The Valley is not a suburb. It is as economically self-sufficient and culturally dense as major cities. Should the Valley secede, it will be the 6th largest US metropolitan area. It will have the highest concentration of aerospace firms, the 3rd greatest number of entertainment companies and the 6th most manufacturing headquarters. While these statistics suggest that the Valley is turning into a bona fide city, it is in fact something else. Spurred by the knowledge that the Civic Center, the Central Business District, the Cultural District and the critical mass of a downtown are social and financial drains, Valley residents realize that ‘spread’, a low-density fabric of single family dwellings with dispersed, small commercial-industrial strips, can thrive as a collective body.

The San Fernando Valley is vilified for its culturally bankrupt way of life. It is the home of the shopping-obsessed Valley Girl, of Mall Culture, exercise trends from Bodybuilding to Tae Bo Kickboxing, a referendum to slash public education funding that crippled California schools – and the US porn industry. For what it’s worth, we believe these phenomena add up to a legitimate Valley culture. Los Angeles’ most abused lowlands is its greatest cultural ambassador.

In any event, the Valley’s far-reaching influence has re-oriented the traffic of social trends from outbound to inbound, almost by accident generating a reverse commute of ideas from the suburbs into the city. Much of what emanates from the Valley is the outcome of diminished expectations. There is faith that lowered design ambitions pay off in the end. Architecture is systematically rejected as frivolity. Taste is waste.

Spread is in Irvine, Raleigh-Durham, Silicon Valley, Fairfax County and in all of America’s ‘top 10 most liveable places.’ Yet this type of collective coherence may have even greater possibilities elsewhere – in China and the former Soviet Republics, for example. In these countries spread may ultimately prove to be even more popular. For the Valley, and would-be suburbs everywhere, sprawl is almost O.K.

Jeffrey Inaba and Peter Zellner are architects based in Los Angeles and the founders of VALDES, a planning and design school that focuses on suburban conditions (www.val-des.org).