rome, can also be described in terms of the history of technology. Through a simplification of the city it shows relationships between the built and unbuilt space. In this light one can see how the limited colour and value range of technology influenced the thought process of Collage City. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 6 CorridorDigital “Real imitating the Virtual,” Screencap of video, 0:51/3:22. Source: “Real GTA,” Youtube, posted Jun 08, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=0ZZquVylLEo Similarly to the limitations of technology influencing Rowe and Koetter, Rockstar games are also influenced through the technology of their own time. Since the development of the game the timeline of technology has enabled environments to be virtually created from 2D to 3D. In 2001 Grand Theft Auto III became the first Grand Theft Auto instalment to be in 3D. Compared to the original bird's eye view from Grand Theft Auto 1, the change in technology since Grand Theft Auto III allows viewers to understand the game from a more immersive third person point of view. This new advance in technology literally gave a new dimension to the game, and enabled players to experience the fictional cities in more depth. Through technology the newest adaptation Grand Theft Auto V (2015 for PC) boasts the most developed and detailed city of the series. By using virtual taxis as a measuring tool it has been estimated that Grand Theft Auto III has 4.01 km2 of playable space, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) has 8.89 km2, and Grand Theft Auto V has 45.52 km2. “GTA Map Size Comparison,” 4FuN gaming, accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivELtVTjIyQ Using these figures Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos then has more than three times the combined area of all its 3D predecessors. Furthermore each fragment of the newer virtual city becomes more detailed and executed through the increased technology found in today’s latest generation consoles. The Playstation 2 in which Grand Theft Auto III was released, boasts up to 5 million flexible polygons. TigerSuperman, “When Comparing the Dreamcast to the PS2, was the PS2 really stronger?,” Gamespot, accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-discussion-1000000/when-comparing-the-dreamcast-to-the-ps2-was-the-ps-29413628/ The Playstation 4 that Grand Theft Auto V released a port for, can withstand 1,600 billion flexible polygons. Shredenvain, “XB1/PS4 Polygon Pushing Power,” last modified Oct 06, 2015, https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/xb1-ps4-polygon-pushing-power.55222/. A difference of more than 320x the amount of polygons on screen can be rendered, which creates a substantial difference in the quality and realism of the environment. Through these polygons, can Los Santos have a texture akin to Los Angeles? Through Rowe and Koetter, texture can be thought of taking elements of a human visage within a city. The façade is not enough for a deep textural reasoning. As Los Santos is a fictional theatrical construction it could be said that the human texture is missing in the virtual realm of Grand Theft Auto V. One could identify the virtuality of the game and reduce every face to three triangulated points in space. They could not see the construction of Los Santos’ perspective through the screen and instead only see pixels, a falsified attempt to generate three dimensions in the monitors simple two dimensional surface. In this way of Los Santos being fictional, is it still possible for one to still feel texture through its intangible touch? Using ideas of relativity, perhaps there is a possibility games can have a texture of a true city. Philosopher Brain Massumi writes on relativity in his book Parables of the Virtual (2002). He frames the actions of football players to be of the upmost importance when one is submerged in the game. When the ball has been kicked, he refers to it not as a simple localised action, but instead as if one exists within the rules of the game, the kicking of the ball creates a global event. Suddenly through reasons of relativity, the game of football can generate a new world of experience. The football match becomes virtually palpable in the mind. Can this logic not also apply to video games? Specifically can these ideas of relativity apply to Los Santos? If one accepts the rules of virtuality that come with the video game, then the pixels, polygons, and absence of physical form disappear in the mind of the player. The virtual game world becomes an authentic real world. For the serious gamer the virtuality of the game is not of unidimensional pleasure, but instead is of as real of a reality as a fan or player partaking in their favourite sport. Through relativity games can have the texture of a real city. Rockstar’s Naked City Los Santos Los Santos can be revealed as a way of perceiving Los Angeles. This idea is similar to the way the Situationists interpreted Paris via their maps. By defining Psychogeography, the drift enabled the Situationists to have the relevant tools for generating their own representation of Paris. ‘The Naked City’ by Debord Figure 3, Page 17 is one of these images. ‘The Naked City’ is composed of nineteen separate fragments of a map of Paris. ‘The Naked City’ is flat black and white, with directions and movement hinted by red arrows. The colour, size, abstraction and playfulness of the arrows highlight the emphasis on movement and on exploration as being more important than the parchments of map itself. The pieces of the collaged Paris cut-outs are carefully curated to strengthen the Situationists’ goal of an experiential and narrative map. ‘The Naked City’ was the Situationists’ virtual understanding of how Paris should be traversed. Figure 