california city; hollow city of dust
Any city worth its name needs another city nearby to compete with. There are many examples of this: Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo, Madrid-Barcelona, Rome-Milan, Tokyo-Kyoto, Medellin-Bogota, Mumbay-New Delhi... In wealthy California, Los Angeles had no neighbours to quarrel with. San Francisco could have filled that role, but that beautiful, hippy city never had a competitive spirit. California became a land of dreams during the 20th century. Millions of people moved there in search of an opportunity. Nat Mendelson was one of those people. But he didn't have any old dream: he wanted to build a city that was going to make Los Angeles look small. He bought 200 square miles of the Mojave desert and started to build. They started with a 115 square yard artificial lake. Then machines started moving in every direction to turn Mendelson's urbanistic plan into reality. On the maps, at least, there's no denying his dream came true. Nowadays California City is California's third largest city and the country's 34th largest. In line with typical US town planning, there's a downtown and districts all around it, every postman's nightmare with its endless catalogue of streets. But then postmen don't have any particular trouble in California City. There are no buildings in most of the city's streets: no houses, no electricity posts, no pavements and no trees either. Mendelson wasn't aware of the desert's peculiarities when he began building, and he thought that he only had to copy the model of the many successful cities of the 50's and 60's. Sand storms quickly showed him that the Mojave desert was different. Mendelson started building California City 51 years ago and nowadays it has 14,000 inhabitants. They all live in the western part of the city, near the lake. And the city has found a way of staying alive. They built the California City Correctional Center for 2,500 prisoners, which, along with a military base, keeps the city going. Honda has a test centre there too, but the industrywide crisis has put its continuity into question. According to the official website, the city is growing and there are many projects in progress, but, after visiting California City on Google maps, this optimistic vision seems questionable. In any case, we prefer it as it is. We'll leave this 20th century reflection of man's ambition like Nazca lines for the paranormal experts of the future.
