Talk:Southern California/Hierarchy

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Southern California, for Wikivoyage, is a region in the southwest of California. It encompasses Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as all the cities in that area.

Borders:

West: Pacific Ocean (but Santa Catalina Island and the Channel Islands are included)
North: The Grapevine on highway 5, and that part of highway 101 where it leaves the coast north of Santa Barbara
South: The Mexican border
East: The Inland Empire, although I'm not sure what the traditional border for this is

Here's a hierarchy for the region. Note that we don't normally do this kind of hierarchical list thing for articles -- it looks terrible, and isn't really useful -- but it can help us hash stuff out.

Southern California <region>
- Santa Barbara County <region>
  - Santa Barbara <city>
  - Carpenteria <city>
  - Goleta <city>
  - Isla Vista <city>
  - Channel Islands <park>
- Ventura County <region>
  - Ventura <city>
  - Oxnard <city>
- Los Angeles County <region>
  - Antelope Valley <region>
  - Gateway Cities <region>
  - San Gabriel Valley <region>
  - Santa Clarita Valley <region>
  - West Side <region>
    - Malibu <city>
    - Santa Monica <city>
    - Venice Beach <city>
    - Marina del Rey
  - South Bay (Los Angeles County) <region>
    - Manhattan Beach <city>
    - Hermosa Beach <city>
    - Torrance <city>
    - Palos Verdes <city>
  - San Fernando Valley <region>
    - Encino <city>
    - etc.
  - Metro Area <region>
    - Los Angeles <huge city>
      - Los Angeles/Downtown <district>
      - Los Angeles/East LA <district>
      - Los Angeles/South LA <district>
      - etc.
  - Santa Catalina Island <region>
    - Avalon <city>
    - Two Harbors <city>
- Orange County <region>
  - Beach Cities (Orange County) <region>
    - Huntington Beach <city>
    - etc.
  - Inland Cities <region>
    - Anaheim
    - Mission Viejo
    - etc.
- San Diego County <region>
  - North County <region>
    - Rancho Pensaquitas
    - Scripps Ranch
    - Ensenitas <city>
  - Metro Area <region>
    - San Diego <city>
  - Inland <region>
    - El Cajon <city>

OK, just go ahead and edit that, adding and removing cities and regions. We'll give this a try. -- (WT-en) Evan 12:07, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

Wow you work quick!(WT-en) Ron 12:16, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

I removed the high desert; I think that stuff goes in Desert (California). -- (WT-en) Evan 12:18, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

Also, I think the Inland Empire (California) is it's own region, outside Southern California. See California#Regions for the ones I listed there. -- (WT-en) Evan 12:20, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

Wow! I just went searching on google to see other sites' listings of California regions. Look how close we are to the Open Directory's! Not really cogent for Southern California discussion, but still. -- (WT-en) Evan 12:27, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

Hmm, ok i think i see how its structured now. But you would get some diagreement that the Inland Empire is not in Southern California. I also dont think that it would hurt to included the desert region in southern california along with the california section. Its your call. Im gonna read some more before i start adding templates to these. (WT-en) Ron 12:34, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

While i was updating the Southern California page, i really thought that the westside and south bay portions should be placed into the los angeles metro area. Thoughts?(WT-en) Ron

i filled in most of the regions on the southern california page, im not sure if you will agree with the LA breakdown, but i think that it works well. (WT-en) Ron 14:53, 11 Nov 2003 (PST)

I don't agree. First, Los Angeles is lost. I also don't like having the Westside and Southbay be part of some greater LA Metro region. That's pretty much what we have Southern California for in the first place! Also, Catalina is not one of the Channel Islands! -- (WT-en) Evan 07:39, 12 Nov 2003 (PST)

All right, let's see if we can take another poke at this. I went ahead and broke up Southern California into 5 regions, matching the five counties: Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego. I used Ron's breakdown of SD and Orange, and made region pages for those. SB and Ventura are pretty sparse; I think we can leave them as leaf-level regions for now.

For Los Angeles, I added the nine regions listed on the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation's regions page. They may need some fine tuning, but you can see that most of the regions were ones we were dealing with before. My main change was that I considered South LA to be part of the city of Los Angeles, which is in the Metro Area region.

I think the essential thing is that we now have 2 levels of regions of SC: the first one is counties, and the next is sub-county areas.

Los Angeles is just the city of Los Angeles. It can be broken down further into districts, since it's pretty big. But let's not try shoving other cities into it, too! -- (WT-en) Evan 09:48, 12 Nov 2003 (PST)

One last thing: for parts of Los Angeles County that are distant from downtown, but still technically part of Los Angeles, let's use the district format. Like, say, Los Angeles/Hollywood. -- (WT-en) Evan 10:22, 12 Nov 2003 (PST)

Hey Evan that looks great! I dig it. I know that this is not one of the most interesting places in the world to organize, but since its in my backyard i wanted to see it done right. (WT-en) Ron 12:19, 12 Nov 2003 (PST)

Interesting? Totally! This little exercise has really stretched some of the core concepts of how we organize articles on Wikivoyage. It's been a good test for how we can deal with different kinds of urban geographies. I've been fairly averse to using government-made distinctions (like county borders) for making regions, but I think the key concept here was figuring out that counties in California really do have a lot of cohesion, culturally, geographically, and climactically. Once we were over that hump on using counties as the first level of regions, everything else fell into place. Well, except for the amoeba-like shape of Los Angeles... but we'll see how that turns out. I'm interested in seeing this section of Wikivoyage expand. Thanks for sitting through this with us, and having the patience to take a breath and recalculate. P.S. I love LA! -- (WT-en) Evan 12:28, 12 Nov 2003 (PST)

Channel Islands and Catalina

The Channel Islands National Park should probably be under Ventura County since the headquarters are located there and all the regular trips by boat or plane to the Park are from the Ventura/Oxanard area (see ([1]). I'm not sure which county the northern islands officiall belong to, but I know that Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands are officially part of LA County.

For Evan: Catalina is not part of the Natl. Park, but it is one of the (California) Channel Islands that run from San Clemente Island through San Miguel Island (see [2]). [[User:(WT-en) GK|(WT-en) gK ¿?]] 04:16, 19 Dec 2004 (EST)

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