What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism

ABSTRACT

In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula urbanism can be extended beyond the imbrication of real estate states and smart cities to shed new light on other forms of urban redevelopment and their consequences such as gentrification and urban exclusion more broadly. Additionally, I emphasize the importance of the local in the multi-scalar Dracula urbanist imagination, and make an argument against the so-called centerless and unbounded character of smart cities, which I show are mired in forms of inter-urban competition and discourses shaped by ever-present, politico-legally defined borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Dracula urbanism
• real estate state
• smart cities
• gentrification
• neoliberalism

Introduction

Therefore I write this in case … find this great UnDead, and cut off his head and burn his heart or drive a stake through it, so that the world may rest from him.

—Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Stoker, 1897)

In recent years, geographers and other urbanists have found utility in various monster analogies and metaphors to describe aspects of the advanced capitalist urban condition (e.g. Cugurullo, 2018; Summers, 2022; Draus & Roddy, 2016; Peck, 2010), using them to facilitate and stimulate new, productive lines of inquiry and to shed light on previously unrecognized or taken-for-granted dynamics. In their recent piece titled “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) put forward a new monster analogy, inaugurating “Dracula urbanism” as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those which are engaging in smart city initiatives. Dracula urbanism, they argue, is an institutional formation and ethos that transcends borders and informs policy decisions at local, national, and global scales, defined as “a deep-reaching, human-punishing unfolding that co-works in revanchist-persistent times with flagrant forms of human immiseration … simultaneously a state of mind, a mode of institutional operation, a vision of people, one gaze onto growth’s true needs and a kind of growth produced” (Wilson & Wyly, 2022, p. 2). Inspired by Bram Stoker’s (1897) fictional epistolary novel Dracula, Dracula urbanism parallels attributes of the book’s eponymous vampire.

With this monstrous character and his properties in mind, Wilson and Wyly (2022) describe four guideposts by which to distinguish places infected by “Dracula-itis” (p. 9): first, smart city building initiatives are undertaken by “real estate states” (Stein, 2019) with the intention of extinguishing lifeways deemed to be “degenerate,” i.e. the lifeways of marginalized urbanites, much like Dracula seeks to end inferior and weak mortal bloodlines; second, these real estate states sustain themselves via “a bolstering parasitism” (Wilson & Wyly, 2022, p. 5) to furnish the lifeblood that facilitates their existence, as their continuation relies upon other entities’ resources (at a variety of scales, such as public-private partnerships and national- and global-level institutions); third, Dracula urbanism builds smart cities by utilizing discourses of decline and decay to identify that which is in need of change. Importantly, unlike the revanchism described by Neil Smith (1998, 2005) which volatilely combines anger and vengeance with moral panics, Dracula urbanism supplements or perhaps complements revanchism through more clandestine efforts to annihilate alleged civic cancers (Wilson & Wyly, p. 4), disguising its revanchist logic behind discourses of decline and decay that make way for recommended “cures:” revitalization, growth, modernization, and other positively-tinted pharmakons; and fourth, this Dracula urbanism is anchored in a reality of planetary urbanization – a global expansion of the urban and its influences such that the precise boundary between city and non-city spaces may no longer be clearly discerned (Lefebvre, 2014; Brenner, 2018). For Wilson and Wyly (2022), just as Dracula is “a truly planetary operative” who uses “fact-finding across the globe to gain understanding about his potential victims” and “international catalogues to construct the ideal place and person in need of creation,” real estate states produce smart cities as “fragmented, center-less creations” that involve “multi-scalar, interconnected networks of logistics that splatter across the earth” (Wilson & Wyly, 2022, p. 6).

Whereas Wilson and Wyly (2022) carried out two case studies documenting Dracula urbanism in the US city of Flint, Michigan, and the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta, this article contributes to this incipient framework of urban exegesis an empirical case study in a radically different urban context. Rather than looking for “Dracula-itis” in a deindustrialized Rust Belt city in continued decline (Dandaneau, 1996; Fasenfest, 2019) or a growing megacity in the developing Global South (Bunnell & Miller, 2011), attention is turned toward the US “superstar” city of Los Angeles (see Kemeny & Storper, 2022). Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolis in Southern California known for its entertainment industry, diverse population, and temperate, Mediterranean climate – but also, inter alia, for its high cost of living, soaring real estate values, and homelessness crisis. Nearly four million people live within the City of Los Angeles’ borders, while some 13 million live in the Greater LA metropolitan area – making it the largest city in California, one of the largest cities in the US, and the second-largest metropolitan area in the country behind that of New York.

Following the four aforementioned guideposts, this article seeks to identify instantiations of Dracula urbanism in Los Angeles through an examination of LA-centered scholarship, city-generated reports, and statements by LA city officials. Methodologically, I explore precursory historical examples of Dracula urbanist practices by drawing on academic articles which interrogate aspects of LA’s (re)developmental history and rely upon a textual analysis and discourse analysis of city-generated reports and statements by LA city officials to uncover the ways in which Dracula urbanist visions of the city are being manufactured and disseminated to the public. Textual analysis involves attempting to understand how texts are likely to be interpreted by those who consume them (McKee, 2003, p. 2). Meanwhile, discourse analysis involves examining how “language both shapes and reflects dynamic cultural, social, and political practices” (Starks & Trinidad, 2007, p. 1374). Via this attempt at locating an LA-manifested Dracula urbanism, the explanatory capacity of Dracula urbanism in the context of Los Angeles is considered and elaborated. I wish to underscore at the outset, however, that while analogies may have great utility, we must always regard them as tools whose functions may only extend so far, being mindful of their limitations and being ready to withdraw from them when they have lost logical applicability. From the perspective of LA, I argue that the logic of Dracula urbanism can be reasonably extended beyond the imbrication of real estate states and smart cities, helping to shine new light on other forms of urban redevelopment and their consequences such as gentrification and urban exclusion more broadly. Additionally, I emphasize the necessary importance of the local in the multi-scalar Dracula urbanist imagination and make an argument against the centerless and unbounded character of smart cities, which I show are mired in forms of inter-urban competition and consequent discourses shaped by ever-present, politico-legally defined borders.

I begin with a background that connects real estate states and smart cities beyond Los Angeles, as these have been posited as two central features of cities overtaken by Dracula urbanism (Wilson & Wyly, 2022). I then move to document the presence of a deeply ingrained real estate state in Los Angeles, as well as the presence of an in-progress effort to transform the city into a “smart city” before analyzing examples from LA that I argue reflect Dracula urbanism as “a deep-reaching, human-punishing unfolding that co-works in revanchist-persistent times with flagrant forms of human immiseration” (Wilson & Wyly, 2022, p. 2). Finally, I briefly discuss the implications of invoking Dracula urbanism as a conceptual framing in the LA context.

Real estate states and smart cities ascendant

In Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Stein (2019) argues that real estate capital has largely supplanted industrial capital in Global North cities. While the real estate state is not an entirely new emergence, as some version of it has existed since the dawn of primitive accumulation, real estate is becoming increasingly central to capitalism’s global growth strategy, acting as a dominant medium of capital circulation mediated by the state in the post-industrial era.¹ Critically, the real estate state is enacted at all scales of government, but most intensely at the municipal level, where city planning plays a major role in shaping urban development and decision-making. It is at the municipal scale that city planners face simultaneous pressures to increase real estate values and, conflictingly, maintain the best interests of community residents. While Stein (2019) focuses attention on the US and New York City in particular as he documents the rise of real estate states and resulting gentrification, real estate states have become embedded across cities of the Global North and the Global South – with an increasing number now rolling out so-called “smart city” logics.

Smart cities are broadly defined as those which mobilize digital technology in attempts to improve urban administration and solve difficulties associated with urbanization (Silva, Khan, & Han, 2018), as well as to leverage technologically driven innovation and entrepreneurship to support urban economic growth and inter-urban competition (Coletta et al., 2019). Such smart city strategies are usually implemented via public-private partnerships between governments and private technology companies (Samih, 2019; DeSouza, 2014). Across North America, Europe, and Australia, smart city strategies have been implemented (Micozzi & Yigitcanlar, 2022; Spicer et al., 2021; Sancino & Hudson, 2020; Michalec et al., 2019), and in the Global South, smart city building plans have also gained significant traction (Prasad & Alizadeh, 2020; Offenhuber, 2019; Datta & Odendaal, 2019). A testament to Dracula urbanism’s reach, the real estate state-smart city linkage has been elucidated particularly powerfully in work on African nations and India (see Watson, 2014, 2015 respectively).

In Vanessa Watson’s “African Urban Fantasies: Dreams or Nightmares?” (2014), she explicates the fantastical visions of development advanced by the speculative urbanism of international growth coalitions. These coalitions are comprised of investors and transnational networks of professional architects and planners who trade in “technical knowledge and global best practice … deployed to promote inter-urban competitiveness” (Watson, 2014, p. 226). Smart city discourses circulate around the globe and embed themselves within the urban planning imaginations of Global North and Global South cities alike, yet in places like the African continent and India – geographies which are richly diverse but largely economically poor and reliant upon informal labor – the immiserating stakes for vulnerable populations are even greater. As Watson writes:

It is access to land by the urban poor (as well as those on the urban periphery and beyond) that is most directly threatened by all these processes, and access to land in turn determines access to urban services, to livelihoods and to citizenship. As the poor confront new alliances between international property capital, national and city politicians and emerging urban middle classes, all bent on the seizure and re-valorization of land, it is also possible (if trends in parts of South Asia are reflected on the African continent) that systems of governance will also be reconfigured in order to facilitate … speculative urbanism … As elsewhere, the possibility exists that poorer urban dwellers in Africa’s larger cities will find themselves not only dispossessed of land but also of political rights. (2014, p. 230)

Hence, the Dracula urbanist alliance of planning and (often transnational) real estate interests is a globally burgeoning phenomenon wielding the potential for asymmetrically immiserating and destructive effects.

