A Different Kind of ‘City on a Hill’

The community of Los Angeles is soon to be defined by the fate of two crucial building enterprises: the Disney Concert Hall and a new cathedral for the Catholic archdiocese. Both have been made possible by extraordinary acts of philanthropy; both would be created to serve the spiritual and cultural needs of our community; both will be designed by outstanding architects; both represent the kind of opportunity that no other city in the nation would fail to successfully embrace. Not San Francisco, not Seattle, not Dallas, not Cincinnati. What is wrong with Los Angeles?

What is wrong is our failure to perceive ourselves for what we are.

We are the first American city to decisively separate ourselves from European urban models and to express the privatization impulse embedded in our nation’s founding. The built landscape of the Los Angeles region favors the private over the public realm, which has led to fragmentation and the proliferation of two dozen population centers, each subdivided into building blocks of smaller enclaves. The whole constitutes a new kind of porous urban tissue, which repeats and replicates its constituent parts as the population expands. This urban form is fundamentally different from the Eastern and European cities we provincially intend to emulate.

Within our unique form, we have generated the strongest, most diverse, technologically sophisticated and resilient economy in the nation. Within that economy, the interaction between technology and creativity now produces the nation’s largest export, loosely called entertainment. And entertainment is nourished in crucial ways by the fine arts.

Walt Disney understood this continuum between popular and fine art when he made “Fantasia” and when he endowed the California Institute of the Arts. His wife and daughters acted in the same spirit with their remarkable gift for a new concert hall. In the face of this example, should not the entertainment community find a way to move out of its gated compound to meet the equally insulated Music Center? Where is the civic leadership that will promote, even in the 11th hour, the long overdue interaction between the industry and the arts that could contribute immeasurably to our public life?

It is a public life whose political and institutional arrangements reflect the spatial character of this region: A multiplicity of communities, a bewildering variety of state, county and municipal jurisdictions and single-purpose agencies (transportation, air quality, water, etc.) whose independent (fragmented) activities cross-impact and frequently neutralize one another. A city council that resembles the warring city-states of Italy during the Renaissance. A mayoralty without the power to manage public agencies and the council when citywide issues require consensus. A county government empowered by constituencies so large that productive focus on any one issue, such as a concert hall on county land, is compromised. When everyone is in charge, no one is in charge. When political power is so fragmented, lines of accountability are obscured and the momentum of communal enterprise is undermined.

The courageous and catalytic decision to build a new cathedral at the uncertain edge of the downtown Civic Center should have been met at once with support and a coordinated institutional response by the civic and political leadership. This should have happened before the need was upon us to rescue what is precious for the community at large from the confusion and gridlock of our political and civic structures. The same was true of the enterprise zone fiasco; the same is true of Disney Hall.

To plead for the hall and the cathedral on the basis of revitalizing the Civic Center is to miss a crucial distinction. Instead, we should arrive at our strategies from an understanding of the multicentered realities of our urban geography. Each project has a regional constituency, each plays a role in a social, economic and cultural ecology whose web of interests go far beyond downtown. Downtown is a place for a critical mass of unique, interacting and even dependent regional resources, which increasingly look for sustenance from the regional base they serve and less from an exclusive downtown establishment. What is offered to other population centers in the region is what they cannot provide for themselves--a great symphony hall, a glorious cathedral, a beloved central library. However, such institutions must also be more engaged with communities and interests outside the core from which they will derive their primary energy.

Somehow, within the extended city and the energy of its private sector and civic associations, we must find a cooperative way to nourish the spiritual and creative bases of our public life. In significant ways, these two buildings embody the aspirations and test the will of our evolving city to be. Let us have a magnificent new symphony hall. Let us build a great cathedral in the right place.