TIMES EDITORIAL : The Next Los Angeles: Reinventing Our Future

Life is a series of collisions with the future, wrote one Spanish thinker; it is not the sum of our pasts, but the sum of our yearnings for what we may become. On January 17, Los Angeles collided with its geological past. That shattering Northridge quake can, paradoxically but triumphantly, point the way to a stronger future here.

In a special section in today’s Times, entitled The Next Los Angeles, many of the most provocative plans for the future of Southern California have been detailed by scientists and policy-makers, by futurists and regular citizens. Some plans would require enormously bold change; some would demand little more than common sense and strong hearts--the best of what Los Angeles was built on.

No city born of a desert can live without dreams. From its days as a dusty pueblo, Los Angeles has attracted many of America’s most spectacular dreamers. Those visionaries’ talent for creation brought us the city of today, with all its flaws and glory and now entrenched interests. But just as the shock of a heart attack can spur a patient to reconsider and reform his life, so the shock of the Northridge quake can be a warning and a summons to Los Angeles: The future requires vigor and innovation. For Los Angeles the last four years have brought a Biblical set of misfortunes, fire and riots and recession.

But history shows that, for great cities, misfortune can ignite brilliant accomplishments. Consider San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906; consider London after World War II. The problems of the cities did not disappear in their catastrophes. But the will and the willingness to innovate were stirred, in part by desperation, in part by the desolation of the past.

The intent of The Next Los Angeles is to stir the debate and dialogue about our region’s future--about its governance and its classrooms, its freeways and its industries and the changes they, and we, inevitably face.

The intent is not to endorse specific proposals but to invigorate the dreams and not the despair. By character and by custom, a newspaper celebrates its city’s victories, shines a spotlight on its flaws, analyzes its predicaments. More rarely, a newspaper lays out a set of landing lights for the future. Here and in future dispatches, the Los Angeles Times will do just that. Our own future as well as our fabled past are intimately bound to this region of sun and mountain and ocean. Here we take our stand: innovate or languish. In the evolution of cities, as of species, there can be no other course.