The real estate state meets smart city initiatives in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, the real estate state (Stein, 2019) maintains a powerful grip. There is a high concentration of capital invested in real estate relative to other sectors (Rae, 2021), and these investments both shape and are shaped by urban policies and political power. An immiserating result of the real estate state’s desire to ceaselessly inflate real estate values is gentrification, i.e. the displacement of less affluent residents and their replacement with higher-income residents facilitated by the physical overhaul of neighborhoods. Gentrification has occurred across Los Angeles, with scholars consequently attempting to grasp its locational patterns (see Scott, 2019) and document its presence throughout the city. For example, Lin (2019) points to gentrification – signified in part by an influx of White, higher-income residents – in the Northeast LA neighborhoods of Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Montecito Heights, Mount Washington, and Glassell Park. Others have documented gentrification in the east-central neighborhood of Echo Park (Molina, 2015) and Boyle Heights on the east side (O’Brien et al., 2019). Downtown LA has also been gentrified (Reese et al., 2010), with Chinatown (Hom, 2022; Lin, 2008), the Arts District (Darchen, 2017), and Bunker Hill (Loukaitou-Sideris & Sansbury, 1995) standing as select examples. This does not begin to approach an exhaustive list of places that have undergone/continue to undergo gentrification in Los Angeles – but it should suffice to demonstrate that it is a widespread phenomenon within the city.

Crucially, this gentrification has been inextricably linked to the actions of municipal planners working on the city’s behalf. Indeed, city officials must approve these redevelopment projects and enforce zoning regulations (or in some cases selectively fail to enforce zoning regulations – see Lippert, 2019; Stein, 2019), but it is also the case that city officials often actively encourage these projects as they engage in inter-urban competition to competitively seduce capital into their municipality by way of incentives and public-private partnerships with real estate developers (Peck et al., 2009; Kirk, 2023b). No doubt, this is partly because such projects inflate real estate values, a key motivation of municipal planners. At the same time, private development interests cajole city officials with assurances of safer, more vibrant neighborhoods, job creation, and other related economic stimulation. Yet these private development interests that covertly manipulate city officials do not necessarily hail from the local area or its hinterlands. Elite real estate capital traverses deregulated state and national borders with little resistance in this neoliberal era, resulting in an increasing internationalization of the real estate market spearheaded by a transnational capitalist class of elite real estate investors (Ley, 2017; Pow, 2017; Agnew, 2023).

Los Angeles has long been considered a top gateway market for commercial real estate investment in the US (ElGenaidi, 2022), although it experienced downturns in foreign direct investment (FDI) following the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing capital migrate to Sun Belt cities like Dallas, Charlotte, Denver, and Austin. According to a 2022 report by the World Trade Center Los Angeles (WTCLA) on FDIs in California, FDIs in LA County primarily originate from – in order of economic impact – Japan, the UK, France, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and South Korea (WTCLA Report, 2022). It is harder, however, to discern the impacts of foreign capital on the residential housing market in Los Angeles or California more broadly. Traditionally, housing researchers have used all-cash buyers as a crude proxy for international real estate investors. Matt Levin, writing for CalMatters, reports that all-cash buyers in California comprised just 10% of home purchases in 2006 but climbed up to 25% by 2018 (Levin, 2020).

But this method of using all-cash buyers as a proxy for international buyers certainly underestimates the true extent of foreign real estate investment in the state. Conveniently shielding transnational real estate investors, sales deeds in California do not require either the buyer or the seller to disclose their citizenship or residency status. Further, foreign capital interests in the US often conceal themselves behind trusts, limited liability companies (LLCs), and other forms of shell companies which may be registered in one nation but whose financiers are in another (see Story, 2015, 2016).² According to data from the Los Angeles County Assessor, less than 500 LA properties are openly owned by foreign-based individuals and firms.³ This figure is undoubtedly a dramatic underrepresentation given the well-documented use of obfuscatory tactics by transnational real estate interests. Moreover, although transnational real estate speculation in Los Angeles is often licit – mediated and aided by legal institutional frameworks – it is also occasionally illicit.

Political bribery is one means by which elite, transnational real estate capital becomes fixed in LA. In 2022, for example, Chinese developer Shen Zhen New World I, LLC was found guilty of bribing LA city councilman Jose Huizar over $1 million to approve its redevelopment of the LA Grand Hotel into a skyscraper with mixed residential and commercial functions (Delaney, 2022). Not mutually exclusive, money laundering is another, mostly involving capital hiding out from tax collectors, looted funds from government coffers, and the desire for capital outlets from politically unstable regimes (Agnew, 2023). However, few prosecutions have resulted from these activities for the reasons I have outlined. Some other money laundering through LA real estate is the product of international drug trafficking. One prominent example is the 2004 case of an ecstasy-trafficking ring run by Israeli nationals who laundered money through various real estate transactions (DEA, 2004). Since then, the federal government’s acknowledgments of the likely-underrecognized scope of money laundering through real estate have prompted at least some reform: in 2016, the US Department of the Treasury began requiring all-cash luxury home buyers in Los Angeles to reveal their identities as they close on their deals (Khouri, 2016). Because the true identities behind real estate holdings are so often concealed using licit methods of obfuscation and hidden, illicit methods may be used to overcome political objections to their projects, the full reach and influence of foreign real estate investment by the transnational capitalist class in Los Angeles are not readily knowable.

