In January 2025, series of firestorms exploded in the Los Angeles region. The occurrence appeared exceptional in terms of its magnitude, Conversation suggested by:
Renaud Le Goix, CNRS, Université Paris Cité, UMR Géographie-cités 8504, Paris , & Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, Université Paris Cité, UMR Géographie-cités, Paris
its extent (some 12,000 homes and businesses destroyed, 150,000 people evacuated), the number of casualities (20 and possibly more), and its media coverage, linked to the celebrities involved and live images broadcasted on social media. The event has been said to be “unprecedented”, not only because of its magnitude, but because this climatic event exceptionally occurred in January, in the middle of the winter. The consequences of climate change are well known and documented: two particularly wet seasons in 2022 and 2023, wet vegetation spreading over the highlands, followed by an exceptionally arid summer season; the violent north-easterly hot and dry Santa Ana winds, blowing from the high desert fueled the fire and spread the embers, as journalist and writer Joan Didion described back in 1968:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.(…) The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.
(Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, p.217)
In this context, this contribution aims at circumscribing the aftermaths of the 2025 fire seasons in the light of the sprawling nature of the Los Angeles Urban region. This post is a fully reproducible and open science document, published on Gitlab repository as a RMarkdown (https://losangelesfires-f1c005.gitpages.huma-num.fr/) including code and sources: https://gitlab.huma-num.fr/rlegoix/losangelesfiresWe start by referring back to Mike Davis work and the historical wildfires in Los Angeles and their intrication with the sprawling built environement (Davis 1995, 1998). We do so with a wider focus in time (using historical data on wildfires in the metropolitan region), as well as with regards to our scale of analysis at the metropolitan level (other recent fires occurred in less central areas, but also impact inhabited neighborhoods). We analyze fires in Los Angeles’ recent history, using public data from the California Open Data Portal, recent census data (Manson et al. 2024), and reproducible sciences protocols (https://gitlab.huma-num.fr/rlegoix/losangelesfires). This comment was prepared with wildfire data last updated on 15 jan. 2025. To analyze this event in a broader perspective, we focus on the intrications with the socio-economic patterns and sprawling nature of the buit environment, characterized of single family homes, subdivisions, private communities and master planned communites. This fabric of the urban and suburban built environment intersects with a fragmented local governance structure (Keil 2000; Le Goix 2016). This helps getting a better understanding of some of the issues in local water management and fire services structure.
Fires in the Los Angeles urban history
In a frequently quoted paper, Mike Davis (1995) recalls that fires in this urban mega region are neither rare nor surprising: they are part of the urban history of Los Angeles, a city where most houses are built of wood, a material better suited to cope with earthquakes. The deadliest fire in recent history occurred in 1933 on the slopes of Griffith Park, a public highland park north of Hollywood. The article “The case for letting Malibu Burn” (republished and expanded in 1998 in his book Ecology of Fear) recontextualizes the event of 2025 in a continuous history of massive wildfires (Figure 1), with a sense of provocation that supports a rigorous urban history approach:
Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on average, by a large fire (1000 acres plus) every two-and-one-half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three-times-over this century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying fire-storm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable march across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 four such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted almost a billion dollars in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930. (…) The richest and poorest landscapes in Southern California are ironically comparable in the frequency of incendiary disaster. This was emphasized tragically during 1993 when a conflagration in May at a Westlake tenement, which killed three mothers and seven children, was followed in late October by a siege of twenty-one Southland wildfires culminating in the great firestorm that forced the evacuation of most of Malibu on November 2nd.
(p. 3-4)

Since the great fires of 2009 in the San Gabriel mountains, the number of inhabitants directly affected has been considerable. With an analysis of the number of inhabitants in densely populated areas, the wildfires documented within the limits of inhabited census tract (a local census geography that usually approximates neighborhoods in urban studies research) reached more than 400,000 persons by 2017 (Figure 2 and Figure 3). The city-nature interface has always been in the urban history of sprawl and suburbanization an endogeneous constituent of the morphology, a highly desirable amenity, and also at the very core of the city’s identity (Ghorra-Gobin 1997; Jackson 1985). When reaching urbanized areas, the damages of wildfires are countless, and among other loss of property and animals, mass evacuation of neighborhoods, and recently, the cancellation of homeowner’s insurance policies against natural disasters and loss of property.