1 Mark Teo, “Naked Los Angeles, comparing The Naked City of the Situationists with Los Santos,” 2015. Digital Image. The Situationists wanted to understand Paris by making a map subject to the will of the psychological experience. See page 11 Similarly Rockstar’s mapping concepts can be viewed through the process of games being designed as a played space. Games are designed to be a psychological experience. John Hopson, “Behavioral Game Design,” Gamesutra, accessed Oct 06, 2015, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php. The idea of psychogeography is translated into game design as developers create geography for the player to experience. Games are rigorously play-tested to see how new users interact with the environment. The game is then continuously reformatted with results of play-testing to create a more immersive experience. Los Santos is no doubt an iteration of thousands of hours of play-tests to create an immersive city. Similar to ‘The Naked City’, Los Santos exists to create a psychological experience. Thomas F. McDonough writes in his article ‘Situationist Space’ about the importance of capturing iconic attributes of the city. McDonough notes that the title ‘The Naked City’ was an appropriation of an American 1948 detective noir film entitled The Naked City. He quotes Parker Tyler describing the American movie in The Three Faces of the Film saying “In Naked City it is Manhattan Island and its streets and landmarks that are starred. The social body is thus, through architectural symbol, laid bare (“naked”)…” This description alludes that the title of the pyschogeographic map ‘The Naked City’ references the movie directly through the symbolism of ‘starring’ important places. Instead of ‘starring’ Manhattan streets, it is rather the icons of Paris that have been ‘starred’. A viewing of the map indicates Parisian landmarks such as the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Gare de Lyon, and the Pantheon, to be highlighted, showing their ‘starred’ importance. In Los Santos, iconic zones such as Downtown, South Los Angeles and Santa Monica have been included. The architectural symbols and districts are then “laid bare (“naked”)” in the structure of the map. Three regions that constitute Los Santos are, South Los Santos, Del Perro, Downtown and Legion Square. These regions represent South Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Downtown and Pershing Square. South Los Angeles and South Los Santos The South Los Angeles region consists of 25 neighbourhoods, whereas South Los Santos is a mesh of 5 districts. South Los Santos’ districts are Davis, Strawberry, Chamberlain Hills, Rancho, and Banning. The corresponding archetypes in Los Angeles are Compton, Inglewood, Crenshaw, Watts, and Wilmington. The name Rancho most likely comes from the 1843 original Rancho La Tajuta Mexican land grant on which Watts, Los Angeles is built upon. Rancho has both high gang activity and high crime rate. The two fictional gangs, the Los Santos Vagos and the Varrios Los Aztecas reside in this area. South Los Angeles can be best understood through its reputation and history. Mike Davis’ City of Quartz is notable for distinctively envisioning tensions that painted the scenario in which the 1992 Los Angeles riots occurred. The riots are iconic of the area. They involved a series of arsons, riots and lootings that started within South Central Los Angeles. They had been the largest riots the city had witnessed since the Watts Riot of 1965. From the 1992 riot was there was estimated property damage of over $1 billion, 53 people killed, and 2,000 injured. Stan Wilson, “Riot anniversary tour surveys progress and economic challenges in Los Angeles," CNN, accessed Sept 10, 2015. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/25/us/california-post-riot/index.html?hpt=us_t4 These events and reputation paint the scheme for which the canvas of South Los Santos is rendered within Grand Theft Auto V. South Los Santos hosts a large housing project complex on the south. These project houses are uncanny in their appearance to Nickerson gardens in Watts, Los Angeles. The Nickerson Gardens are a famous townhouse completed in 1955 by William Nickerson, Jr. Dennis Freeman, "Nickerson Gardens Targeted for Redevelopment". Los Angeles Sentinel, March 25, 2004, 11. In addition, they are a recognised haunt of the Bounty Hunter Bloods gang. Hector Becerra, “A quiet night’s menace,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 17, 2007, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-gangstory17nov17-story.html In Los Santos the housing complex is made of white brick, barred windows, and cell like divisions. This virtual construction reflects the physical form of the Nickerson Gardens as seen in Figure 7. Furthermore the project houses in Los Santos hosts the Los Santos Vagos gang. There is gang notoriety in both Los Santos’ white unnamed project houses and the Nickerson Gardens. Furthermore Rancho is a trigger point for a random crime encounter in Grand Theft Auto V. In games it is common to have programmed encounters with events relative to an area. These programmed encounters are given with a probability aspect to imitate reality. In Rancho, there is a programmed encounter of a bike theft. In this scenario a random criminal steals the bike of a civilian, and the player needs to chase the criminal and return the stolen bike to the victimised owner. Through this programmed encounter as a narrative the game pontificates the region as being dangerous. There is a similarity of reputation and violence in South Los Angeles that is reflected in South Los Santos. Rockstar use the emotional landmark of violence and gangs as an anchor point in which to portray South Los Santos. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 7 “A Comparison of Nickerson Gardens (Left) with South Los Santos housing complex (Right)” 2015. Digital Collage. Source: Left, genius.com. Image of Nickerson Gardens, accessed 6 Sept, 2015, http://genius.com/3869626. Right, Cableline Network “GTA V All Gang locations,” Screencap of video, 2:49/7:03, Youtube, posted Sep 22, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D78aiRYVhzQ Baldwin Village in Los Angeles is a community part of the Crenshaw district. It was renamed after the prosperous Baldwin Hills neighbourhood nearby. Chamberlain Hills is part of South Los Santos. When viewing the figure-ground diagram of Los Santos, Chamberlain Hills can be shown as dense white blocks with courtyards as seen in Figure 8. In-game these blocks are low rise apartment buildings. The low rise construction in Chamberlain Hills appears to represent the iconic Baldwin Village community in Los Angeles. The solids and voids visible in the figure-ground zone of Chamberlain Hills are typical of the Baldwin Village apartment community. Furthermore, Baldwin Village appears in 2001 film Training Day as a dangerous area in which the protagonist is afraid of being trapped inside due to gang violence. Franklin a protagonist in Grand Theft Auto V was born in Chamberlain Hills. He is part of one of ‘The Families’ gang, specifically the ‘Chamberlain Gangster Families’ (CGF). If Franklin harms any of the CGF gang in the area he will be attacked by the district. In film the area is shown as a place of hostility. This danger is reflected in the game through the unbalanced see-saw of violence and peace. The reputation of Baldwin Village is mimicked in Chamberlain Hills. In this way, this is one district that Rockstar have depicted in South Los Santos. Together with the other four zones of South Los Santos, Rockstar attempt to portray South Los Santos as South Los Angeles. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 8 Mark Teo, “Comparison of Baldwin Village with Chamberlain Hills,” 2015. Digital Collage. Sources: Google Earth, Los Santos Figure-Ground Diagram, and Satellite view of Los Santos. Del Perro and Santa Monica It must be noted that Santa Monica in California is politically not part of the Greater Los Angeles district. Nonetheless socially, Santa Monica and LA are frequently bundled due to their proximity and culture. Banham also groups Santa Monica into greater Los Angeles in Four Ecologies. Del Perro in Grand Theft Auto V is a parody of Santa Monica in California. Santa Monica is a beachfront city in the Los Angeles County, California. It is a famed resort town and is home to Hollywood celebrities, surfers, and executives. The accompanying Grand Theft Auto V manual writes that "Del Perro is a laidback, trendy beachfront community made up of hip tanned new-agey-type yuppies and hip tanned new-agey-type homeless people. Bums on Del Perro beach have a higher standard of living than most of the rest of the United States." The bold statements of Rockstar in their descriptions of Del Perro enforce and mock the opulent and surf lifestyle of Santa Monica. Taking a specific street for inspection, Prosperity Street Promenade clearly draws from Third Street Promenade as reference, see Figure 10. Third Street Promenade is identified as an upscale dining, shopping and entertainment complex. Supporting the upscale shopping in Third Street, Rockstar name their recreation of the street as Prosperity Street Promenade, which clearly uses the word prosperity as a play on the opulent reputation of the shops. Where Third Street boasts more than 100 shops, its virtual counterpart holds only 29. There is a clear difference in shops and Los Santos does not try to assimilate every detail. H&M nor any other large retail chain appears in the virtual reconstruction. In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi and Brown understand that the silhouette of the enormous Chippendale highboy is visible before the building itself. Robert Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1972), 9. The sign for the building takes priority over the actual function. Likewise in Prosperity Street Promenade, its character is defined by an overall sign rather than the specifics. Third street promenade as an image can be defined by its pedestrian pathway, centre landscaping, and a procession of palm trees. Similarly Prosperity Street Promenade carries similar imageability. It includes the same dual pedestrian pathways, centre landscaping and iconic palm trees. The street tries to take powerful characteristics of the original and embodies a general feel of the original, rather than a complete copy. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 9. “Comparison of Astro Theatre in Los Santos (Left) with AMC in Santa Monica (Right),” 2015. Digital Collage. Source: Left, “Astro Theaters,” Screencap in GTA V, gtawiki, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Astro_Theaters. Right, “[AMC],” Screenshot, Google Streetview, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.google.com.au/maps/search/AMC+santa+monica/@34.0161949,-118.4980942,18z AMC in Santa Monica is a cinema located on the corner of Arizona Ave and Third Steet Promenade. In Prosperity Street Promenade there is a cinema at one of the corners along the intersection of Red Desert Avenue. The cinema is part of Grand Theft Auto’s fictional franchise Astro Theaters. Prosperity Street Promenade’s Astro Theater draws physical and symbolistic similarities to AMC’s Santa Monica as seen in Figure 9. Astro Theater is predominately a box with prominent arches at both fronts. Similarly AMC also can be perceived as a box with prominent arches at both street faces. However it must be noted that Astro Theatre is coloured a dark brown, whereas AMC is a light cream pink. Furthermore the canopy on the Astro theatre is considerably less outstanding than in the AMC theatre. Both the colour difference and the subtle change in architecture could be considered to be a design factor for the cinema as a symbol. The darker colour contrasts to both the bright yellow Astro cinema logo and the film listings. Also the reduction of the canopy strengthens both the entrances and the cinema signs. The abatement in unnecessary elements reinforces the greater symbol. From a distance the Astro theatre reads more like a stereotypical cinema than AMC Santa Monica. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 10 “Comparison of Prosperity Street Promenade (Left) with Third Street Boulevard (Right),” 2015. Photo Collage. Source: Left, “Several views of Prosperity Street Promenade,” Cropped, gtawiki, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 ,http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Prosperity_Street_Promenade. Right, Wedding Mapper, “[Prosperity Street],” Photograph, accessed 10 Sept, 2015 http://www.weddingmapper.com/wedding_vendors/ca/santa_monica/parks_recreation/32 This idea of bold communication is demonstrated in the famous concept of the Venturi’s duck’s and decorated sheds. The duck was named after a roadside building in Eastern Long Island that looked like a duck. Using this example Venturi hoped to emphasise the image of the building over the process or form. Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, 64-65 As the building looked like a duck, it was a bold symbol alluding to the sale of ducks and eggs. The other idea is the decorated shed. The decorated shed is a generic structure that is only identifiable due to signs.49 Without the signs or applied ornamentation they cannot be understood. In the case of Astro theatre and AMC Santa Monica, it can be suggested that they are both decorated sheds. Without signage or ornamentation, neither can be instantly recognised as a cinema. Nonetheless there is an idea of a symbol and bold communication in Astro Theatre. Astro Theatre can be considered to have greater decorations than AMC Santa Monica. Its design emphasizes the sign through the reduction of lesser elements and change in colour. It aims to be read as a cinema with as much ease as possible. The cinemas are both sheds, but Astro Theatre recognises its purpose and is designed for greater communication. As a symbol it helps define Prosperity Street Promenade, which in turn supports the characterisation of Del Perro. Del Perro as a smaller fragment of Santa Monica then reflects Santa Monica through symbolism. Downtown Downtown in Los Angeles is defined by four borders of highway. The south region is syndicated by Santa Monica freeway, west by Harbor freeway and Transit Way, north by Santa Ana Freeway, and east by the Los Angeles river. Similarly Downtown in Los Santos is divided by four main borders. Its regions are split: South Olympic Freeway, West La Puerta Freeway, North Del Perro Freeway, and east Los Santos Storm Drain. The freeway and orientation of the Los Santos borders are clearly abstracted from Los Angeles. Although LA’s downtown is bordered by four main paths, the variation in direction and curve makes it difficult to visualise as seen by Lynch and imageability. Lynch, Image of the City, 32 However the Los Santos edges do not include complex curves or variations. Instead it is placed simply along a north to south and east to west axis. Downtown Los Santos is easier to visualise due to the straight boundaries. As described by Lynch, straight roads create greater imageability.50 The roads of the highway are made more coherent in Los Santos. As Banham and Lynch have both described, the highway is an essential element of Los Angeles. In this case the highway affects both the city as a whole and the boundaries. By a more imageable construction of the freeway, the entire city then becomes more imageable. There is a huge disparity between the size and functions of both downtowns. Downtown Los Angeles includes 50,000 people, 500,000 jobs, 65 city blocks and 16 distinct neighbourhoods. David Meagher, “Downtown LA: America’s fastest growing city,” The Australian, Aug 07, 2015, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/travel/downtown-la-americas-fastest-growing-city/story-e6frg8rf-1227469817746. In contrast Downtown Los Santos includes zero people and zero jobs in a single player game. The 65 city blocks are reduced to 26. The 16 distinct neighbourhoods are reduced to 4 districts. There is a clear difference in the sizes of these two zones. To be representative Los Santos must streamline Downtown Los Angeles. There is a clear distinction when one drives into the downtown of Los Santos. All of both north and south entrances require the player to drive over a bridge. The bridge acts a catalyst to let the player know they have entered the city. It defines the downtown as a space distinct from the previous zone. The east and west also have similar framing devices for downtown. The west entrances are located underneath the freeway. In this fashion as the player drives through, the three physical barriers of the freeway above and supports to the left and right, frame downtown. Downtown is then framed as the player arrives in from the west entrance through this makeshift concrete entrance. The east entrance is similar, in that the giant skyscrapers are visible from a distance upon crossing the storm drain and are accentuated from the contour of the landscape. There a huge shift in typology evident from all directions, the skyscrapers are erected tall and are representative of a modern city. Compared to the scattered suburban outskirts, downtown cohesively comes together in a collage of glass and steel, its elongated shadows enveloping and determining a distinct zone flavour. In