At the same time as the LA real estate state pumps up real estate values and exacerbates already-exorbitant inequalities, it has begun to roll out – like many other cities – so-called “smart city” building initiatives. To reiterate, smart cities are characterized by their reliance on digital infrastructures that allow them to collect data from the public for a variety of purposes. Improving citizen participation by plugging residents into the modern “digital city” is an often-touted goal, as is reaping the entrepreneurial benefits from public-private partnerships with technology companies that will carry the smart city vision to fruition (Samih, 2019; DeSouza, 2014). The smart city, therefore, may also act as a testing ground for new technologies aimed at gathering data and information about the city’s inhabitants (DeSouza, 2014). In LA, efforts to elevate the city into true “smart city” status have been underway for over a decade. In 2013, then-mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive order mandating that raw data collected by the city government be made freely available to the public, with the stated intention of:

[o]pening government data to entrepreneurs and businesses [to promote] innovation by putting that information to work in ways outside the expertise of government institutions and giv[ing] companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to leverage one of government’s greatest assets: public information … foster[ing] creative new thinking about solving our most intractable challenges through public-private partnerships and promoting a culture of data sharing between our own City departments and other civic resources. (Garcetti, 2013)

Following Garcetti’s executive order, in 2013, 2017, and 2018, LA was voted first place in the Digital Cities Survey conducted by the Center for Digital Government. Los Angeles’ actualization as a truly smart city, however, is still a work in progress according to city officials. In 2019, the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency convened a “Smart City Committee” comprised of 24 city departments and elected officials. Together, they devised a plan called “SmartLA 2028” that seeks to transform the city into a full-blown, digitally interconnected metropolis by the 2028 Summer Olympics set to be hosted in LA (SmartLA 2028 Report, 2020).

In this section, I have sought to demonstrate that Los Angeles, like Flint and Jakarta, is also experiencing the rise of the real estate state and smart city building, what have been posited as two central components of cities overtaken by the Dracula urbanist gaze (Wilson & Wyly, 2022). Having set the stage, I now turn toward an analysis of examples that I argue reflect Dracula urbanism in Los Angeles. I have chosen these examples for two reasons: first, to draw out what I submit is a more useful understanding of Dracula urbanism by departing from smart city building as a necessary component, and second, to caution against viewing Dracula urbanism as an unbounded and decentered phenomenon that flouts boundaries (such as municipal borders) altogether.

Los Angeles’ Dracula urbanism

Urban redevelopment and gentrification in Los Angeles

The institutional formation of Dracula urbanism as well as its general ethos may be embryonically located prior to the ascendance of neoliberal globalization in the 1980s, sometimes also called the third wave of globalization (Martell, 2007; Hay & Marsh, 2000). Neoliberalism is understood to be a hegemonic ideology (see Harvey, 2005), a dominant set of interconnected values that are applied in governance to establish a “free market” (Mitchell, 2004). Neoliberal globalization is perhaps synonymous but is used here to emphasize neoliberalism as a global economic policy regime that involves diminished governmental involvement in production, free mobility of commodities and capital, economic deregulation, and the subsequent inter-urban competition to attract and retain capital investment that has arisen between geographies on the global scale (Kentikelenis & Babb, 2019; Sheppard et al., 2013; Centeno & Cohen, 2012; Sassen, 2010). Even in the 1950s – decades before the onset of neoliberal globalization and the more recent rolling out of so-called “centerless” smart cities – urban redevelopment schemes in places like Los Angeles included key characteristics of Dracula urbanism, namely, a real estate state parasitically enmeshing the interests of city planning and private development capital (both domestic and transnational capital), the discursive-material mobilization of decline to encourage growth (see also Wilson & Heil, 2022), and immiserating results for existing populations whose lifeways and spaces have been devalued and deemed degenerate (see also Wacquant, 2008). The redevelopment and gentrification of Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles serves as a particularly stark example.

Bunker Hill is a raised area of central LA bounded by First Street, Hill Street, Fifth Street, and the 101 Freeway (Figure 1). In the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood of Bunker Hill was comprised mostly of middle-income families in quaint, single-family homes, alongside some high-income families living in Queen Anne-style mansions along the crest of the hill and its slope. However, during the early twentieth century, between about 1900 and 1920, the built environment had been incrementally reconfigured into a denser, mixed-use arrangement characterized by small chain retail stores, mom-and-pop shops, and residential buildings (Loukaitou-Sideris & Sansbury, 1995). During this time, its residential demographics shifted from predominantly middle-income to predominantly low-income. By the 1950s, a powerful coalition of city boosters and developers had formed to call for the total redevelopment of the area.