Interactive map online: https://losangelesfires-f1c005.gitpages.huma-num.fr/#Fire_Urban_Map

California: a pioneering state in environmental regulation, and its limits
California has been a pioneer in building a regulatory framework for the environment and urban development. The first comprehensive regulations date back to 1970, when Governor Ronald Reagan passed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). It required environmental impact studies for development projects, and its 2007 amendment included greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the impacts. The Global Warming Solution Act (AB32 in 2006) passed under Governor A. Schwarzenegger, also a Republican, introduced binding GHG reduction targets to public policy, which have been exceeded. Its implementation includes zoning plans based on housing needs, the promotion of greater densification and transit plans to regulate urban sprawl under Senate Bill SB375 (Couclelis 2011). Building and fire prevention codes were also amended in 2019, with stricter rules on urban interface/risk zones (mandatory distances and resistant materials). Finally, under the current mandate of Democrat Gavin Newsom, the densification of residential areas has been extended to increase the supply of affordable housing, while limiting urban sprawl (SB9 Housing Development, 2021), authorizing for instance additional housing units built in backyard lots of residential areas (Kim et al. 2023).
Paradoxically, however, this voluntarism is at odds with a precursor structural movement, as early as 1978, to austerity in local public finances (Proposition 13, a law limiting the tax base). It had the effect to limit the financing capacity of public services and emergency services, and to make developers and and special purpose levees finance them (community facility districts). The result has been a headlong rush to build large planned subdivisions on the large agricultural ranches on the edges of the urban region: Le Goix (2016) analyzed that new planned developments designed to absorb the region’s demographic growth, also ensures the reproduction of tax base for the county, in the low-density areas under its jurisdiction (“unincorporated”, i.e. non-municipalized territories). Figure 2 highlights a sample geography of 2418 master planned communities and planned developments, with homeowner’s association, built between the 1960s and 2012. Some of them are also gated and private neighborhoods (Le Goix 2013, 2022).
Urban growth and vulnerabilities : “fire-suburb”
Yet the conditions of urban growth determine the vulnerability of an urban region of 19 million inhabitants (9 million in central Los Angeles County alone): regional planning agency SCAG’s projections for 2029 are for 1.3 million additional housing units. While the housing crisis is affecting central areas due to exorbitant rents and prices (Angst et al., 2023), increasingly excluding and evicting populations, part of the new supply continues to develop on the outskirts, in the form of planned subdivisions. Davis wrote in 1995:
Meanwhile, the suburbanization of Southern California’s remaining wild landscapes has accelerated in face of the perceived deterioration of the metropolitan core. As middle-and-upper-class families flee Los Angeles, and, especially, its older, “urbanized suburbs” like the San Fernando Valley, they seek sanctuaries deeper in the rugged contours of the chaparral fire-belt. The population, for example, of the Calabasas-Agoura Hills corridor -the crucible of almost all Malibu firestorms- has tripled since 1970 (to nearly 60,000) with hundreds of new homes scattered across isolated hilltops and ridges. Ignoring every lesson of the recent fires and earthquake, two new mega-developments (Newhall Ranch and Ritter Ranch), totalling 32,000 homes, will soon begin construction in the environmentally sensitive, fire-prone Santa Clarita and Leona valleys of northern Los Angeles County. Statewide, some seven million inhabitants -the whitest and wealthiest segment of the population- now live in the suburban-chaparral ecotone where wildfire is virtually inevitable (…). The social cost of fire has increased in almost geometric relation to the linear growth of fire-suburb population. Two-thirds of all the homes and dwellings, for example, destroyed by wildfire since the state-wide record-keeping began in 1923 have been burnt since 1980.
(Davis 1995, p. 32-33)
In impacted communities or subdivisions subjected to evacuation orders, the housing needs identified by SCAG between 2021 and 2029 are +3.5% in Calabasas, +13% in Santa Clarita, +28% in the rest of the non-municipalized areas, such as Altadena. Many of the fires between 2018 and 2024 thus affected recent subdivisions (see Figure 2, particularly in West and South Los Angeles highlighting the proximity between recent fires and large planned residential developments). Suburban development patterns highlight multi-factorial vulnerabilities, which are particularly discriminating in social terms.
The conditions of urbanization have an impact on the availability of water resources, a scarce and precious resource: rights of access to water are currently divided between a hundred or so governments (Pincetl et al. 2016), special districts and private companies. The political and economic development of certain municipalities has been built on the control of water conveyance: the growth of Los Angeles in the 20th century depended on aqueduct systems and conflicts between the city and private interests (Kahrl 1976). The municipal autonomy of some municipalities, such as Pacific Palisades’ neighbor Santa Monica, stems from their desire for independence in controlling their water resources. In addition, the networks are outdated and underfunded, and water has been in short supply for emergency services because the network is designed to support fires in individual buildings, not such massive blazes. In a context where resources are consumed for green spaces (golf courses), agriculture, industry, competition from private services in the most exclusive enclaves, and local fragmentation of water access rights, this historical factor of vulnerability is well identified and feeds public discourse and political narratives.
Socio-economic ecology of fires: a multi-faceted vulnerabilities
We understand vulnerability as analyzed by Rufat (2013), as a framework of analysis that relates to relative indices of vulnerability, and their correlations in establishing vulnerability profiles. In other terms, the scope aims at defining which populations and places are vulnerable and why, to discuss vulnarability profiles. In this context, Mike Davis already analysed the impact of wildfires through the prism of social justice:
Defended in 1993 by the largest army of firefighters in California history, wealthy Malibu homeowners also benefitted from an extraordinary range of insurance, landuse, and disaster relief subsidies as well as obsessive media coverage. Yet – as most experts will readily concede – periodic firestorms are inevitable as long as private residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas. On the other hand, many of the 100-or-so recent fatalities from tenement fires in the Westlake and Downtown areas might have been prevented if slumlords had been held to minimal standards of building safety. If enormous resources have been allocated – quixotically – to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-made and remediable fire crisis of the inner city. As we shall see in some detail, the political history of fire in Los Angeles is a faithful reflection of larger class struggles.
(Davis, 1995, p.4)
As it was obvious in the picturesque drama of mansions burning in Pacific Palisades and some of the heritage neighborhoods of Altadena, wealthier and mostly White neighborhoods of property owners, on the foot-hill settings have been hardly striken by wildfires, as show on the property price maps and fires since 2009 (Figure 4). This first socio-economic image of fire impact does not cover the diverse socio-economic settings of vulnerabilities. Altadena sets out also as typical case of an unincorporated suburb where a large part of middle-class black African-Americans have become homeowners (Figure 5). Thus, the capacity for resilience (reconstruction / rehousing) will vary according to the socio-economic profile. The housing crisis, already very intense in the Angelino’s market, is likely to be exacerbated. The issue of insurance is crucial in this respect. Since 2022, insurance premiums have been rising steadily, and private companies have been cancelling policies in fire-risk areas. Some are resorting to a public scheme implemented by the State of California, which covers 20% of property in at-risk areas (FAIR: Fair Access to Insurance Requirements). A necessary side note in this context is that insurance price inflation usually implies more spatially selective exclusive neighborhoods, and impact differently wealthier neighborhoods where prices are boosted by insurance costs, and intermediate owner-occupied neighborhoods were insurance cost is detrimental to housing value and housing wealth (Taylor 2020, 2017). In this context, reconstruction will be easier with high land values, which are not lost. Moreover, Governor Newsom has lifted the CEQA’s environmental restrictions to speed up the process, and Mayor Karen Bass has authorised the setting of tiny houses and RVs on lots during the reconstruction period.




