Redesigning Los Angeles

Los Angeles City Beat, January 25-31 2007

As L.A.’s mishmash of styles and thoroughfares clutters our lives, architects, planners, and activists are demanding a new future

~ By MINDY FARABEE ~

There are parts of the city of Los Angeles that are so ugly they could kill you.

It’s 80 degrees on a mid-December day, and the bare concrete assault that is 6th Street at Alvarado, colloquially known as the Westlake district, offers its denizens no respite. Jennifer Allen, a coordinator for the Alliance for a Livable City, and I squint hard against the washed-out pavement, breathe the fumes, and watch people scurry around impatient traffic.

“Cars whiz by here, and it’s dangerous for pedestrians who have no buffer between them and this traffic,” Allen says. “We have to ask ourselves, is it OK for it to be unsafe for kids and adults to be walking along here so I can drive to work as fast as possible in the morning?”

Technically, Allen and I aren’t standing on a street at all. Since at least the 1950s, this fat slab of rumpled concrete just west of downtown has been classified as a “secondary highway” instead, re-baptized in the name of channeling a daily torrent of automobiles into and out of the 213. Some 10,000 cars move through this intersection every hour of rush hour, Allen says, and, true to form, sidewalks here have all the aesthetics of a freeway shoulder. Westlake is not a neighborhood; it’s a stretch of arid blocks and bald facades snapped together like Legos.

In reaction, Allen’s alliance, along with a growing number of planners, architects, activists, designers, M.D.s, policy makers, and fed-up residents, have begun vocally positing the radical notion that people live in Los Angeles – and it is people who actually own the streets of Los Angeles. The needs of people can compete with – and complicate – those of the cars as they circulate through our neighborhoods, and the city, these advocates say, has a responsibility to envision and design a metropolis that strikes a more liveable balance. That means a vision. A big vision.

As far as L.A.’s Department of City Planning is concerned, each section of Los Angeles is governed by a document called a Community Plan. Some of the city’s newer such plans incorporate design guidelines, but many are only rough sketches of regionally approved zoning codes, a general sense of whether it’s okay to build a strip mall, a strip club, or a middle school. As a consequence, Los Angeles has long left developers to their own devices, and never bothered to envision how all our pieces might fit together. The automobile’s long reach often takes the blame for Los Angeles’ fragmented nature, but this lack of an overarching aesthetic, this uneven approach to urban design, goes a long way toward explaining that disjointed feeling that comes with lurching from downtown Hollywood to Hollywood-adjacent.

“Does a fish know it’s in water?” Allen asks. “People aren’t aware of how much their built environment affects them, and how much better it could be. Street design is huge for where we go next.”

“We need to attend to the public realm,” says Robert Harris, an architecture professor at the University of Southern California. “We get a project and a project and a project along streets that are disheveled and [the pedestrian] doesn’t get any sense of continuity.”

As we speak, Allen notes, the city has begun taking a closer look at Westlake and 11 other neighborhoods, launching efforts to identify each one’s character in order to lock in specific zoning codes that will enshrine it. In the meantime, across the city, these efforts are being augmented by a newly inaugurated Urban Design Studio, the city’s first attempt to think of itself as a city.

“Urban design is about arrangements and relationships,” says John Chase, urban designer for the City of West Hollywood. He, for one, thinks that good design doesn’t necessarily pit people against cars. Where a planner approves an application to construct a supermarket, a designer decides what to do about the parking and whether the proposed structure is in keeping with surrounding architecture. Without the latter, over time the area ends up looking “like a teenager’s room that hasn’t been picked up.”

Developers, Chase notes, have long had a field day here. “There are places where planning was done, just not by the city,” he says. L.A. might have been one of the first cities in the country to get municipal zoning codes, but it was businessmen who laid out Leimert Park. When developers first arrived in nascent Los Angeles, they found a tabula rasa, a grassland basin easily shorn and built upon and sporting a climate for endless Sunday driving with the top down. Now land still lays at our edges, but the environmental toll of developing it for low density no longer pencils out. As people continue to pour into Los Angeles and because, as Chase notes, “people are allowed to have children,” the city must turn back and face itself.

Design is Health

Over the past few years, experts have come to understand that bad urban design can exacerbate obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, high dropout rates, domestic violence and gang activity, economic depression, and global warming. Not to mention that it hurts the intellectual growth of kids and makes their parents depressed. “We’re animals,” says Neal Kaufman, a physician and software developer who this past summer co-organized the urban planning symposium Unhealthy By Design. “A sterile environment with no grass, no trees … that’s not good for us. Turning asphalt into park space translates into a decrease in violence.”