Figure 1. Map of Bunker Hill neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. Source: Created by author.

Map showing location of Bunker Hill neighborhood relative to boundaries of Downtown Los Angeles.

For the city’s boosters, concern was fixated on making Bunker Hill more “respectable” by reshaping it into a more affluent locale from which greater taxes could be collected. Loukaitou-Sideris and Sansbury (1995), writing about the City’s strategic use of photographs of a derelict-looking Bunker Hill, explain:

The still images, used by the housing authority and the Community Redevelopment Agency, became symbols of decay and neglect associated with a failing social order in a period that championed urban renewal as a means of promoting economic efficiency. They acted as rhetorical devices meant to call forth material conditions and to persuade public opinion of the meanings attached to these conditions. The means of “correction” of the perceived “unfavorable environment” of Bunker Hill involved the razing of all of its 396 buildings and the displacement of its 11,000 mostly low-income residents. (p. 399)

Furthermore, the police department characterized the area as high-crime and disorderly, while the fire department complained that fighting fires atop the hill was inconvenient (Loukaitou-Sideris & Sansbury, 1995). Indeed, as Mike Davis (2006) put it, Bunker Hill’s “epic dereliction … symbolized the rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis” (p. 41). The discursive-rhetorical deployment of decline to cast Bunker Hill as a crime-ridden, blighted burden served the obvious purpose of manufacturing justification for its redevelopment – its remaking in the interests of capital and the real estate state which does its bidding. Bunker Hill stood as an obstacle to the westward expansion of the business district, and by 1964, most of its buildings had been demolished pursuant to the boosters’ and developers’ victorious vision. What replaced the densely constructed, mixed-use built environment was a multitude of corporate towers and offices – many of which still form the meager Downtown LA skyline – in addition to several public buildings and apartments.

However, even in the 1960s and 1970s, before the onset of neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization sensu stricto, transnational real estate capital played a large role in the redevelopment of Bunker Hill and elsewhere in the central business district (CBD) downtown.

As Brohman (1983) observed at the time of his writing, “[a]t least 21 of the 75 most valuable properties in the CBD’s western edge are owned by foreign companies or by partnerships with foreign-based members” (p. 115). These included Japanese holdings in the Bonaventure Hotel, Crocker Bank Plaza, and the New Otani Hotel, and Canadian holdings in the Manulife building and the California Plaza in Bunker Hill. Other significant investments were made by British, German, Swiss, Dutch, Chinese, and Iranian interests (Brohman, 1983). However, in 1986 an LA Times report claimed­­­ that 75% of major Downtown properties were foreign-owned (Turpin, 1986), a figure later corroborated by The National Real Estate Investor that same year (1986, p. 102). One expert, Howard Sadlowski, even put the percentage of foreign-owned major Downtown properties at 90% two years prior (Sadlowski, 1984).⁴ The transnational fixing of speculative capital investment in real estate is not a new phenomenon (surely it has occurred since the advent of capitalism), but the intensity of transnational investment accelerated in the latter half of the twentieth century, beginning in the 1970s and increasing especially after the solidification of neoliberalism and its “free trade” policies in the 1980s during the Reagan and Thatcher era (Carroll & Sapinski, 2016).

From 1975 until 2010, the City of Los Angeles, acting through the Community Redevelopment Agency (commonly called the CRA), has made a somewhat scattered effort at broadly “revitalizing” the CBD under the banner of the Central Business District Redevelopment Project. In a 2010 report by the CRA documenting and reflecting on the project’s progress, the goal of “building a world-class city” is heavily emphasized (CRA Report, 2010). According to the report, redevelopment efforts centered on retaining and expanding existing important industries, including jewelry, wholesale produce, and financial and legal services. As a result, “[t]hese initial steps helped attract private investment, causing property values to increase and thus generating tax increment funds to implement the overall CBD Work Program” (CRA Report, 2010, p. 5). Rising property values and the seduction of private investment are rendered in the report almost as incidental, but the City’s deep entanglement with real estate interests suggests that they were, of course, thoroughly considered and primary motives for CBD redevelopment. These motivations are also reflected in the report’s language of making Los Angeles a “world-class” city, intimating the competitive construction of urban landscapes wherein cities across the globe compete with one another to secure private capital investment (Ghertner, 2015), a phenomenon which widely characterizes the globalized regime of neoliberalism (Chatterjee, 2016).

