The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Habitat : “The most radical approach to rebuilding Los Angeles is not to build or rebuild at all in risky places”

Again, Los Angeles looks longingly to its past as it tries chart a future.

It is spending billions rebuilding its long-abandoned commuter rail system. For the first time in more than 30 years, voters elected a Republican mayor who radiated nostalgia for that safer, more manageable city of old.

Now, more than ever, people seem preoccupied with the idea of going back--as if the collapse of the freeways revealed the ruins of a more stable, civil society.

In Malibu, where fire and earthquakes are perhaps more a part of the life-cycle than in most other places in Los Angeles, Mayor Carolyn Van Horn ponders a new kind of general plan that both shapes and reflects the sense of community she recalls from growing up in the San Fernando Valley. “Nature was a part of life. People had chickens in their back yards. Everybody had a vegetable garden. The adults always knew where the children were. You could go next door if you needed something. If they didn’t have it, you could walk to the store. . . .”

The possibility of Los Angeles as a collection of self-sufficient communities--where people know their neighbors and where King Car no longer reigns--has nourished the frustrated dreams of local architects and planners for years. The concept of the urban village lies at the heart of two grandiose plans. Playa Vista, just south of Marina del Rey, will be a mostly low-rise cluster of homes, stores and offices for 28,000 people of varying incomes. The other, Central City West, just across the Harbor Freeway from Downtown, is meant to provide an even larger mix of residential and commercial space.

Yet these projects were planned in an era that seems eons ago, before recession, riot, wildfire and earthquake.

Many of the building blocks for urban villages are already dotting the landscape, to hear architect Craig Hodgetts tell it. He points to the outdoor farmers’ markets, the swap meets and the empty storefronts that could become neighborhood offices for a decentralized bureaucracy. Linking them together would be the electronic highway that people enter from their home computers.

Unlike the Red Car, which went out of business, the city’s urban villages didn’t disappear so much as become dysfunctional, casualties of crime, job flight and middle-class exodus. And as in small towns elsewhere, the corner stores were upstaged by the big suburban malls.

Yet the outlines remain of the place this once was--in neighborhoods from Watts to Echo Park, from Boyle Heights to North Hollywood. They have relatively compact housing patterns yet still offer many pleasant side streets of single-family homes that are within easy strolls of shops and schools. Why then, as so many planners ask, struggle to create entirely new towns on a nostalgic model, when the real ones still exist and need cash and encouragement to come back?

“The most visionary thing of all would be using this as an opportunity to strengthen what we have. Invest in South-Central and South Bay and East L.A.,” said Culver City community development director Mark H. Winogrond, who also heads the Los Angeles section of the American Planning Assn.

Perhaps the most radical approach to rebuilding Los Angeles is not to build or rebuild at all in seismically or otherwise risky places. In densely populated parts of the city, why rebuild every condemned building, when a park or a community garden might serve better?

Overcrowding is “part and parcel of decline. If all we do is repair the earthquake damage, it’s not going to stop the cycle of deterioration and the linking of that deterioration to other social problems like drugs, crime and gangs,” said Barbara Zeidman, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles city housing department.

Within those neighborhoods, planners envision building more apartments and opening others into three- and four-bedroom flats to accommodate the larger families of an immigrant population. The old model of ground-level retail and living above the store could be revived; so could living above the office. Density would go up in these neighborhoods, but the housing could remain affordable.

What matters most is trying something different. Hodgetts talks about “more improvisational and transitory forms.” Hodgetts’ best-known design, UCLA’s temporary library, may be appropriate for a city whose faith in bricks and mortar has been shaken: It’s a huge tent, actually a cluster of interconnected tents complete with heating, air conditioning and the electronic capacity for a 40-station computer lab.

No one is foolhardy enough to predict the death of the single-family house with its lemon tree in a sunny California yard. But what of that house? Although the model of a wood frame bolted to its foundation withstood the temblors well enough, some have conceived houses better equipped for the aftermath of natural or man-made horrors.

That could mean a survivalist’s fortress, a post-apocalypse “Road Warrior” compound, with its own power generator, heavy security devices and an awesome telecommunications ability. And in case all else fails, maybe a helicopter waits on the roof.

The kindler, gentler version is an eco-house built with recyclable materials proven to withstand quakes. A house that also has its own septic and compost systems independent of city pipes that can break down, a house that collects rainwater and uses it wisely, taps solar energy and has, perhaps, some chickens or goats in the yard. Instead of an escape helicopter, maybe several bicycles sit in a shed.

For a less extreme lifestyle change? Craig Kronenberg, an architect with the Johannes Van Tilburg firm in Santa Monica, suggests more plywood, less marble; garden block walls replaced by old-style wooden fences; masonry chimneys replaced by prefabricated metal flues or maybe fewer fireplaces altogether; no more houses on stilts; less unnecessary heavy ornamentation. “It’s an aesthetic,” he says, “born of necessity.”