Image.source#4 Textsource: Mike Davis The Mercenaries, Epilogue: Gramsci vs Blade Runner ... "The large-scale developers and their financial allies, together with a few oil magnates and entertainment moguls, have been the driving force behind the public-private coalition to build a cultural superstructure for Los Angeles's emergence as a 'world city'. They patronize the art market, endow the museums, subsidize the regional institutes and planning schools, award the architectural competitions, dominate the arts and urban design taskforces, and influence the flow of public arts monies. They have become so integrally involved in the organization of high culture, not because of oldfashioned philanthropy, but because 'culture' has become an important component of the land development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between different elites and regional centers. Oldfashioned material interest, in other words, drives the mega-developers to support the general cultural revalorization of Los Angeles, and, more specifically, to endorse the concentration of cultural assets in nodes of maximum development. This culture strategy has a long history behind it. Since the 1920s, the 'Downtown elite' (composed of old guard families, led by the Chandler dynasty of the Times, who had sunk their patrimonies in Downtown real estate), faced with the centrifugal movement of investment westward along Wilshire Boulevard, have struggled to 'recenter' the region around a revitalized central business district. At various times, they have tried to repel, or assimilate, the autonomous 'Westside' power structure that arose out of Jewish interests in the entertainment, savings-and-loan, and suburban real-estate sectors. Contrastingly, the Jewish elites have pursued their own spatial strategy of centering academic and cultural institution-building on the Westside. More recently, as offshore capital has partially supplanted this old ruling-class antinomy, central-place rivalries have been subsumed into a more ambitious neo-regionalism geared up to compete with San Francisco and New York."...(excerpt of the text embedded in the image) from: City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles. (pp.70 - 88) Mike Davis, 1st Vintage Books ed.,1992 Image.source#1 Textsource: Saskia Sassen Die neue Zentralität - Auswirkungen von Telematik und Globalisierung Image.source#2 Textsource: Rem Koolhaas The Generic City Image.source#3 Textsource: Walter Gropius Die soziologischen Grundlagen der Minimalwohnung	.
	.
	<	.