While Dracula urbanism as an institutional formation and overarching ethos has been described within the context of planetary urbanization as a decentered and unbounded phenomenon (Wilson & Wyly, 2022), I wish to emphasize the necessary importance of the local – an integral facet of the “bifocal” local-global nature of transnational capitalist urbanism (Smith, 2000) – in the simultaneously global Dracula urbanist imagination. If Dracula urbanism is to provide a more illuminating perspective on the entwined urban phenomena of gentrification, redevelopment, and recent smart city building, it must grapple with the abundantly evidenced ways in which cities, manifesting as real estate states, materially and discursively deploy the local amid the backdrop of border-flouting, transnational capital flows. To further illustrate and expand on this point, I call our attention to recent smart city building initiatives in LA, which – far from being truly centerless and borderless creations – manifest in locally centered ways that are dependent upon politico-legally defined municipal borders. Moreover, I contend that this competitive emphasis on the local – i.e. boosters and developers seeking to redeem, revitalize, beautify, modernize, and elevate their own cities in order to compete with others – is a key way Dracula urbanism disguises its campaign to eradicate devalued lifeways and spaces.

Smart city building initiatives in Los Angeles

As previously described, the City of Los Angeles has launched a project called SmartLA 2028, a program to transform the city into a fully realized smart city by the 2028 LA Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. In an official plan outlining the City’s intended steps to achieving smart city status, unsurprisingly, public-private partnerships and technology investments are said to play significant roles. About the impacts of its planned public-private partnerships with private technology firms, the plan claims:

Businesses will find Los Angeles as the economic epicenter of multiple industries. As the digital media capital of the world, LA will be home to the best talent and startup ecosystem whether in Silicon Beach or the Downtown L.A. Cleantech Incubator. (SmartLA 2028 Report, 2020, p. 3)

In the struggle to secure capital investment and increase property values, LA’s smart city boosters strive to economically revitalize the city as an “epicenter” of industry, taking advantage of its renowned digital media presence. Certainly, marketing LA as “the best” talent and startup ecosystem places LA on top of an implied hierarchy of cities, but only as soon as it can realize its largely untapped smart city potential.

The plan continues, announcing that 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics visitors will be immersed in:

a transformational digital Olympic experience from the moment they arrive. Passing through LAX airport’s completely renovated terminals, they can use the new automated people mover to select between light rail airport connections, rideshare, or taxi transportation choices. They will be greeted by digital signage, directed by multi-lingual electronic wayfinding, and connected through their smartphone with the hotels, restaurants, and venues that they are looking for during their stay. Whether visiting Hollywood Boulevard or Venice Beach, visitors will use smartphones or easily accessible kiosks to learn in their own language about the landmarks and readily available services to enhance their experience, including blind or deaf visitors. (SmartLA 2028 Report, 2020, p. 4)

The Olympic and Paralympic Games, therefore, are vital motivating elements in LA’s scheme to transform itself into a world-class smart city. SmartLA 2028, the name of the plan itself, refers to the 2028 Summer Olympics, and the implementation of technology to impress visitors and improve upon visitor experience for the games is front and center. To be sure, the City is using the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics just as other cities have used past Olympic Games and other mega-events in neoliberal times – “as place promotion tools that serve to redirect capital and consolidate support for regional development” (Vanwynsberghe et al., 2013, p. 2090). The redirection of capital and bolstering of support for regional development is anticipated to be achieved through the smart city building program rolled out in the lead-up to the games. Furthermore, the state-managed nexus between globally circulating capital (or tourists) and the ethnoracial and class surplus populations of the transnational capitalist production of urban space is exemplified in the digital navigation tools for blind and deaf visitors which will, of course, steer them carefully away from homeless encampments – encampments which themselves will be dynamically displaced via the assistance of constantly re-calibrated optimization algorithms characteristic of the “smart city.”

In another section of the plan, it declares:

Los Angeles residents will experience an improved quality of life by leveraging technology to meet urban challenges. No longer the “car capital of the world”, residents will choose how they wish to get around LA, using a single, digital payment platform, with choices like renovated Metro rail and bus systems or micro transit choices, such as on-demand LANow shuttles or dockless bicycles. Neighborhoods will again welcome the pedestrian and allow easy access to green space. (SmartLA2028 Report, 2020, p. 3)

However, what is left unsaid is that this shift toward digital platforms would actively deprive the lowest-income Angelenos of access to public transportation. For example, LA’s staggering population of people experiencing homelessness (counting just above 69,000 at the end of 2022 – see LAHSA, 2022), 42% of whom are Latinx and 33% of whom are Black according to the LA Almanac (2022), does not have the same access to online services or cellular phone service as comparatively higher income residents. Hence, the creation of the LA smart city quietly works to push devalued, low-income urbanites, especially those experiencing homelessness, farther into the city’s fringes, dispossessing them of access to the city’s increasingly digital infrastructure. In this way, the lifeways of the very poor as a highly racialized class are judged to be undeserving of access to the city and erased from Los Angeles’ smart city aspirations on account of their perceived degeneracy, as they are unable to partake in the progressively digital city. Yet, this immiseration is occluded by the neoliberal advertisement of a competitive, world-class smart city welcoming of “pedestrians,” but only those whom it valorizes as worthy inhabitants and visitors. The new, carless vision of the city is on one level commendable considering the widely recognized negative environmental and health impacts of motor vehicles (Chapman, 2007). On a hidden level, the vision insidiously seeks to stamp out the presence of the city’s especially poor.

