An Alternate Future: Reawakening the Civic Life of Los Angeles

Los Angeles has been the whipping boy of urbanists for too long. The dominant influences of architecture and urban design flow mostly out of the Eastern seaboard. They live in cities that evolved out of necessity for pedestrians and horses, later overlaid with great densities made possible by elevators and mass transit. These souped-up cities feel like the European models they were based on, but without the layered sediment of history and its expression in great architecture and public places. They lack the old-world charm so compelling to Americans, though those who built cities in Europe were indifferent, even hostile, to democratic values.

In these older cities, life happened in public because private space was meager and unhealthy, and the aristocracy sought public approval and personal glory through the exercise of patronage. The enjoyment of the public realm by the rest of society was an affirmation of the design judgment and power of those who ruled. In contrast, the American Revolution recognized everyone’s right to the pursuit of happiness in a land of matchless natural abundance. Eventually, this led to the privatization of experience in relation to nature--each house on its own plot--that has had its culmination in Los Angeles.

Yet, we are missing something of the full urban life here because we lack a sense of community and its fulfillment in a public realm that significant architecture can provide. Recently, voters have independently approved nearly $5 billion in funding for new schools, libraries, parks, fire and police stations. In combination, these facilities could provide the kind of civic places that can transform the structure of the city. Theme parks and shopping malls respond to the absence of such communal space, and people’s instinctual need for social interaction. But, such venues are essentially shrewd (if often entertaining) selling machines, operating at the surface of our lives, substituting consumption for meaningful experience.

This new funding of public facilities represents an alternative future for Los Angeles. As a city, Los Angeles has barely survived its lost opportunities for civilized growth, submerged as it has been by freewheeling development and numbing environmental indifference. Lost Los Angeles. Is the city finally ready to stop feeding private fantasies and consider its collective needs? And to cross the selfish jurisdictional and political boundaries that reflect an obsession with personal safety and freedom without accountability? Paying attention to the public part of our lives requires both planning and design vision. Yet, city politicians marginalize professional planning and our finest architects work primarily in Europe.

Fortunately, $5 billion attracts attention. This week, at the Getty Center, a group composed of civic, foundation, business, political and education leaders will meet to consider how to take advantage of this stunning coincidence of public funding. They meet with the support of the school district and the offices of the mayor, governor and federal education secretary. Their agenda even includes the question of how to involve the best design talent; the public record here, in relation to expenditures, would make a cynic weep.

The most significant result of these deliberations would create public places for communities out of the amalgamation of schools, libraries, parks, police and fire stations. This critical mass would attract theaters, branch museums and other cultural and entertainment uses. Private investment in retail and restaurants would follow, enhanced by wide sidewalks and trees to support cafe (and coffee) street life.

Isolated, single-purpose civic centers are pompous and actually make big holes in the community. Instead, the Information Age makes it possible to decentralize public services, making the space they need to occupy more humane and digestible as part of a comprehensive mixed-use strategy. The necessary parking structures (no mindless parking lots, please) could devote street-level frontage to pedestrians and might also provide a platform for loft housing, to make multiple use of precious ground. Reconceived, publicly funded parking structures are central to the strategy, and their cost would be recaptured from the overall economic halo effect produced.

A dozen such community sites, developed through well-thought-out urban design efforts, enhanced by memorable architecture and founded on public needs and pleasures--while involving the private sector--would awaken Los Angeles’ inclination for the public life. For this to happen, we must identify authentic needs that are vital to the decentralized way we live. We cannot base urban design on the unfounded premise that people would rather walk than ride if given the opportunity; or that they prefer an old-fashioned Main Street when the reality is Starbucks, Banana Republic and cyberspace; or that evil traffic must inevitably lead to transit-based pocket communities, where people greet each other on the way to the light rail while saving the planet.

These assumptions form the basis of the New Urbanism, a powerful and sophisticated movement that embraces traditional design down the thickness of mortar joints and is attracting increased attention. Its first success, Seaside, Fla., provided the perfect setting for “The Truman Show.”

All these preachy assumptions of how people ought to live were developed by certain architects in a smug inversion of the moralizing “oughts” of the modernist movement. Life as it really is lived never wanted to catch up with the modernists, and is now, in its complexity, way ahead of the New Urbanists. What is to be done?

Public space based on real needs would include schools designed for both kids and adult education, near to libraries, parks, day- and night-care, social services and health facilities, cultural and community space and security (police and fire). These are connected in our lives and belong together. In a society where change is so rapid and destabilizing that each adult will now, on average, work at six different jobs with two career changes in a lifetime, job counseling and retraining will be a continual need. Schools and libraries for all age groups should be open all time. Parks should include community gardens and provide the consolation of nature with thoughtful landscape design. Eventually, places like this, serving different populations at different times of the day and night, would be active on an 18-hour, even 24-hour, basis.

These civic centers would be the foundation of an authentic public realm based on values arising from necessity rather than marketing inventions. In built form, they embody the emerging civic impulse behind the neighborhood councils. Strategically located, they could help structure our extended pattern of growth by providing centers of public activity and civic pride.

Architecture and urban design has the power to promote the public life and represent its highest aspirations. In addition, resourceful talent can identify hidden opportunities for social interaction, and give life and spirit to a place. The best chance for this would mean engaging our most gifted architects. This is not easy, given the mediocrity of most public projects--designs seem governed by absurd regulations devised by bureaucrats in Sacramento basements who conspire with local philistines in government.

No existing institution has the expertise or the resources to organize and build even a limited number of these community centers, and the schools in and independent of them. Nor does an agency exist with the power to do the research, insist on inter-agency cooperation, work with the neighborhoods and accomplish the task with the best design talent available. Where there is inclination, there is no clout; where there is clout, there is no inclination.

Some structure will have to be created that can combine private sector expertise with public accountability, and also welcome the participation of philanthropy and community leadership. The consent of the governed is not easy to get out of so many back yards.

A sympathetic governor and supportive county and city governments are key to any success. But this kind of sympathy usually arises in elected officials only when prompted by forceful and effective community leadership. Are we seeing the beginning of such a coalition in this week’s meeting at the Getty?*