many cities a skyline typology represents the area of downtown. Los Angeles and Los Santos are no exceptions. In Los Angeles this typology of the skyscraper is one of the most defining aspects of downtown. In Los Santos the idea is mimicked, and though a fragment of its LA counterpart, Los Santos Downtown skyscrapers are engaging to the player. To further strengthen the relationship of both cities’ downtowns the next section will look at a specific region, Pershing Square. Pershing Square and Legion Square Lynch’s analysis of Los Angeles is limited to a small pilot study in Image of the City. Sample sizes of approximately two and a half miles by one a half miles (or ~4km x 2.5km) were taken as a sample size. Lynch, Image of the City, 14. Due to the small sample size of his case studies, Lynch’s study of Los Angeles seems to omit many key districts found in both Banham’s Four Ecologies, and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V. Examples of landmarks not identified in Lynch’s study include Santa Monica’s Beach, the culture of “The Hills”, or even LA’s famous Hollywood Sign. Instead of these largely known landmarks, Lynch maps the importance of Perishing Square. “Perishing Square is consistently the strongest element of all”, Ibid., 36. “Perishing Square in Los Angeles…” “… perhaps the sharpest point of the city image.” Ibid., 75. His diagram titled The distinctive elements of Los Angeles, in Image of the City considers Perishing Square as the most important element in Los Angeles (Figure 2) . Lynch, Image of the City, 151. In Grand Theft Auto's Los Santos, Perishing Square is known not by the real world alias, but instead as Legion Square. It is located in the commercial downtown district, bordering Mission Row (Skid Row) on the east and Pillbox Hill (Bunker Hill) on the west. The park mimics the spatial qualities and implementation of Pershing Square’s 1992 $14.5 million redesign and renovations by landscape architects Ricardo Legorreta and Laurie Olin. The new design includes icons such as a ten story purple bell tower, fountains and various public artworks. It is significant in Downtown Los Santos as it is the only block in the district to be dedicated to the sole purpose of park space. It is symbolic as Grand Theft Auto V’s real estate as a gaming platform is constrained. Therefore to have a complete downtown block dedicated to Pershing Square would be a design decision by Rockstar. This design decision would most likely be based on virtual space versus importance. From this extrapolation, Pershing Square in Los Angeles must have a momentous cultural importance to exist as a block in Downtown Los Santos. Pershing Square has a history of being the result of social tendencies. The current Pershing Square in LA faces harsh criticisms of poor design. “Pershing Square” Yelp, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 http://www.yelp.com/biz/pershing-square-los-angeles. Born as Block 15 in 1849 as a singular block on a grid, it manifested as a public park by the city council when it was left undeveloped due to being unattractive during an economic slump. Nathan Masters, “From Plaza Abaja to Pershing Square: L.A.'s Oldest Park Through the Decades,” KCET, May 9, 2012, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/from-plaza-abaja-to-pershing-square-las-oldest-park-through-the-decades.html. During the 1950s it was notorious for being a venue for public preaching and outspoken oratory. However the city's reaction to the public speech had them disengage the zone from the protestors through design. This reaction was enacted with the 1992 $14.5 million redevelopment. Yellow, purple and beige walls now edge the square with large pink cylinders lining the main road facing Hill St, hindering visual connections and accessibility. Mike Davis’ outcry about the loss of public space is evident. There are currently arched seating and railings intended to deter homeless from habituating or sleeping. It is frequently cited that locals call the palm tree lined area in the northeast corner “urinal alley” due to frequent urination. “nourish Los Angeles”, Skyscraperpage, Last Modified April 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/printthread.php?t=170279&pp=20&page=691., “Pershing Square,” Triposo, Accessed Sept 10, 2015 http://www.triposo.com/poi/W__80579943., Heather Lynn, “Pershing Square”, Blogspot, Oct 28, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://heatherlynnmc.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/pershing-square.html. In response to the notoriety of Perishing Square, the corporation AEG is currently sponsoring a $700,000 redesign of the complex. Adrian Glick Kudler, “Los Angeles Plans to Completely Re-Envision Pershing Square,” Curbed, Feb 01, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/02/los_angeles_plans_to_completely_reenvision_pershing_square.php. Los Santos emulates social aspects and does more than create a geographic likeness to Los Angeles. The reputation of Pershing Square bleeds into the fictional reality of Legion Square. The square is always crowded during the day time, featuring many artists and small stores you can interact with. There are several in-game missions initiated by conversing with the ‘stranger’ Barry on his makeshift table in Legion Square. Barry is a politician and gives pseudo political sermons on the benefits of marijuana legalisation to the characters. To entice the general public he attempts to lobby people directly by giving out free samples of his home grown marijuana. Grand Theft Auto V fearlessly associates and categorises Legion Square as a drug zone. The game does not pull any punches, and lets viewers see the city as a stereotypical idea of itself. It adds a layer of social immersivity to the user experience. The