The places we inhabit, inhabit us as well. Researchers have found a correlation between the built environment and intellectual activity: “A window opening out onto a tree whose branches move in the breeze – that stimulates a child’s brain development better than a static picture of nature against flat lighting,” Kaufman continues. And a population’s social development can suffer as well: “Public gathering places, such as farmers markets, are extremely important for adults’ mental health, because they dramatically increase opportunities to interact with a wide range of possible acquaintances.” Habitually shopping at the Beverly Center doesn’t suffice. The key is not so much people-watching of strangers by strangers, but frequently returning to neighborhood gathering hubs, where the same faces routinely pop up and relationships have the potential to form.

According to John Kamp, a planning assistant with the City of L.A., the popularity of farmers markets has intensified in Southern California as of late, a development he attributes to basic human instincts. “People are starving for the experience of walking down a street and feeling a part of something, even if it’s only for two hours on a Saturday,” he says. “People are starved for that atmosphere of liveliness and activity, that good old-fashioned civic experience.”

In fact, we crave congestion. We want to drive our cars unfettered, but when we have time off, we drive those cars to places where the car is unwelcome – to flea markets, to dense shopping districts like Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade or the pier, to the beachside booths of Venice. It’s congestion, many theorists point out, which makes cities.

Those places exist, but Los Angeles is not a particularly civic-minded city. Private backyards, private vehicles, and private estates all prime the Angeleno subconscious to feel comfortable when keeping other Angelenos at arm’s length. The city’s high percentage of detached single family homes can also magnify the impact of those homeowners who think first about personal property, then community character.

“People want to feel safe, so they build fences and walls, to feel safer inside buildings,” Allen says. “But it makes the streets more desolate.”

To understand why this is, it’s helpful to not think of streets as streets, per se. “Another way to think about this is: the facade of a building is the face of a building, but it’s also the inside wall of the street space,” Harris explains. Staring at block after block of blank walls can make you feel like you’ve been institutionalized. And urban planners have found that pedestrians often don’t forsake their automobiles based on rational time-based formulas – there’s no 5-, 10-, 15-minute threshold – rather, they gravitate toward eye-catching niceties that help pass the time. “The Los Angeles landscape is really designed for people who are moving at 30 miles per hour,” Kamp says. “The level of architectural detail isn’t as fine-grained here as it is in cities like New York or Chicago, where the sidewalks aren’t just concrete; they can be cobblestones. And there isn’t just a street tree, there’s a tree surrounded by plants, and there aren’t just brownstones, but steps leading up to them, and ironwork around those, and windows to look into. You could walk the same distance in Los Angeles and feel like you’re moving much slower.” It’s time, Kamp says, to rethink our streets as multifunctional experiences.

Rushing to Slow Down

Lois Arkin might look like a traditional grandmother, with her bouncy gray hair and twinkling eyes. But she has just marched a group of about 30 high school students out into the middle of Bimini Street on the northern edge of Koreatown, and, even with a white pickup truck staring them down, she won’t let anyone budge. Smile and wave, she instructs them. We’re retraining cars to share the street with pedestrians, she explains. “The suburbs have more car-related injuries than Los Angeles’ inner city has from crime,” she says.

Arkin serves as executive director of Eco-Village, a two-block radius in which residents are experimenting with various forms of sustainability and attempting to bring the city back down to human scale. Here, the potholes are patched with mosaics by local volunteers, the sidewalks are shaded by fruit trees, and the backyard is edible. Arkin’s group has secured $250,000 from the city for street redesign, and they are going to use it to make traffic go slower – an idea considered antithetical to the whole L.A. experience.

Tree canopies, milling crowds, and street furniture – like shaded bus stops – have been shown to slow down drivers more reliably than posted speed limits, and if Arkin has her way, Bimini Street will give over an entire traffic lane to a mini-orchard, while one of its alleyways will relinquish its pavement to a green paseo for pedestrians. Koreatown lies along the Red Line, and “every time a quality public transit facility comes online, a comparable auto use should be reduced,” she says. “This will be the first demonstration project of a shared street in the city.”

What Arkin ultimately visualizes are the promenades and open-air plazas of Barcelona, coupled with the bus rapid transit of Coretiba, Brazil, and the bio-active architecture concocted by Viennese designer Hundterwasser. So far, she’s managed to barricade a short section of 2nd Street, convincing the city to install an eco-park instead. It could take a while for many of Arkin’s other ideas to migrate beyond her borders.

“The city street-trees department has asked for as wide a spacing as possible, because they don’t have the funds to maintain the trees they have,” laments Harris.

One day, Angelica Rojas would like to get an internship with the city planning department, but right now, despite living 15 minutes from Staples Center, the soft-spoken South L.A. high school student who hides behind a long flip of dyed hair had no idea developers were constructing a $2 billion entertainment complex called L.A Live just to the north of her. Rojas listened to a few minutes’ description of the project before dismissing it out of hand. “It doesn’t sound like it’s for us,” she says.

