Advertising,information,and space: Considering the informal regulation of the Los Angeles landscape

Abstract

This article analyzes a municipal inventory of billboards within the City of Los Angeles. It has long been rumored that thousands of the billboards in the city were illegal; since completing their inventory, city agents now claim that only a fraction of billboards are illegal. I argue herein that a close reading of the inventory reveals over half of the billboards in Los Angeles either lack permits or are out of compliance with their permits and are thereby illegal. While some city agents work to strengthen the city’s regulation of signage, others fail to enforce sign laws, protect the signs from appearing illegal, and push to rewrite the sign code to legalize technically illegal signs. I argue that these contradictory actions evidence informality as the city’s mode of regulating signage, and I seek to understand how state actors, as unique individuals, play a part in the creation of this informal landscape. Using theories on advertising and urban space, and drawing in information theory to understand the concatenation of information and space, I tie the varied experiences, knowledges, and actions of individual state actors to the overarching informality of the state’s regulation of outdoor advertising.