new layer of social immersivity represents the city in exaggerated ways that are difficult to portray in formal texts. Lynch’s book Image of the City was released in 1960s and so his interviewees would have been familiar with the 1950s version of Pershing Square. As previously stated in this time it was notorious for being a venue for public preaching and outspoken oratory. The most vivid of Kevin Lynch’s descriptions is that “Sometimes subjects showed fear of the old and eccentric people who use it”, which is immediately followed by “Nevertheless, this is a highly identifiable image, strengthened by the presence of… Biltmore Hotel.” Lynch, Image of the City, 37. Following the brief description of the park there are several paragraphs dedicated to indicating Pershing Park as being a fine example of the element of the node. It can be noted that due to Lynch’s focus on the elements, there is a lesser importance on the true nature of the zone. While the real Pershing Square and the virtual Legion Square are visually similar, the ways in which Lynch and Rockstar Games represent them are different. Legion Square presents a negative stereotypical homeless, artist, and drug induced hub. It is ostentatious in the way it constructs the square, exaggerating dark sides of social fabric to more immersively engage the player. It represents the city through parody to give a greater layer of depth to the simulation of life. On the other hand, Pershing Square presented by Kevin Lynch is posed to function as the greatest node in the samples he takes of Los Angeles. In Los Santos, however, the square is not some idealised place within a greater idea of the city. It is instead a place where one is able to experience an engaging representation of the social conditions of Los Angeles. The Minimap For Pershing Square to be legible as a node the element must be experiential and have strong imageability. However rather than focus on a node, let us zoom out to an urban scale of experience and peer at Lynch’s wayfinding for the sake of understanding how Los Santos can be perceived. Coined at the start of Image of The City, wayfinding is a form of spatial problem solving related to imageability. This type of spatial thought highlights the strategic link between the environmental image and the mental picture held by the individual. Ibid., 4 Lynch lists examples of way-finding devices as maps, street numbers, route signs, and bus placards. He notes the symptoms of disorientation as anxiety and terror. It is as though being lost manifests itself as a physical sickness. The term ‘lost’ in English means more than a misplacement of physical being, it foreshadows utter disaster. An imageable city would not allow for utter disaster to occur. Therefore as an evolutionary response, one must keep the city as powerful as an image as possible.63 This significance of imageability should cause any city designer to keep in mind ideals of legibility. Los Santos aims to be as legible as possible for the sake of playability. Within many games there exists a head-up display (HUD) that is available at all times. The head-up display exists for the sole purpose of providing information to the user. It displays knowledge to the user that may or may not be self-evident within the gameplay. In the Grand Theft Auto V world, the head-up display is minimalized and shows the minimap, health and stamina bars. See Figure 11, in Images Health and stamina bars function as bar graphs indicating the amount of vitality and fortitude remaining. The head-up display is part of Los Santos’ approach to being legible. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 11. Wu, “GTA V Minimap,” 2015, Cropped Screenshot. Source: “Bad Cop: Grand Theft Auto V Review,” The Flashy Review, posted Sep 21, 2013, Accessed Sept 10, 2015, http://www.theflashyreview.com/bad-cop-grand-theft-auto-review/. More importantly in the context of city legibility is the head-up display feature of the minimap. Minimap is a jargon term described by gamers that outlines a small map given to the player in the head-up display. Its origin comes from being a small minature map, hence minimap. It is akin to having a transportation global positioning system (GPS) in the car. Furthermore the Grand Theft Auto V GPS minimap is synced directly to all shops and services within the game as though it were an omnipresent deity tracking knowing all services and events. These events are represented on the map using specific iconography that represents their purpose. The gun shop has an icon of a gun. The politician in Pershing Park has a mission symbol, denoting he has a task for the player. The way in which these icons are clearly labelled helps define and indicate the surrounding opportunities. Lynch considers the physical unmoving map to be a wayfinding device. The GPS minimap hyperextends the functionality of its predecessor, it is a modern wayfinding device. The icons and minimap help direct the player to create a legible and easier to understand environment. As one drives in Los Santos they are directed by the omnipresent minimap. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 12. Rob Jackson, “Google Glass GPS,” 2015, Screenshot of Video, 0:42/3:52. Source: “Google Glass: Navigation,” Youtube, posted May 9, 2013, accessed Sept 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZdkIVS53Uw The minimap exists beyond the GPS of a car. It lies in a permanent state at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Out of the automobile and walking the streets, the minimap is always present to assist the player in navigating the environment. The idea is currently seen bleeding into reality as in 2011 Google publicly released Google Glass with GPS and HUD displays as seen in Figure 12. The technology innovation is aimed to create a more efficient life. In the Grand Theft Auto series it already exists. When hunted by police, the minimap displays police icons on the map with their line of sight. By showing the line of sight it helps the player to avoid being caught. If police are scouting towards the player’s zone, the player can move away on an omniscient path to avoid detection. The user experiences Los Santos on a consciousness higher than reality. In addition the minimap displays where players can receive their missions. As previously noted, in Pershing Park the politician gives players a mission. Missions are given by artificial characters and are the key aspect in progressing the game forward. As the minimap denotes symbols for the missions, it acts as a wayfinding device for characters to progress through their lives. Driving “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original.” Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Short Documentary, performed by Reyner Banham. (1972; BBC Films.) It is a commonly spread story among LA historians that Banham learnt to drive in LA. It emphasis the idea that, without being able to drive one cannot truly understand the way in which Los Angeles was originally intended to be explored. To drive in LA is to experience it in its true vernacular. Through driving you become aware of different fragments. In the film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Banham brings the viewer through LA as a narrative using the car as the main transportation medium. Gas stations and Drive-ins become the recommended public monument as Banham drives from one zone to another. He indicates that driving the freeway is an expression it itself, and also that the fragments are reachable through it. Los Angeles has each change of district and typology is experienced through the car. While driving he narrates “Up here you see the most weird [and] extraordinary pieces that you can hardly see from down below.” 65 Accessing and exposure to districts is expressed to be available through driving on the highway. The automobile becomes the place in which Los Angeles is experienced. Driving acts a facilitator in viewing the fragments of the city. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has always focused on driving. The title refers to stealing cars and through the games there is a recurring focus on the automobile. The dark overtone of stealing cars from the title contrasts to name Los Angeles. There is an interest gained from the irony. ‘Los Angeles’ translates to ‘The Angels’ in Spanish. ‘Los Santos’ translates to ‘The Saints’. The game title of stealing cars creates tensions within the city of The Saints. The game is implied to be experienced through the stealing of cars from the saints or angels. In game, at the press of a button near a driver’s seat, the character initiates an automated theft from the Los Santos citizen. Let the player take the city for themselves. The player will rob the city through the automobile. Los Santos emulates Los Angeles. By driving the player will experience the city. Unitary Urbanism The player experiences Los Santos through driving and the minimap. These are tools that have allowed the user to witness the freedom within Los Santos. Understanding the tools of psychogeography and the drift, enabled the Situationists to generate their own ideal city. “The Situationists foresaw a city constituted of grand situations, between which the inhabitants would drift, endlessly.” Sadler, The Situationist City, 117-118 The city would be that of play, and would allow its observers to continuously wander. This city embodying these ideals would be planned on the principle of unitary urbanism. Sadler writes that the city of unitary urbanism would be built upon the ordinary person’s participation. The architecture would be subject to the will of the psychological experience.66 Debord proclaims that their ideals of Unitary Urbanism would “be infinitely more far-reaching than the old domination of architecture over the traditional arts.” Guy Debord, Theory of the Derive: And Other Situations Texts. (1997), 52 The city of the social urban project would do more than showcase architecture to the world. It would exemplify the other arts of the people, in turn reducing the dictatorship of architecture as the main framework of the city. The architecture of unitary urbanism would be mixed smoothly with other arts. It would be greater than any passive built form. The multiple aesthetics of the various arts would flash bang the potential endless drifters into a state of experiment and play. The Let’s Play genre is an association usually pertaining to youtube videos where users record themselves playing games with added audio commentary. In episode 53 of TmarTn2’s Let’s Play online series, gameplay is shown where the user seems to embody experiment and play. After waking up in Los Santos, the character controlled by pseudonym ‘TmarTn’ decides he needs to ‘do good’ for the holiday period of Christmas by giving a 1.5 million dollar army tank (virtual) to an arbitrary player. As Grand Theft Auto V exists in the virtual, the inhabitants on the online platform exist through their avatars only. Therefore TmarTn can only be known by his avatar pseudonym and not a formal biological one. What follows next in the recording is TmarTn accidentally flying a heavy lift tandem transport helicopter and crashing while carrying another player’s car, resulting in the death of both avatars. On respawn (Verb used to describe when characters are resurrected) the other player known as babybright, is not angry or spiteful at TmarTn, but instead returns to him in a car offering a free ride. In light of this act of generosity and goodwill, TmarTn directs babybright to the Del Perro pier for the surprise of a free 