Building a Visionary Infrastructure : As structures are remodeled, the area’s remarkable landscape features can be incorporated into designs.

In the coming months and years, Southern California will spend billions of dollars to rebuild its earthquake-damaged freeways and other infrastructure components. And it will spend billions more to retrofit them against future quakes.

Rather than pursue rebuilding as usual, let’s use this massive public works program to promote a vision for a Southern California landscape, particularly in Orange County.

This vision will celebrate Orange County’s remarkable landscape features: its mountains, plains, rivers, beaches and ocean. It will also encourage the creation of distinctive community identities.

Orange County’s freeways are one good place to start implementing this landscape vision. Why can’t sound walls, now little more than empty canvases for graffiti, be covered with attractive flowering vines? Graffiti would be removed from our freeways permanently.

The scheduled widening of the Santa Ana Freeway (I-5) in Orange County now presents another opportunity.

Earlier this year, Anaheim proposed innovative design guidelines for the stretch of I-5 between the Riverside Freeway and the Santa Ana River. These design standards call for graceful shallow-arched “nostalgia bridges” recalling the 1920s and 1930s, improved roadside landscaping and sound walls, public art at important spots, and use of the Santa Ana River crossing as a ceremonial gateway into the cities of Anaheim and Orange.

Caltrans has adopted part of this proposal, and its engineers are now designing the “nostalgia bridges” for this section of I-5.

Orange County’s rivers and flood control channels offer another opportunity to implement a vision for the landscape. Think of waterways like the Santa Ana River and San Juan Creek as “land banks” winding through our crowded region and unifying disparate communities.

Instead of covering these waterways in concrete, let’s install more attractive landscaping along their banks, where possible, and prepare long-term plans for adjacent land uses like parks or entertainment. Portions of some waterways could be returned to their natural state.

How can Orange County implement a vision for the landscape? A countywide entity--including both government and grass roots organizations--would seek the ideas and support of various municipalities and agencies, environmental organizations, and community groups in a two-year series of public forums.

Then, these public forums would create this landscape vision which would be organized in a series of five-year plans. Public agencies would follow these provisions in construction and repair work.

Where will the money to implement this vision for an Orange County landscape come from? Most can come from the more imaginative use of existing funds.

To plant shrubs and vines along freeway sound walls, Caltrans could supplement its limited landscape funds with current anti-graffiti and “Adopt-A-Wall” programs.

Or, consider the flood control “improvements” along the Santa Ana River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wants to construct higher walls along the river, raise numerous bridges and overpasses, and raise the height of the nearby Prado Dam. If past experience is any indication, this project will cost far more than the estimated $1 billion. Worse, its single-purpose approach treats the Santa Ana River as a concrete-lined drainage pipe.

Instead, let’s spend that money on a more effective multipurpose solution incorporating flood control, parks and entertainment, and conservation of rainwater which now flows into the ocean.

Just look what Phoenix has done with a similar program in only five years’ time. In 1988, several city agencies expanded the “per cent for art” program from individual buildings to the entire metropolitan infrastructure--highways, neighborhood streets, canals, bus stops, even water and waste treatment plants. Today, 68 public art and landscape projects are completed or underway, making Phoenix a more attractive city and a better place to live.

If Phoenix can do this, why can’t Orange County? If we do, our children will thank us for strengthening Orange County’s identity, reclaiming some of its natural beauty, and improving the local economy by attracting more business and tourism.