City Planning Means Vision, Not Reaction

It was an unprecedented sight, but there they were. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), hardly the closest of allies in normal times, stood together at a press conference and announced strict measures designed to stem the tide of Los Angeles’ overflowing sewage. Just a week before, Hayden called his own press conference to criticize earlier Bradley proposals on the sewage problem as being woefully inadequate. For more than a year the city sewer system has repeatedly failed to function properly, spilling over raw or partly treated sewage into Santa Monica Bay--much of which falls within Hayden’s district.

The plan includes emergency restrictions on water usage, intended to reduce waste water flowing into the sewer system, and a monthly cap on new development, at least until 1991, when expansion of the Tillman water reclamation plant in Van Nuys is completed. “It’s a bold program,” Bradley told the press. “It’s an aggressive program, yet it’s a prudent program.”

Bold? Aggressive? These words are not appropriate to describe what is really a stopgap measure, a belated reaction to a crisis. The mayor is more like the little Dutch boy who plugged the bursting dike with his finger. We can appreciate the heroics, perhaps, but boldness was something required many years ago when city engineers first warned that the explosive rate of development in Los Angeles would eventually fill its sewers to the brim.

Of late the city has been in the grip of a crisis mentality. Whatever the issue--sewers, traffic, smog--we seem able to addressthe problem only when it has become close to insurmountable. Our failure to look ahead postponed the day of reckoning. But that day is here, and the “boom or bust” boosterism of the past 30 years must give way to sober but imaginative planning.

We have a planning department and a planning commission, but little real planning goes on here. Planning, after all, means much more than finagling with zoning, negotiating with developers over the scope of their projects or debating whether the atrium on the Los Angeles Central Library should be flat or peaked. Planning means creating a vision of what we want our city to be, based on the needs of people who live here. It means developing a real consensus about the future of Los Angeles, and discarding the current phony process of arriving at “consensus” by juggling demands of special interests with narrowly focused economic concerns.

To some extent Los Angeles’ laissez-faire approach to urban growth derives from the city’s unique history, in which numerous small towns from the beach to the San Fernando Valley to the pueblo gradually meshed into a loosely structured metropolis. As architecture critic Reyner Banham wrote in 1971, planning “is one of those admired facets of the established liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles.”

But, as must happen with any ecosystem, Los Angeles has found that it cannot ac-commodate an infinite number of living organisms--a fact that led to the rise of the so-called slow-growth movement. Yet so far, at least, the slow-growth movement has been mostly reactive, attempting tolimit development in a piecemeal fashion. This approach will at best only freeze current problems into place and lead to the stagnation of the city. We need to go much further and look for ambitious new ways to make the city livable again.

In the early 1960s, for example, social thinkers Paul and Percival Goodman proposed banning all private cars from Manhattan. Now that is a bold, aggressive plan. Of course, it will never happen--not because it isn’t a good idea but because it represents a higher plane of thinking, a visionary approach. Although it would bring wonderful results, the idea could never withstand the certain onslaught of comparatively minor technical arguments.

In Los Angeles even relatively small sparks of imagination are often snuffed out by special-interest politics. When transportation engineers in the 1970s considered closing the downtown portion of Broadway to through traffic, the idea was soon re-jected. Why? In large part because a few powerful business interests objected to it.

And when in 1985 planners made the even more modest suggestion that Broadway be turned into a one-way street, merchants rallied against any changes on “their” boulevard.

Just who does Los Angeles belong to, anyway? If our city is to solve its problems, we as a community must transcend the demands of those who cannot see beyond their own narrow, petty interests. We must insist that our political leaders search for creative, daring solutions to the city’s problems, even if it means stepping on a few toes along the way.