Discussion

As the historical case of Downtown LA’s Bunker Hill shows, the main ingredients of Dracula urbanism were present before the proliferation of smart city building initiatives: i.e. a real estate state parasitically enmeshing the interests of city planning and private development capital, the discursive-material mobilization of decline to encourage growth, and immiserating results for existing devalued lifeways and spaces. This examination of Los Angeles suggests that smart cities are contingent and not necessary conditions of Dracula urbanism. Although today cities infected by “Dracula-itis” often engage in smart city building as they redevelop, gentrify, and devalue urban spaces and people, not all instances of Dracula urbanism must involve smart city aspirations. By freeing up our conceptual understanding of Dracula urbanism, its true reaches may be more comprehensively grasped.

Per the predatory Dracula urbanist gaze, areas sought to be “redeveloped,” “revitalized,” “beautified” and so on are first materially and discursively identified in the built environment by their perceived states of decline and decrepitness, but also by the perceived degeneracy of their occupants’ character and lifeways (Wilson & Wyly, 2022). Certainly, this is not a new strategy: in the 1950s, Bunker Hill was earmarked as “blighted” and “crime-ridden” by city boosters, and 11,000 mostly low-income residents were displaced when the hill was redeveloped into the corporate high-rise towers that now occupy the landscape (Loukaitou-Sideris & Sansbury, 1995). Recently, efforts to “revitalize” Downtown LA have largely centered on wresting the built environment from the staggering population of people experiencing homelessness that resides there. Supplementing the bold revanchism which explicitly seeks to “take back the public space” from the homeless (quoting Representative Nury Martinez, then-president of the Los Angeles City Council in 2022 – see Cordero, 2022) is a surreptitious mode of pushing out devalued lifeways and landscapes to reclaim the city: propping up visions of a “revitalized” downtown and more broadly of a “smart city” mobilizes discourses and aesthetics of decline to facilitate growth in the interests of the real estate state. In this way, Dracula urbanism hides its motivations to remove so-called degenerate ways of life and associated derelict spaces behind narratives of potential and the greater good. The Dracula-esque spatial imaginary conjures up a vision of the city without homeless encampments, the racialized poor, and other perceived civic cancers – not because these ills have been resolved, but because their lifeways and spaces have been eradicated or pushed to the city’s fringes. According to this logic, it is only through the removal of devalued lifeways and spaces that the city may be transfigured into one of eternally rising real estate values. When Dracula bites his victims and drains them of their blood, it is through death that they may ultimately obtain elevated life, becoming immortal vampires themselves.

Further, this interrogation of Los Angeles suggests that what has been newly termed “Dracula urbanism” – although a globe-spanning phenomenon situated within the context of a rapidly urbanizing planet – deploys a dual local-global identity and imagery in its individualized, city-based instantiations. The city is a nominally bounded spatial unit that is simultaneously global; we observe an urbanization whose boundaries may not be clearly demarcated, as global circuits of capital (like elite transnational real estate and technology capital) move into and out of spaces with relative ease (Lefebvre, 2014; Brenner, 2018). In this schema, the politico-legal boundaries that nominally define cities play a critical role. In the neoliberal era, cities not only compete with other cities within the same region or nation-state to lure capital into their borders but also with cities across the globe (Harvey, 1989, 2005; Kirk, 2023a). Hence, cities like LA attempt to represent and reinvent themselves as “world-class” in order to attract further capital investment and drive up real estate values pursuant to a deeply entrenched real estate state whereby co-functioning city governments and developers displace low-income residents in favor of luxury condos, high-end retailers, upscale restaurants, art galleries, and so forth. More recently, these efforts have become connected to wider neoliberal projects which seek to produce smart cities – as smart city aspirations are part of broader strategies to attract and retain capital investment. Yet, I argue that smart cities are not centerless phenomena, but rather, they are deeply connected with neoliberal inter-urban competition – relying fundamentally upon localistic rhetoric trumpeting promises of a better city. Crucially, Dracula urbanism does not maintain a singularly local or global gaze but rather is “bifocal,” being at once local and global in keeping with the general subsistence of transnational capitalist urbanism (Smith, 2000).

Planetary urbanization has not done away with borders. Instead, it is associated with a neoliberal shift in power from the nation-state to the city and city-region as localities compete for resources and investment, producing new, entrepreneurial modes of governance (e.g. as manifested in urban development corporations and public-private partnerships). Dracula urbanism is therefore a multi-scalar phenomenon that relies upon footloose elite transnational capital flows (especially real estate and technology capital) that move across deregulated borders (Agnew, 2023), as well as the entrepreneurial spirit of individual cities in neoliberal times. Dracula urbanism transcends borders, moves across scales, and spreads clandestinely across space. The full array of mechanisms by which it accomplishes this feat is yet to be fully spelled out – but it certainly ingratiates itself in the local, national, and international flows of real estate and technology capital, seducing political entities and working in concert with other resources like financial and credit institutions.

