Public Space and Private Initiative

“A city must be so constructed that it makes its citizens at once secure and happy. To realize the latter aim, city building must be not just a technical question but an aesthetic one in the highest sense.”

So wrote Camillo Sitte 100 years ago in his classic “City Planning According to Artistic Principles,” in which he urged those shaping cities to pay more attention to the creation of public spaces, in particular squares.

Sitte felt it was such spaces that generated a sense of place and community; that buildings, in addition to being functional and decorative, should be thought of as backdrops for places where people can meet, stroll, see and be seen and, generally, take part in the life of a city.

What Sitte, in effect, was urging was the creation of an inviting place with an identity, be it a sense of history or style. This concept is known in current real estate terms as “location,” or “an address,” a hard-to-define factor that investors correctly consider the key to a successful development.

It also is a concept that planners in the public employ talk about a lot, and do little, especially in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, city planners here under a timid Dan Topping and under constant pressure from politicians seem to have abandoned their roles as urban design innovators to become sort of glorified zoning police, parking space attendants and traffic counters.

Los Angeles begs for a planning department, indeed any public agency, that can take the initiative as advocates for sensitive urban design, sympathetic in-fill housing, more parks and playgrounds, pedestrian-friendly streets, accessible neighborhood shopping, responsible citizen participation and, generally, a more livable city.

One wonders what city employees are putting themselves on the line for these days--what they believe in and are prepared to fight for--other than their own jobs, medical plans, parking privileges and retirement benefits.

And we are not talking here about reams of planning studies that end up on dusty shelves, but employees willing to walk the streets, listen to residents, help them develop positive programs for their neighborhoods and confront the powers that be downtown.

Just how long can the municipal government here wallow in a 1950s mind-set, treating communities like subversive cells and urban design like a disease to be quarantined and studied?

Meanwhile, the initiative for the design of public space in the last few years has shifted from the public to the private realm, in particular to the more imaginative architectural and planning consultants and enlightened developers. They realize well, even if the city doesn’t, that the key to the success of any development of any size today is “place making.”

The result has been such engaging downtown projects as the Seventh Market Place and the Japanese Village.

And engendering promise of “place” are the water terraces and stairway at the base of Library Tower, connecting Bunker Hill to the restored (we hope) west lawn of the rehabilitated (we hope) Central Library. There is promise, too, in the Showa Village proposal for Little Tokyo, if it isn’t crushed by a compromised City Council.

Add to this list is the recently announced plan for the private development of nearly 14 acres of prime Ocean Boulevard frontage in Long Beach, including the former site of the Pike amusement park. It was packaged under the name of Pike Properties by developer Wayne Ratkovich and a host of advisers and investors, including James Rouse of Festival Market fame.

The plan has a $1-billion price tag and calls for the staged development over the next decade of the now familiar and welcome mix of office towers, varied housing types, a hotel, eateries, retail outlets and convenience shopping--subject, of course, to the availability of financing.

What distinguishes the plan is that the emphasis is not on the buildings, but on the public spaces.

They will be developed first, in stages, not as afterthoughts, as they usually are; in effect, providing the basis for a “location” that will determine the form and orientation of the varied structures. That, in fact, is the way cities traditionally have been shaped.

The public spaces include an expanded and enhanced park along Ocean Boulevard and a series of landscaped courts, terraces, malls and walks within the development, edged with diversions designed to encourage pedestrian activity. Parking will be tucked under the development, yet easily accessible because of the 20-foot drop in the site from Ocean Boulevard to Seaside Way.

It is a relatively simple, yet sophisticated plan, taking advantage of the dramatic site and its views, while responding to the existing street grid of the city. Created is the potential for a distinctively picturesque and lively urban neighborhood, rather than the usual sterile settings of large commercial and residential efforts.

Long Beach certainly can use it to repair some of the damage done to its downtown over the last few decades by a perverted urban renewal program and a plodding city government.

The ambitious plan was fashioned by Stanton Eckstut, now of the firm of the Ehrenkrantz Group & Eckstut. Consultants in the design process included architects Charles Moore, Frank Gehry and Jon Jerde, and Richard Weinstein, dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA. It is an interesting lineup, the kind that generates an award or two.

But frankly, the plan reads Eckstut, who was one of the principal designers of the much acclaimed Battery Park City in New York. The urban design elements focused on the public places that worked there are very much in evidence in the Pike Properties plan, and are welcomed. Hopefully, they can be instructive in other large planning efforts now under way, such as for Central City West adjacent to downtown Los Angeles.

As a public place, California Plaza has its problems; too isolated and too big, poorly edged and unfocused. That is what happens when politics wins out over design.

One of the things that might help inject a little life into the plaza and better connect it to the city is Angel’s Flight, the funicular railway the Community Redevelopment Agency has repeatedly promised to rebuild.

However, its reconstruction has been delayed again. We hope not for too long, and that a date be set and a schedule announced, and this time be met. If not, one of these days the funicular is going to leave the CRA standing at the station with mud all over its face.

Hinting at how California Plaza might better serve the denizens of downtown is the marvelous Dame Myra Hess Concert series being offered at noon every Wednesday through Sept. 29, free, thanks to the International Music Foundation of Los Angeles. It is just the stuff that makes being downtown an urbane experience. Encore, encore.

Camillo Sitte would have loved it.