PERSPECTIVE ON THE QUAKE : L.A.’s Fault Lines : We accepted nature’s risks to build a dream world of private pursuits. Now we see the price of isolation.

We live in the first American city whose shape and organization express the will to individual self-determination and the freedom from received precedent. The cities of the East Coast were founded and built under the influence of European densities and social inclinations. We have built a city on the American dream of the family home existing within its own envelope of space, and this same notion of individual self-determination has governed the growth of greater Los Angeles into a vast constellation of separate communities. This is a non-hierarchical and porous arrangement of space, which has bred a free-form style of living and the most diverse industrial base in the world from a kind of mulch of second-rate construction.

Flourishing, we could withstand whatever nature could do to shock the system. We had made a bargain: to be separated by a continent from the past, accepting fire, flood and moving earth in exchange for climate, mountain, sea, and for the promise of an unbounded future. Is this psychic bargain unraveling?

For the first time, we sense ourselves to be connected to events over which we have little control. Unsettled by destabilizing changes dictated by distant forces--economic restructuring and uncertainty, social unrest, immigration--we are aware, suddenly, of the latent isolation of our condition. The very way we live is now perceived as linked to our vulnerability to fire, flood, drought and earthquake. Under stress, our privacy is also linked to isolation and anxiety. The freeway system is one physical expression of our desire for compensating connection and communication. Its partial destruction and the powerful images we have all seen of its frailty are somehow definitive of our present moment. Our mobility is essential to our existence as a community. When it is compromised, what is isolating about privacy is disturbingly revealed, and revealed with the power of a public metaphor. We are reminded not only of our personal circumstance, but also of the fragmented nature of our public circumstance--the distance of our political leaders from us and each other, of our ethnic communities from one another, of our bureaucracies from each other and from us, of the tense separation between and among cities and counties and our warring, Balkanized city-states. Each of them, each of us, in our own back yards . . . except, fleetingly, in time of crisis.

There seems to be a collective anxiety about the future expressed in our response to this latest test of the Southern California premise. Certainly there is enough tragedy and loss to explain this reaction for almost any place, but not this one. Do we feel exposed because the material comfort so many of us enjoy is threatened? Because we can no longer manage without acknowledging that too many of us are ominously poor? That in building the city of private realms to pursue private dreams, we have never experienced the advantage afforded by community? I do not mean the personal acts of heroism or neighborliness in times of crisis, but rather the belonging to a larger set of collective interests that bind us together as a whole and define a public realm in more equitable balance with our private interests. Because we must now begin to act differently than we have before, is because we have separately succeeded so well up till now. The future will require that unfamiliar, collective adjustments be made. The fault lines running through our social, economic and political arrangements are under extreme pressure.