The “Dracula-itis”-stricken city is homogenized and fragmented in a reality of planetary urbanization where “the urban and the global crosscut and reciprocally disrupt each other” (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 204). I point to one such crosscutting between the urban and the global as planetary Dracula urbanism is necessarily confronted with the reality of municipal borders and the neoliberal governance and politics that interface with them. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula is indeed a “planetary operative” able to travel wherever he pleases, but it is not as though he is divorced from his Transylvanian homeland. Rather, we read that Dracula must carry soil from his homeland with him wherever he moves; this is because he cannot regain strength unless he is near his native earth. Thus, Dracula is a global monster, but also one who is anchored in the local, i.e. in Transylvanian soil. Perhaps loosely parallel, global real estate capital traverses space in footloose fashion, but the real estate states that result can only continue to exist if they deploy localistic strategies to seduce evermore capital into their municipalities’ borders.

Conclusion

For over half a century, LA has proved to be a striking nexus of processes illustrating the co-evolution of the state, capital, and technology in the management of social inequality. Los Angeles today is a fragmented megalopolis that, like other cities in the neoliberal era, maintains a local-global vision mediated by a parasitic, destructive institutional formation and ethos – a condition that transcends LA and which likewise afflicts cities across the Global North and Global South as real estate states engage in redevelopment and modernization projects – like smart city building – that displace, dispossess, and destroy. Through an exploration of this “Dracula-itis” in Los Angeles, this work brings to light important aspects of Dracula urbanist cities. First, it helps us recognize Dracula urbanism as an institutional formation and ethos that can be separated from smart city building initiatives, and that can be identified when key features are present – to wit, a parasitic real estate state, the discursive-material mobilization of decline to motivate growth, and immiserating results for urbanites whose lifeways and spaces have been devalued and deemed degenerate. Smart city projects then are contingent, not necessary, properties of geographies overtaken by “Dracula-itis.” A critical implication of this revelation is that bringing about the demise of predatory smart city logics cannot alone put an end to the pernicious force of Dracula urbanism. Second, although a global phenomenon rooted in planetary urbanization (see Lefebvre, 2014; Brenner, 2018), Dracula urbanism relies on the deployment of localistic identity and imagery in its individualized, city-based instantiations. It is for this reason that actually existing smart cities are not truly “centerless” phenomena, but rather projects steeped in neoliberal inter-urban competition and its localistic, entrepreneurial rhetoric. Dracula urbanism is therefore a multi-scalar phenomenon that is simultaneously global and local, dependent on flows of elite, transnational capital, in particular real estate and technology capital, that moves across deregulated borders in this neoliberal era (Ley, 2017; Pow, 2017; Carroll & Sapinski, 2016; Agnew, 2023). Future work may consider exploring in more depth how the planetary Dracula urbanist formation manifests across space and deploys simultaneously local and global logics. Further case studies and comparative work would be illuminating in this regard. Additionally, future work should be undertaken to better empirically document the seductive and Machiavellian nature of Dracula urbanism – more thoroughly investigating the mechanisms through which this institutional framework and imagination spread across geographies in these neoliberal times.

From Flint to Jakarta to Los Angeles, applying the exegetical lens of Dracula urbanism allows us to see beyond the veil of urban redevelopment schemes and smart city building by casting light onto their hidden, monstrous motives. Only by recognizing the true complexion of this immiserating urban formation – seeing beyond Dracula’s polite and charming façade – can we begin to devise an end to its blood-sucking parasitism. However, if Stoker’s (1897) Dracula can only finally be killed by cutting off his head and burning his body (p. 192), Dracula urbanism’s multi-scalar subsistence and contingent deployment of smart city building points to a Dracula who has many heads – and in this struggle against the deeply entrenched, destructive stranglehold of real estate states, there is no Dr. Abraham Van Helsing on whom to call.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John Agnew, Derrick Behm Josa, Alex Ferrer, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This ventures into a debate surrounding rentier capitalism—what is posited as a recent form of capitalism characterized by the increasing domination of rent-seeking assets in the economy (see Christophers, 2022). As Kevin Cox (2022) argues, rentier capitalism may not be a new phenomenon at all, but merely an extension of capitalist accumulation processes. Relatedly, real estate states are not new phenomena either, but rather represent an intensification of already-ongoing processes of capital accumulation mediated by states (Stein, 2019).

2 For a journalistic documentation of shell companies and the expansive nature of opaque real estate deals in the US, see the 5-part article series in The New York Times titled “Towers of Secrecy: Piercing the Shell Companies.”

3 This figure is according to tabulation of 2022 Property Rolls Secured Basic File available via Los Angeles County Assessor.

4 These citations—Turpin (1986), The National Real Estate Investor (1986), and Sadlowski (1984) emerge from Mike Davis’ wondrous book, City of Quartz (2006, pp. 135, 148). Sadlowski (1984) is not available via The Los Angeles Times’ digital archives. Therefore, I have reproduced Davis’ (2006) citation here: Howard Sadlowski, Times, 17 June 1984.