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Playa Vista Plan Reaches Beyond Modern Suburbia

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<i> Whiteson is a Los Angeles free-lancer who writes on architectural topics. </i>

As modern cities burst their boundaries and expand to become vast regional metropolises as populous as small countries, residents feel increasingly at a loss. People find it hard to identify with such amorphous entities.

How, for example, does a person identify with the huge and shapeless growth that sprawls from Simi Valley to San Diego? How does he or she sustain an image in the mind and heart of a district or neighborhood that is home?

The creation of coherent neighborhood identities is the main challenge facing the new design team that is planning the 900-acre Playa Vista project between Westchester and Marina del Rey.

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Given the largest tract of virgin real estate within the boundaries of any major U.S. city, the managing developer, Maguire Thomas Partners, and its planners have begun to evolve a novel scheme.

The proposed design features a fusion of commercial, retail and multifamily residences that may serve as a model for Los Angeles’ future development beyond the suburban, single-family home character that has begun to break down under the pressures of Southern California’s escalating traffic congestion and housing scarcity.

“We see the new Playa Vista plan as an opportunity to do something completely different in urban design in Southern California,” said Maguire Thomas senior partner Nelson Rising.

“Rather than develop raw real estate without concern for the quality of life, we see this as a chance to create a real community from the ground up, complete with all the vital civic and commercial services.”

This enlightened goal has a dark past. A 1986 attempt to plan Playa Vista, owned by Howard Hughes Properties, a division of Summa Corp., was shot down in flames by community groups, as was the political career of City Council President Pat Russell, the area’s councilwoman, who supported the earlier proposal.

Resistance to the previous Playa Vista proposal--commissioned directly by the Summa Corp. before the entry of Maguire Thomas--boiled down to two basic objections: The development was top-heavy with traffic-generating commercial development and it was crudely planned.

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“Politicians and developers have connived in a rotten, stinking sellout of community interests,” the president of the local Coalition of Concerned Communities, Patrick McCartney, declared at the time.

The previous plan proposed 7 million square feet of commercial, retail and industrial space and 9,000 residential units.

The new design includes 5.7 million square feet of commercial and retail development and 11,000 residential units. The previous plan envisaged some office towers as tall as 14 stories; the new design limits commercial buildings to 10 stories to avoid interfering with the view of houses located on Westchester Bluffs that runs along Playa Vista’s southern boundary.

Beyond adjusting the vital balance of jobs and housing, which planners hope will ease the traffic impact of the development by allowing people to live close to work, the new scheme divides the huge site into coherent mini-neighborhoods, each with its own stores, parks and public squares based on a pedestrian pace and active street life.

The Playa Vista site presents major social and physical problems to the design team that includes Moore, Ruble, Yudell of Santa Monica, De Bretteville and Polyzoides of Los Angeles, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami, Ricardo Legoretta of Mexico City and landscape architects Hanna/Olin of Philadelphia.

The team was assembled by Maguire Thomas project manager Douglas Gardner, who chose the participants for “their design skills, their belief in community interaction and the humane nature of the communities they had previously designed.”

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The social problems have been confronted in a series of community presentations and “charettes”--brainstorming sessions in which the designers work out their ideas in public.

Following the appeal of the area’s new councilwoman, Ruth Galanter, the design process has been, in Rising’s words, “open and public, not planned in the back rooms of City Hall.”

Residents of neighboring districts attending these public sessions have generally been receptive to the developer’s openness. “It’s a big change from the previous scenario,” several agreed after the Playa Vista charette held in June.

The physical challenges of the site are perhaps even more complex than the social. Bisected by Lincoln and Jefferson boulevards, the site is segmented into four main parcels squeezed between the Westchester Bluffs and the Ballona Channel.

The longest segment lies between Jefferson Boulevard and the bluffs, facing a confused commercial-industrial-residential stretch across the street. The western parcel, bisected by Culver Boulevard, is a wetlands area, most of which has been committed for conservation by the Audubon Society.

The site is overlooked by the Loyola Marymount University campus and Westchester homeowners.

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“How do you create a sense of community in this complex context?” architect Buzz Yudell asked rhetorically. “This is the central question, and the heart of our design.”

The Playa Vista planners made certain basic decisions right from the kickoff. These were:

--The emphasis of the plan would be on its public, rather than its private spaces, including its streets, plazas and parks.

--Its basic building block would be a manageable 520-by-325-foot size, broken down into two and three-story residential clusters planned around communal squares and green spaces.

--Housing would be mixed with shops and stores, and often built over retail space.

--Most parking would be below grade, leaving the surface streets for people walking.

--Housing would cover a range of economic types, including congregate homes for the elderly, low-rent housing for the blue-collar workers who will service the office and retail areas, as well as upscale residences for the affluent.

--Office development, confined to the western and eastern edges of the main segment, at the intersection of Lincoln and Jefferson, and Jefferson and Sepulveda, would be of a low-key “campus” style, in keeping with the small-town character of the overall plan.

--Internal shuttle services by bus or rubber-wheeled trolley would reduce the need to use the private car within the project.

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The small-town character of the new Playa Vista plan was influenced by the concepts carried out by Duany and Plater-Zyberk in their much-publicized design for the Florida coastal resort town of Seaside.

Seaside’s layout, based on pre-World War II Southern towns with their sleepy, narrow lanes and central courthouse square, was explained by Duany as a desire “to reform society at the level of having people meet, in contrast to the typical suburb where no one is on the street.”

The kind of atmosphere the Playa Vista planners are trying to conjure up is similar to those few surviving “urban villages” in Los Angeles, such as Beachwood Village in Hollywood.

These villages are coherent neighborhoods that people in a large city can relate to as home, the designers argue. They provide the kind of clear social and visual boundaries that allow the residents to identify as their own community.

Some urban designers claim that a harking back to small-town scenarios in a regional metropolis is phony and reactionary. Suburbanites must come to terms with the increasing urbanization of Los Angeles, they say, not take refuge in a kind of live-in Disneyland.

“In Playa Vista we are trying to create a new neighborhood form that is more densely populated than a suburb, but not as crowded as, say, Westwood’s Condo Corridor,” Yudell said.

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“If we don’t provide a sense of communal identity in the city, we risk a profound urban alienation that can end in a shattering social chaos.”

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