Battle Lines Are Drawn--and Redrawn

Cartography must be the fastest-growing hobby in Los Angeles. Used to be that everybody in L.A. was writing a screenplay. Now everybody is making maps. And why not? It’s easy and fun. Maybe it reminds us of our youth. Kids who mastered jigsaw puzzles of the United States would as teenagers attempt to master the world in marathon games of Risk.

Those Risk games could get intense, but now there’s more risk in our mapmaking. These days, lines are being drawn that seek to divide and thus conquer the existing city, school district and transit agencies. Some of these maps are more serious than others. Some might even be swell ideas. But it won’t be easy, and maybe not much fun, making the best--or worst--of these maps a reality.

The imagined city of Westside, Calif., is the newest map to make waves. Inspired by the secessionists north of Mulholland Drive, a group of Westsiders is kicking around the notion of a burg of 643,000 inhabitants that would stretch from Pacific Palisades to LAX and reach inland around Culver City to (roughly) Western Avenue to embrace much of Hollywood.

The Westsidistas don’t seem nearly as serious as the Valleyistas to the north and the San Pedroistas to the south. Regardless, the amateur cartography should help people like Marcos Castaneda and Erwin Chemerinsky save Los Angeles from itself.

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Chemerinsky you probably know. He’s the USC law professor who became a familiar face analyzing the daily drama of the O.J. Simpson murder trial on TV. This bit of celebrity, plus the endorsement of labor unions, helped Chemerinsky win election to the city’s charter commission, representing a council district that straddles the Santa Monica Mountains from Sherman Oaks to the Fairfax district.

Castaneda’s name may not be so familiar. Councilman Richard Alarcon’s chief of staff was elected to represent Alarcon’s northeast Valley district on the commission.

While some activists preach secession as a remedy for whatever troubles their community, Chemerinsky and Castaneda fear that the balkanizing of Los Angeles won’t make life better for anyone. Better, they say, would be a new charter that would empower distinct neighborhoods and perhaps create a kind of borough system that provides more power to local communities.

Chemerinsky, who helped the emerging nation of Belarus draft its constitution after the breakup of the Soviet Union, says the challenge of empowering L.A.’s communities is far more daunting than, say, the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government.

“The hardest and most important issue we will face,” Chemerinsky says, “is the desire to decentralize governing power while still maintaining the necessary central authority.”

Some of L.A.’s communities, he points out, are easily defined, while others tend to blur together.

“I live near La Brea and Beverly,” he continues. “Real estate ads call it Hancock Park adjacent. Is it part of Fairfax? Is it Mid-Wilshire? I don’t know.”

Castaneda doesn’t have that problem. Born in the city of San Fernando, raised in Pacoima, he now lives with his wife and three children in Sylmar. He sees the communities of the northeast Valley both as distinct entities and as areas that have strong kinship with one another. These communities also relate strongly to and in some ways envy the city of San Fernando, which incorporated long ago because it had its own well water and didn’t need help from William Mulholland and the empire builders of Los Angeles.

I was curious about Castaneda’s opinion of my colleague Robert A. Jones’ recent effort at cartography. In a column, Bob envisioned the Valley not as one new city, but three that have a nice socioeconomic balance.

The West Valley--everything west of the San Diego Freeway--would be one, and the biggest. The East Valley would be divided into two with Coldwater Canyon Avenue as the demarcation. At Roscoe Boulevard, however, Coldwater becomes the curving Sheldon Street, which then becomes Wentworth. Well, maybe the border could just run up Interstate 5 at that point.

At any rate, Castaneda couldn’t see it. Would Sylmar or Pacoima really relate to Toluca Lake? But where, I asked Castaneda, would he place the southern border of the northeast Valley? Maybe Oxnard Street, he said. Then he thought a bit and moved his border a few blocks south to Burbank Boulevard.

As a parlor game, it’s kind of fun. My own map has L.A. divided into seven boroughs of roughly equivalent population--a compromise that recognizes both neighborhood interests and the bloblike reality of Los Angeles. We’d have boroughs for the West Valley, the East Valley, the Westside, etc. Maybe there’d be one tiny borough for San Pedro--the Staten Island of L.A.

Exactly where all the borders would be drawn and how the borough governments would be structured and how they would interact with one another . . . well, I figure that’s why we elected people like Castaneda and Chemerinsky. Perhaps they can find a way for government to make bigness and smallness work together.

All you mapmakers out there who think that small equals good and big equals bad, consider a couple of recent items in the news.

We are breathing easier now. L.A.’s air is the cleanest it’s been in generations. El Nino has helped but this is the sixth straight year that air quality has improved. Whether most of the credit should go to the federal government, the state government or the Southern California Air Quality Management District, I don’t know. But small government didn’t make this happen.

And meanwhile, the new city of Malibu can’t fix its pier in time for El Nino. Weird to see the words Malibu and “financially strapped” in the same article.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.