Torrance Ca. has managed to escape its once stigmatizing label as ‘the city by the airport’. Torrance has since gone through a transformation and gentrification that has made it one of the nicest places to live, for people who don’t want to deal with all of the nasty hassles of living in Los Angeles and can’t afford to live in the overpriced Orange County.

Torrance is a city of transformation and transition. When it was first established it was a purely industrial enclave. People lived close to where they worked and the things they made were dispatched around the world with the help of the near-by airport.

But of course, things have changed. Most of America makes its living, not by making things but by creating ideas and then dispatching them around the world via new information technology. This was the future and Torrance was leading the way.

Now the city has one of the highest concentrations of information technology firms outside of Silicon Valley, and Torrance just keeps on growing. There’s no telling where Torrance will go from here, but if the cities past is any indication of its future it will be going in the right direction.