1.5 million dollar rhino tank. Babybright then immediately takes hold of the tank, drives into downtown with TmarTn, and begins killing dozens of other players and police. The idea of a world full of experiment, anarchy and play are evident through the city of Los Santos. Wreaking havoc and engaging in deadly rampages are integral parts of the Grand Theft Auto experience. The game invites users to feel free within Los Santos. They are able to cause as much destruction as possible without restriction. As seen in the case of TmarTn and Babybright, players are liberated from their physical counterpart. They live and play within the city of Los Santos unhindered by the constraints of the physical. Even death itself is not an obstacle within the virtual, players are reincarnated or simply 'respawned’ back into the world. The manual dexterity and skill of driving both a heavy lift tandem transport helicopter, and a tank, are also given to the players. The skills are assigned to the avatars, and the player only needs to direct their intent through the controller in order to pilot the vehicle. Los Santos provides the skills to play. The Situationists dreamt of a city where the dweller is unhindered by the built form. Within the virtual world a freedom not available in reality is gained. The concept of the drift and its notions of fun can be seen in the intrinsic concept of play in a video game. Los Santos is a giant virtual playground in which users from all over the world are emancipated to gather and play in. By dwelling into these freedom ideals, one becomes able to draw many parallels between video games and The Situationists. Conclusion Jorn of the Situationists writes that, “We do not recognize the existence of architecture... Cologne Cathedral is nothing but an empty magical sculpture, whose aim is purely psychological- just like a glass of beer is architecture.” Maltz, A. and Malvin Wald. The Naked City (1948), cited in M. Christine Boyer. Twice-Told Stories: The Double Erasue of Times Square. in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, and Jane Rendell, eds. Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City London: Routledge, 1996. 77-81. With this glass of beer, the Situationist idea of architecture is no longer represented by the built form; instead architecture is as a container for events to occur. Grand Theft Auto V acts as a container for Los Angeles to become Los Santos. The game is as a framework designed for the player to explore. The Los Santos conceptualisation of modern Los Angeles is omnipresent and mocking; it is an extension of its former city. Banham has noted how Los Angeles is a city built on transport. The act of driving on the highway is a true experience of the city. He has claimed that the highway should be the tiara the Angeleno deity should use to crown herself. See Chapter 1, Page 19 In the city of saints and angels, Los Santos, the player aims to steal automobiles. They traverse and explore on stolen vehicles, while murdering citizens. They use a GPS system applied as an all seeing minimap. Police appear on the map with their positions and vision localised. Their authority taunted. The player is able to know all and subsequently alter their criminal destiny. In Image of the City, Lynch argues that a strong mental image in the minds of the city dweller would be beneficial in determining how easily understood a city is. Los Santos includes drug dealers in Legion Square. It houses gangs in South Los Santos. Grand Theft Auto V clearly creates imageable areas of the city. These areas are starred regions of Los Angeles. As seen by ‘The Naked City’, a postmodern critique allows citizens to be guided through to the essential elements of the city. Correspondingly the fragments of Los Angeles are amalgamated to create a denser and more enjoyable city. Los Santos is a bricolage of its reference city. Using the Situationists, Rowe, and Koetter, Banham, and Davis, this thesis has examined the way that Rockstar Games has imaged the city of Los Santos. The Situationists protested the rigidity of the modern city. They advocated for freedom against the shackles of a prefabricated life. Online gaming experiences as shown by TmarTn are only made possible by the unique laissez faire virtual system. Rockstar have found the starred icons of Los Angeles and squashed the city into digestible form. Rowe and Koetter in Collage City put forth a critique of modernity and call for cities to be created as a bricolage. So it is that Rockstar Games create a city out of fragments, with places such as South Los Angeles becoming virtual spaces of South Los Santos. Rockstar act as a bricoleur of a city, creating a design with fragments of an existing city. Rockstar appears to have created a city that is described by postmodern criticisms of modernity. This thesis is my interpretation of Rockstar’s representation of Los Angeles. By drawing from The Situationists who dreamt of a city of fun, expression, and anarchy, we understand the postmodern response in which Los Santos lets players discover Los Angeles in ways unavailable to reality. The cognitive mapping process in ‘The Naked City’, is reflected in Los Santos. The social cultures identified by Banham and Lynch in LA have been included in Los Santos. Its fragments are weaved together in virtual construction. Collage City argued for the bricoleur in creating cities. Rockstar have amalgamated Los Angeles. At the end of Lynch’s seminal cognitive mapping book, he closes with great enthusiasm for further studies. It would be “…interesting to apply these methods to environments of different scale or function other than cities.” Lynch, Image Of The City, 157 Should we apply Lynch’s methodologies to virtual cities? 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