Last year, AEG Entertainment, the developers behind L.A. Live – a multi-block entertainment complex complete with nightclubs, theaters, thousands of hotel rooms, retail outlets, and restaurants designed to feed symbiotically off of a new convention center and the nearby Staples Center – broke ground in one of the poorest areas of the city. After complicated negotiations with neighborhood activists and social justice coalitions, residents walked away with a precedent-setting community benefits package incorporating local hiring agreements, affordable housing, and recreation facilities. But will this development and the Grand Avenue Project, its sister mega-development to the north, reinvigorate a blighted downtown, providing a catalyst for the Figueroa Corridor to at long last gel into a neighborhood? Or will it produce just another shopping destination, a high-end enclave of consumption blind to the distressed landscape which surrounds it? Or worse, another Universal CityWalk, with all the same shops and sense of total disconnection?

The question, really, is how a project like L.A. Live could create a space for a local resident like Rojas. Developers often argue that by incorporating a courtyard into projects they have provided a public space, when in fact, that’s more likely to build a self-contained shopping device.

“The Library Tower got it right,” Harris says. “Inside the building, there are almost no amenities for its thousands of employees. Every day at lunch time, it sends people teeming out onto the streets.” This kind of conscious interaction with the street can mutate a landscape of consumption into a landscape of experience. But developers recognize it’s not always in their best interests to do so.

“Developers understand that once they get you inside their wonderful new development, they want to keep you there,” Harris says.

Welcome to the Grove. Like CityWalk before it, the Grove employed well-tested theories of urban design to create ersatz streets in the midst of a real city. In one of L.A.’s more pathetic ironies, residents drive from all around to park their cars and walk around a pseudo-neighborhood, a compact, walkable promenade free of imposing power lines and kept lively with small streets and ground floor retail. Along its outer edge, however, the shopping center offers a blank face to 3rd Street. “The Grove turned itself in,” says Harris “They think they did a nice landscaping job, with some trees, some windows, but they turned their back on the street.”

“These mega-projects we’ve been seeing are extensions of destination-oriented thinking,” Kamp says. “They result in a fragmented landscape where your neighborhood isn’t so great, so you say, ‘I need to go to the Grove to experience something.’ Pedestrian connections between these developments and other parts of their neighborhood are the missing links in making Los Angeles less a collection of destinations that you drive to and more of a city.”

“Good design is not rocket science,” Allen says. “We have all the tools and knowledge, but getting it done is a whole other story.” Indeed, smart growth concepts have been written into the city’s general plan since at least the 1950s, not that any previous city hall administrations seem to have noticed.

What’s the holdup? Numerous complex reasons and at least one huge physical impediment: parking. “Parking is enormously expensive,” Harris says. At around $50,000 per parking space, this amenity siphons a substantial percentage of investment away from actual design, bequeathing boxy ugliness, and even when the city relaxes its requirements – for instance, for sites easily accessible by mass transit – developers themselves will often push for their maximum allotment so that a shortage of parking doesn’t interfere with a venue’s success. “And it gets much more expensive when it needs to be constructed underground, so often every effort is made to figure out how parking can be placed on street level,” Harris adds. According to an ongoing Community Redevelopment Agency study on parking in the downtown area, aboveground, frontal parking depresses pedestrian activity – after all, there’s nothing inviting about trekking across vast concrete wastelands. These dead spaces can plague even some of the city’s most innovative destinations. For instance, while San Francisco’s new concert hall elected to forego all parking spaces, Disney Hall saddled itself with some 2,400 of them.

If these trends hold, according to an environmental impact report recently issued on the Grand Avenue Project, despite conscientiously blending mixed-use facilities, housing, office spaces, and the area’s multiple public transportation options, downtown traffic is set to mushroom.

“Environmental impact reports are based on current habits, as they have to be,” Harris notes. “But Angelenos can change. Any generalizations about an area this diverse are automatically going to be wrong.” The solution to our traffic woes, Harris believes, could well be to just relax. “If we stop trying to build our way out of it, people will begin to rethink how they can use their own neighborhoods,” he says. Furthermore, the area’s staggering diversity has transplanted millions of new mentalities, a whole new class of people blissfully unaware that Los Angeles looks down on those who ride the bus.

In Westlake, MacArthur Park beckons, a worn but nevertheless green patch of relief. Younger, leafier trees are beginning to take hold here, but still, shade comes at a premium in its palm-tree dominated vista. In a tangible way, these palm trees have symbolized Los Angeles’ outdated thinking: they didn’t originate here, nor do they serve much of a function. But illusion is no longer Los Angeles’ major industry.

L.A. is now a global city, an international trendsetter poised to remake its name on ports and trade and as a flashpoint for cross-cultural inspirations. And just like the future itself, L.A. must adapt if it doesn’t want to implode.