> It is much more like a loose federation of nearby townships than it is a city
I'm finding this same pattern in the Bay Area too (moved to Mountain View last spring). Does this match your experience? I've never explored LA.
In any case, the many-small-town structure is kind of disorienting coming from a another city with a central, lively downtown, but I can also sort of see an appeal that the locality has. People who live in e.g. Mountain View or Palo Alto or Redwood City feel like they have a nice, small-town "main street" nearby in a way that most suburbs don't. Done right, small federated towns are not necessarily a bad way to scale. (Putting housing-density issues aside, of course; Mountain View in particular has a really nasty supply-constraint problem now that more and denser apartment buildings would go a long way toward solving.)
That said, there are things that you can't find in your own town, so you rely on the regional federated structure for those things, and then you have transportation issues because (i) it's less efficient to cover the decentralized area with mass transit than to build a spoke-and-hub system around a real downtown, and (ii) regional political coordination to build/improve systems like Caltrain/BART is much harder when you have a distributed governance structure. (Does LA have similar problems with coordinating city governments?)
So I think I prefer the 'single big central lively downtown' model better but both models are interesting, IMHO.
You touch on many things I have thought about for years :)
I think the Mountain View / Palo Alto / Sunnyvale area mirrors the San Gabriel valley structure pretty closely (with Palo Alto ~= Pasadena, Menlo Park+Atherton ~= San Marino, Sunnyvale+Mountain View ~= Glendale+Burbank). So in that sense they are similar in one particular region.
On the other hand, LA downtown is surrounded by confederate townships. San Francisco is in some sense a city on a hill. Similarly, there is nothing like the Venice / Santa Monica / Malibu cluster providing "coastal" political influence to the city. There is no way that, e.g., Pacifica or Half Moon Bay would ever be able to be first class citizens in local politics the way that Venice/Santa Monica/Malibu are in LA politics.
Continuing the contrast, the LA area doesn't really have anything like the East Bay.
I could go on and on, but I will leave it at that for now. I do think that anyone who thinks they have an opinion on LA, but hasn't lived there, should take a moment and think that maybe it really is different from their expectations or previous experience of large cities.
Edit: one could, I suppose, say that Long Beach is, in some sense, analogous to the East Bay. They are parallel in an economic and social class sense, but I still think the East Bay is much more of a cultural component of SFBA than Long Beach is of LA Metro.
I'm finding this same pattern in the Bay Area too (moved to Mountain View last spring). Does this match your experience? I've never explored LA.
In any case, the many-small-town structure is kind of disorienting coming from a another city with a central, lively downtown, but I can also sort of see an appeal that the locality has. People who live in e.g. Mountain View or Palo Alto or Redwood City feel like they have a nice, small-town "main street" nearby in a way that most suburbs don't. Done right, small federated towns are not necessarily a bad way to scale. (Putting housing-density issues aside, of course; Mountain View in particular has a really nasty supply-constraint problem now that more and denser apartment buildings would go a long way toward solving.)
That said, there are things that you can't find in your own town, so you rely on the regional federated structure for those things, and then you have transportation issues because (i) it's less efficient to cover the decentralized area with mass transit than to build a spoke-and-hub system around a real downtown, and (ii) regional political coordination to build/improve systems like Caltrain/BART is much harder when you have a distributed governance structure. (Does LA have similar problems with coordinating city governments?)
So I think I prefer the 'single big central lively downtown' model better but both models are interesting, IMHO.