A socio-economic typology of neighborhoods where wildfires have occurred since 2009 highlights three socio-economic profiles (a cluster analysis over a PCA on urbanized census tracts, see Figures 6 and 7). On one hand (in blue), wealthier white neighborhoods: non-hispanic White (61%) majority, with an under-representation of black and hispanics, in more exclusive wealthier (med. income of 164,000$/year) and more expansive (median value is 1.2 million $) areas of property owners (83%). Life-cycle is characterized by an over-representation of ownership, family with married parents and children living at home. In Pacific Palisades in 2025, the values of burnt down homes averages $3 million, an increase linked to high inflation since 2008. Marginally, 2025 wildfire also destroyed a denser neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, with businesses and small condominiums, characterized by an over-representation of younger skilled adulults and renters (Figure 7).
On the other hand, racially mixed middle-class neighborhoods. With 43% white and 36% hispanic and latinos, these are above average income neighborhoods (107,500 $) with a vast majority of owners (65%) in affordable neighborhoods (almost the urbanised area average property values, 700,000 $). Life-cycle is characterized by an over-representation of ownership, family with younger married parents (48%) and children living at home.
In previous events, Hispanic and Latinos working-class neighborhoods have also paid they tribute to wildfires (Figure 8). Such neighborhoods are characterized by an over representation of hispanic and latinos ethnicity (67%) and a majority younger than 35 years old, with a majority of owners (68%) with lower median income and lower property values (an average of 560,000 $). The overwhelming images of incinerated mansions and villas shall not obscure the diversity of socio-economic vulnerability to wildfires in the Los Angeles area.
Quiet consequences
While some of the consequences are immediately visible to those whose homes have been reduced to ashes, other effects will stealthily and quietly unfold, and will be more damaging to the socio-economic fabric in the short or medium term. In Pacific Palisades, residential areas were also places of employment, mainly for domestic workers. Thousands of workers in the personal services sector (gardeners, pool cleaners, nannies, support for the elderly, etc.) have immediately lost their jobs, whereas they live in other neighborhoods (Figure 8), and will be permanently affected.

These lagged consequences will particularly disrupt the Hispanic and Latino community (10,000 persons are employed in Pacific Palisades and more of 20,000 un the Eaton fire area). These under-the-radar and long-term effects contrast with a particularly high-profile event in cinemascope, with the disaster unfolding live, with media cameras and Instagram posts of celebrities filming their property burning down. In other large-scale natural disasters that are less immediately covered by the media, such as those in Mayotte (December 2024), the breadth of a silent disaster is often only discovered after the event.
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Cybergeo Conversation (24 janvier 2025). Fire Storms in Los Angeles: Davis’ ‘Ecology of Fear’ re-read in the 21st century. cybergeo conversation. Consulté le 18 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/135ux
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