| I dug out my copy of Reyner Banham’s 1971 classic, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the other day, intent on confirming whether Banham — an extraordinary if sometimes wrongheaded architectural historian — was as ardently pro-freeway as I recalled. It turned out he was. Banham, who died in 1988, was one of the most respected authorities on Los Angeles and he depicted the LA freeway system as just about the closest that civilization has ever come to motorized perfection. Untroubled by complaints about freeways, he insisted that for long-distance commuters, “the freeway is not a limbo of existential angst, but the place where they spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives.”
Banham’s endorsement of the freeway lifestyle now seems almost a period piece, akin to the highway propaganda of the 1939 World’s Fair. Even if two hours of driving per day was soothing in 1971 — which I find hard to imagine — it certainly is not calm and rewarding today, when Los Angeles County is packed with three million more inhabitants. After becoming famous for freeways, Southern California has learned that designing a region exclusively around the automobile is a recipe for frustration.
So today the pedestrians of the nation’s second largest metropolis are gradually beginning to get the attention they deserve. The City of West Hollywood took back a 2.7-mile segment of Santa Monica Boulevard from the state Department of Transportation and has been converting it into a more bicycle- and pedestrian-oriented thoroughfare, with wide sidewalks interspersed with elms. Pasadena, a city of dauntingly wide streets, has been doing great things with its downtown alleys — developing them into congenial, sometimes tree-lined passages where people can stroll or hang out amid shops, food, and entertainment.
Rail transit — today’s equivalent of the red streetcars that traversed the region in the 1920s — is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to the private automobile. Like many of the 1,200 people attending CNU XIII in Pasadena in June, I walked from the Civic Center to the Del Mar station just south of Colorado Boulevard and got onto a smooth, quiet Gold Line train. A few minutes later I stepped out onto Mission Street in South Pasadena — a late-19th-century retail crossroads. From a table in a funky South Pasadena café called Coffee by the Tracks, I could see Mission Meridian Village, a handsome new collection of lofts, courtyard apartments, townhouses, and single-family houses, with retail space in a portion of the ground floor.
THE FUTURE IN DENSITY, MIXED USE
Southern California’s future lies, in part, in dense developments like Mission Meridian Village that are within walking distance of shops, transit, and other services. The region’s young Metro Rail system now has four lines — Blue, Green, Red, and Gold — and continues expanding. Though not particularly fast (it took me an hour and 45 minutes to go from Pasadena to Los Angeles International Airport, riding sections of all four lines plus a shuttle bus), rail is making it possible for a portion of the population to go places without clogging the roads.
“There isn’t one town center in Los Angeles County that is not in process of regeneration,” Stefanos Polyzoides told the Congress. Polyzoides sees 1990 as the start of a “hopeful moment,” one in which “the forces of change are to be seen everywhere.”
LA’s large Latino population could play a useful role, according to local leaders like James Rojas, a founder of the Latino Urban Forum. Latinos come from a culture that tends to use public spaces, so there is the potential for what Rojas calls Latino New Urbanism, including animated streets, front yards, and other public or semi-public spaces. As if to affirm Rojas’s view, Los Angeles’s newly elected mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, told the Congress that he wants to appoint a new planning director who “can understand and advocate for the kinds of ideas CNU is talking about.”
These are encouraging times for LA. The region is breaking free of its fixation on freeways — at last.
This article is available in the July/August issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |