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85 T H R E E Inside Exopolis V I E W S O F O R A N G E C O U N T Y (19 9 0 –19 9 6 ) After “Taking Los Angeles Apart,” I could not go back to traditional academic writing and turned instead to the county next door to take another unconventional look at the Los Angeles urbanized area. Orange County was itself both a parody and paradigm of the New American City, an outer city that had grown into a peculiar “postsuburban” metropolis that demanded global attention and not a little scorn. Rather than sixty suburbs in search of a city, as the old Los Angeles was described, OC became a conglomeration of thirty-four cities desperately searching for some sense of centrality—for where the “downtown” might be. Here was an example of amorphous postmodern urbanism just begging to be described in a style appropriate to its main features. I saw Orange County as a representative part of what I called an exopolis, the product of combined processes of decentralization and recentralization. Rather than simple suburbanization, which characterized Orange County up to the 1960s, decentralization took the form of peripheral urbanization, creating cities in what was once sprawling low-density suburbia. Recentralization involved both the growth of these “suburban cities” (some called them edge cities or boomburbs) and filling in of the urban core by mass immigration, as in Los Angeles and many other large world cities. The term exopolis has a double meaning, reminiscent of the Greek utopia or eu-topia, translated as either “no place” or “good place.” The prefix exoconnotes both being “outside,” as with the growth of the outer city, and “formerly but no longer,” as in ex-wife or ex-husband. This second meaning is intended to suggest that Orange County urbanism is unlike traditional forms of urban development—including, I might add, what we have described for Los Angeles. 86 • I N S I D E E X O P O L I S : V I E W S O F O R A N G E C O U N T Y “Inside Exopolis” (app. 1, source 3A), my peripatetic tour of Orange County, first appeared in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by the architectural critic Michael Sorkin and published in 1992. It was my most experimental, intentionally amusing, and decidedly postmodern writing. At the time, exopolis was my entry into the frenzied competition to find words to describe what was happening in cities outside the urban core, a new urban glossary that includes outer cities, edge cities, peripheral urbanization, technopoles, technoburbs, silicon landscapes, metroplex, postsuburbia, metroburbia, boomburbs, and so on. I will return to this explosion of new terms in chapter 7, where I absorb the term exopolis into the larger concept of regional urbanization. Orange County urbanism was drenched with distinctive features demanding serious attention, nothing more so than the artful suspension of factual reality that seemed to pour out of its recreative spaces. Scholars and cultural critics from all over the world saw in OC the most vivid expressions of what Jean Baudrillard, keen observer of Orange County in his America (1988), called the production of “hyperreality” and the “precession of simulacra,” whereby simulations of the real were rapidly replacing (preceding) reality itself. The map (representing the real in always slightly inaccurate, projected form), for example, now takes precedence over the actual territory it was supposed to represent. As Baudrillard asserted, drawing on biblical symbolism, “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” In his own Travels in Hyperreality (1986), also touching down in Orange County, Umberto Eco, the Italian philosopher and author of The Name of the Rose, would concur, calling what he saw an assemblage of “real fakes.” Reflecting this growing inability to distinguish what is real from what is imaginatively simulated (now an endemic feature of American politics and Fox news broadcasts), I described Orange County as a scamscape, where fraudulent behavior has become part of everyday life. Here outward appearances not only deceive but divert us from the possibility that everything real has disappeared. What one sees are thick layers of simulations and simulacra —exact copies of things that may no longer exist, if they ever did in the first place. The origins and development of the scamscape go back to...

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