This is Our Nowhere

That girls ridiculous, guys. She looks like a cheap hooker. Its how she puts makeup on, thats like so Mission Viejo or Inland Orange County.

I never watched Laguna Beach, but on that fateful day in 2005 when one of the characters name-dropped my hometown (which Id happily vacated four years prior) to describe a skanky classmates prom attire, the tiny corner of the internet housing Mission Viejos 95,000 residents went wild. Oh no she didnt! How dare she! With no city center and no sports team I had never known MV residents to display so much solidarity in the face of persecutionlikely because no one ever bothered to persecute us. Nevertheless, I wondered what it was, exactly, that fueled our quiet but uncharacteristically communal rage. Before the rash of TV shows, reality and otherwise, that put Orange County on the map as the west-coast capital of teenage debauchery and surgically-enhanced nouvelle-riche cougars, we had to tell people from out of state that we were from between Los Angeles and San Diego. After The OC, we begrudgingly traded anonymity for a lifetime of parroting Michael Bluth: please dont call it that. We loved Arrested Development because it was our own private joke, and we hated Laguna Beach because it turned what was once a beautiful seaside old hippie artists village known for its Wyland gallery and a Hari Krishna temple into a runway for Paris Hilton lookalikes and their tiny dogs hoping to end up in the background of a shot of LC shopping for a new tankini. Five miles inland from Laguna Beach, just over the hills, lies my hometown of Mission Viejo. Nestled near the very southern tip of Orange County, were only famous for one thing: our mall. We also play musical chairs with Newton, Massachusetts every few years for the position of Americas Safest City, but thats

only interesting to the parents. Even our city council was apparently uninspired: our website features the subtitle, Make Living Your Mission. Yes, I certainly hope thats high on everyones list. When youre a kid growing up in South Orange County and your friends ask if you want to hang out, the assumption is that youll find a willing parent to shuttle you to the appropriate mall. The Kaleidoscope is for junior high kids, The Shops is for high school students, and once you get your drivers license you can graduate to the Irvine Spectrum a few exits away on the 5. We have a bowling alley, too, but only gradeschool kids and ironic high schoolers go there anymore. When you graduate from high school you move to a real city where you dont need shopping malls. At least thats the idea. The Shops at Mission Viejo, once an orange-andbrown-tiled tribute to everything that was cool in the late 1970s, got a facelift and a fancy name and some new handrails and a Saks Fifth Avenue in the early naughts and quickly became a regional shopping destination. In fact, the identities of many of the small cities in South Orange County are wrapped up in their malls: The Shops at Mission Viejo, Fashion Island in Newport, The Irvine Spectrum, the Laguna Hills Mall, the Block at Orange, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Tustin Marketplace. Surely, though, we must have some substance beyond our retail offerings if we warranted a mention on national television? The most interesting thing many residents will be able to tell you about Mission Viejo is that its name is a typo. All the streets in town have Spanish names as a tip of the hat to the areas history first as land claimed by Spanish missionaries and later as a Mexican rancho. Osmosis hasnt seemed to work, though, since in spite of the daily linguistic bombardment calle

is still pronouced kalley and Taco Bell is still the most popular burrito in town. Nevertheless, there are those who will leap at the chance to tell you that since mission is a feminine word, we should actually be called Mission Vieja. Because, well, what else is there to talk about? Built in nearly one fell swoop by typical city evolution standards, this 10,000 acre planned community was constructed in residential enclaves from the mid-60s to the 1980s. Sandwiched between the 5 Freeway and Saddleback Valley, its oddly long with a silhouette vaguely resembling South America. It runs along a central spineMarguerite Parkwaywith four major ribs crossing itCrown Valley, Oso, La Paz and Alicia. If youre looking for a strip mall, you can usually always find one at a major intersection. The arterial roads were placed in the valleys and the houses on the hills, and between the natural contours of the topography and the curvy fractals of suburban street planning, theres nary a right angle to be found in Google Maps. There are only two zip codes in this city, one for each side of Marguerite Parkway. This may be the closest thing to a rivalry that exists here. 92691 was constructed first and as such has the closest thing to historical seniority we have to offer. The homes are slightly farther apart on slightly larger lots, the three to four Spanish Mission-style models that recur throughout the neighborhoods still somewhat visible beneath several coats of paint and second-floor additions. 92692 has the newer developments, the true tract homes, the peach, beige and taupe ticky-tacky boxes all stamped out one-two-three-one-two-three with their identical profiles and six-foot-deep yards. 92692 has the townhomes, the condos, the gated communities, and the lake.

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Lake Mission Viejo, a 3-mile-round reservoir built in the late 70s to provide exclusive faux-beachfront access to its residents. The Lake, with its oversized grains of sand that stick in your palms instead of coating your skin, with its strange chemical smell and the terrifying threshold that marks the beginning of algal growth on the sandy floor. The Lake, with its floating diving platform at the far end of the swimming area off of which flailing children leap, screaming, more scared of tiny fish nibbling their toes than of the one-foot drop off the edge. The Lake, with its stay-at-home moms eyeing kids over sunglasses perched low on noses, strange moments of water retaining wallparking lot juxtaposition, rent-a-kayaks and party boats and the thrill of docking at the marketplace pier to Shooby-Dooby-down-to-Rubys for lunch. Mission Viejo used to be the last stop before the vast no-mans land that made Rancho Santa Margarita and Coto de Caza feel like the isolated ranching communities they pretended to be, before the developers learned how to build new cities in the valley. Now, when I drive along the extension of Crown Valley toward the newly-minted New Urbanist haven of Ladera Ranch to their new CVSso much better than the old CVS on MargueriteI try to remember what Saddleback Valley used to look like, but the landscape has changed so drastically and so rapidly that shadows of dry brush and wild dandelions flutter only briefly in my minds eye before being replaced by technicolor visions of a watermelon agua fresca from Baja Fresh. When the girl from Laguna Beach insulted us, we got angry, and then we laughed. We got angry because someone had publicly voiced what we all secretly feared might be true: the closest thing we have to a common identity might actually be what you find walking through Sephora and Forever 21 on a Saturday afternoon. And we laughed because at the same time it was meaningless. We are a city of cul-de-sacs and shopping malls, homeowners associations and PTAs, unified only by a burning desire to run far, far away after high school. And yet somehow, when a ditzy blonde insults us on national television we link arms and shake fists in unison. Because for whatever reason, we kind of like it here. And maybe, just maybe, when were 35 and have grown tired of the city lights and public transportation networks and panhandlers and biergartens, well come back. PAGE_2_THE LITERARY CITY WEEK 6 MISA GRANNIS_3.2.12_EVOLVING URBAN DESCRIPTIONS MISA GRANNIS | M.ARCH THESIS MANUAL 2011 | DESIGN EXPERIMENTS