Making Los Angeles More Than the Sum of Its Parts : City: Mayor Riordan is looking to practice Big City politics here. But to do this he must project an image of the city as a unified whole.

Mayor Richard Riordan now has his 260-plus commissioners in place. Collectively, the Riordan team represents a triumph of post-mod ernist eclecticism, appropriate to Los Angeles as it lurches toward its destiny.

The mayor has avoided the cumbersome, formulaic checks and balances based on ethnicity that sank Rebuild L.A. Brilliantly, he has cross-indexed multiple layers of identity. An African-American woman lawyer is also part of the Downtown Establishment. An Anglo-Republican oligarch has first-rate connections in the Latino community. A Hollywood screenwriter has a passion for public libraries. A part-time cafeteria worker, with a talent for community advocacy, does not seek an appointment but is now at the center of an important commission.

Everyone senses that Los Angeles is destined to become the trade, financial, entertainment and communications capi-tal of the 21st Century. But how will the city get there--given its current economic stress, the crime epidemic, the persistence of interethnic distrust and all the other thousand natural shocks that cities are heir to--remains the central challenge of the Riordan years.

One thing is certain. Los Angeles must remain a unified city if it is to solve its immediate problems and actualize itself on the world stage. San Francisco has shown, unfortunately, how a deeply divided city can frighten off business and economic development.

U.S. investors well know they can do business better in communities that possess some unity of identity and purpose. Foreign investors, foreign governments, even state and federal agencies, similarly demand a minimum of coherence in a city. From the perspective of Europe or Asia, --or now, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, from the perspective of Ottawa and Mexico City--Los Angeles has got to be able to deliver on its commitments: to do what it says it will do.

The unity of Los Angeles exists in dynamic tension with the growing localism and ethno-special-interest orientation of its politics. If successfully led, Los Angeles has a chance of becoming the sum total, not the negation, of its local and specific identities.

The most fundamental premise of unity, as far as the commissioners are concerned, is Riordan and his vision for Los Angeles as an economically revived, crime-controlled, culturally vital city. Whatever their previous political affiliations, personal loyalty to Riordan and to the success of his Administration now becomes the first premise of their public life. This is called Big City Politics.

Practiced by the great mayors of the past, Big City Politics emphasizes a one-to-one relationship with the Big Guy in City Hall, with whom one rises or falls. Riordan ran as an outsider. But he is an Irish-American from New York and so understands Big City Politics instinctively. Riordan has brought back to City Hall a style that is unafraid to emphasize loyalty and performance in a city where commissioners are constantly in danger of being seduced by multiple agendas.

Riordan’s commissioners can be expected to pursue the goals and agendas of their departments and agencies. These men and women are, by definition, hard-charging types. Can they be expected, however, to keep the welfare and identity of Los Angeles as a whole in mind?

Yes, provided the mayor communicates a vision of Los Angeles as a whole. While localism, even an obsession with turf, is understandable in a member of the City Council, only the mayor embodies the idea, the hope--frequently desperate--that Los Angeles is one city.

If Riordan wishes to communicate to his commissioners this sense of Los Angeles, he must embark on a pilgrimage in search of such unity. While remaining sensitive to localism, to neighborhood groups, to the necessity of every grand policy proving its worth block-by-block, the mayor must also probe, through politics and personal identification, the realities and symbols of what confers on Los Angeles its coherent identity.

Every catalogue of such elements is selective, hence, liable to adjustment. Many unifying elements are self-evident and would make most lists in other cities. They include police, fire, public utilities, the airport, the port, the public library system. The renovated Central Library has restored to Los Angeles a architectural icon of civic unity. It is now time to get 3,000 more cops on the street--and, more important, to communicate to them just how much they are appreciated. Without them, there is more than a failure of civic unity. There is chaos.

More distinctively, the unity of Los Angeles involves a special intensity in the power of talk radio, TV news, entertainment and professional sport. Talk radio has made Los Angeles, for all its distances, one big neighborhood gabfest. The mayor and his commissioners should be on talk radio as often as possible, taking their case directly to the people.

On a more subtle level, Los Angeles possesses unities energized by religion. In ancient times, cities began as shrines and were organized around the ziggurat. Five thousand-plus years later, religion still functions as the prime source of civic unity, despite the religious variety of our times and despite the anti-religious bias so prevalent among secular intelligentsia.

Among other things, Los Angeles is a world center of Jewish civilization, with only Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York in its class. Protestant Christianity still flourishes in the City of the Folks, and Mormonism is a powerful force throughout Southern California. Cardinal Roger Mahony heads the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese on the planet. Orthodox Christianity, in its Greek, Armenian and Coptic manifestations, flourishes throughout Los Angeles. A significant percentage of the 8 million Americans who are members of Islam live in Los Angeles; and scholars of comparative religion, not to mention demographers, see in Los Angeles a capital of American Buddhism in the 21st Century.

When Los Angeles was prospering, leaders of these religious communities tended to be trotted out for the obligatory prayer at public gatherings. Now, however, the powerful forces religion represents--the moral imagination of Judaism, the social gospel of Protestant Christianity, the hope and transcendence centered in the African-American church, the family-centered values of Mormonism, the cultural coherence Catholicism confers on la raza, the tensile purity of Islam, the compassion and equanimity of Buddhism, the social sanity of the Confucian way--are needed more than ever. Along with economics, social justice and the containment of crime, religious values--as in ancient times--must come forward to found and refound the city.

Let the mayor and his commissioners identify with these forces in a manner compatible with the separation of church and state. Let them see that the great ethical and religious traditions of the planet are co-mingling here and struggling toward new ecumenical strength.

Having studied under the famed French philosopher Jacques Maritain at Princeton, Riordan knows well that great cities exist on multiple levels of social, economic, political, aesthetic, moral and spiritual meaning. As mayor, he must respond to them all.

Riordan appears able to deal with administrative issues. But the well-being of Los Angeles depends as well on the more elusive dimensions of civic culture: the dimensions of moral struggle and spiritual quest. He should be unafraid of pursuing these values and encouraging their pursuit by his commissioners--and by all the people of Los Angeles. The sovereignty he represents, the sovereignty of the people of Los Angeles in their collective identity, has a power to heal as well as to squabble with itself.

Let the mayor begin the work of healing by pointing to the better city. And his commissioners, indeed, the people themselves, grateful that something at once new and ancient is being said, will assent to a vision more powerful than cynicism and bring their best energies to the renewal of Los Angeles.