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.

This article describes a Los Angeles-based website that collects volunteered geographic information (VGI) on outdoor advertising using the Google Street View interface. The Billboard Map website was designed to help the city regulate signage. The Los Angeles landscape is thick with advertising, and the city efforts to count total of signs has been stymied by litigation and political pressure. Because outdoor advertising is designed to be seen, the community collectively knows how many and where signs exist. As such, outdoor advertising is a perfect subject for VGI. This paper analyzes the Los Angeles community's entries in the Billboard Map website both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that members of the public are well able to map outdoor advertisements, successfully employing the Google Street View interface to pinpoint sign locations. However, the community proved unaware of the regulatory distinctions between types of signs, mapping many more signs than those the city technically designates as billboards. Though these findings might suggest spatial data quality issues in the use of VGI for municipal record-keeping, I argue that the Billboard Map teaches an important lesson about how the public's conceptualization of the urban landscape differs from that envisioned by city planners. In particular, I argue that community members see the landscape of advertising holistically, while city agents treat the landscape as a collection of individual categories. This is important because, while Los Angeles recently banned new off-site signs, it continues to approve similar signs under new planning categories, with more in the works.