Back to the Future of L.A.

The book “Rethinking Los Angeles,” to be published this week by Sage Publications, looks at this region as a subject of serious academic study. The collection includes essays and artwork on the city, its past and the future by a diverse set of writers.

This is a condensed excerpt from a chapter titled “Reimagining Los Angeles” by Robert Fishman, a professor at Rutgers University.

Other contributors include Steven Sample, president of USC; Mark Kroeker, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau; the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray of the First AME Church in Los Angeles, and Margaret Crawford, professor at the Southern California Institute for Architecture.

The book was edited by Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC; H. Eric Schockman of USC’s Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, and Greg Hise, assistant professor of urban and regional planning at USC.

Los Angeles in our time has imagined itself as a different kind of place, the capital of the 20th century Good Life, the anti-Paris or more precisely, the anti-New York.

From our vantage point at the end of the 20th century, we can see that the Los Angeles “city of the future” has no future. The dream of limitless mobility has been swallowed up in endless sprawl and nonstop congestion. Now among the densest of American cities, Los Angeles has generated its own form of hierarchical constriction, and its own form of slums.

To be sure, new developments at the edge of the region still push out into the desert in a naive search for open spaces and uncrowded freeways. But they are like the provincial acolytes of a dying religion who haven’t heard that the temples of the metropolis are already closed.

How, then, to reimagine Los Angeles when the very idea of the “city of the future” has itself been discredited? I would suggest that the key lies not in a more extravagant science fiction rendering of the city of limitless mobility. Still less can the reimagined city be found in a passive acceptance of the Los Angeles of today, rebaptized as “the postmodern metropolis” and all its sins forgiven.

For me, the way to reimagine the future of Los Angeles lies paradoxically in an imaginative recon- struction of its past. Before the freeway-and-sprawl Los Angeles took shape in the mid-20th century, there was another city, built on the armature of perhaps the best mass-transit system of any region in the world. A city that embodied both human-scale communities and a healthy balance between nature and the built environment.

This “other Los Angeles” still exists, buried beneath the sprawl-city, but still available as a vital alternative form. In the 1920s, the Los Angeles region possessed three great attributes. There was a balanced transportation system where the emerging highway system coexisted with the thousand-mile Pacific Electric trolley system. Second, “decentralized” growth was still disciplined into well-defined towns and villages laid out along the main Pacific Electric routes. Third, these routes converged to maintain the downtown as a lively, open and diverse regional center.

The extraordinary personal ambition of Henry Huntington, founder of the Pacific Electric system, exploited the opportunities presented by a lightly settled but booming region to push the technology of electric traction to its limits. He tied streetcar service to real estate speculation: Each new line or extension meant land that could be very profitably developed along its corridor. Huntington dramatically flung his lines out from central Los Angeles, crossing open countryside to connect the downtown to the Pacific Ocean, the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel foothills. Los Angeles in the 1920s promised to become a new kind of urban region. Freed from smoke pollution, overcrowding and slums, Los Angeles would become “the garden metropolis.”

The crucial decision which I believe has shaped Los Angeles since came when Angelenos were forced in 1924-25 to choose between upgrading the Pacific Electric system (now out of Huntington’s control and a quasi-public utility) and a “Major Street Traffic Plan” put forward originally under the auspices of the Automobile Club of Southern California. The automobile plan was the real estate speculator’s dream: a vast grid of wide boulevards which would put any potential subdivision “inside the grid.”

By contrast, the Pacific Electric plan would have inevitably resulted in development limited to the light-rail corridors. This would have preserved the townscape of the Los Angeles region, both in the walking-scale vitality of the villages and in the greenbelts that surrounded them. It also would have kept the downtown as a lively and necessary urban core for the region. But the Pacific Electric plan would have sold fewer lots.

The street plan prevailed--the boulevards are now the network of “surface roads” that still carry the bulk of the city’s traffic--and so too did its ultimate logic: the deterioration of the trolley system; the obsolescence of both the local centers and the downtown; and swallowing-up of open space in urban sprawl.

By the mid-1950s Los Angeles had earned its reputation as the “shock city” of the second half of the 20th century. For a brief moment the city seemed to express the definitive form of the American dream: universal home ownership; universal automobile usage; unlimited access to high-paying jobs and exciting leisure facilities by high-speed automobile travel. But this “new city for the 20th century” has proved to be a cruel delusion. By the 1960s increased population density meant exploding housing prices, intractable congestion and new forms of segregation.

Instead of the traditional central city juxtaposition of “The Gold Coast and the Slum,” one had the low-density ghettos of South-Central Los Angeles, an area larger than Paris, isolated economically and socially. Meanwhile, the wealthy ensconced themselves in scenically spectacular but environmentally precarious hillsides and canyons, and the middle class spread out ever more remotely. Even before 1992, when the most destructive urban riots in American history rocked South-Central, the Los Angeles “autopia” was dead.

As the Los Angeles autopia reaches a state of permanent crisis, the seemingly buried Los Angeles of the era of trolleys, local-centers and a vital downtown has become increasingly “visible.” Every major “progressive” project put forward by our most committed avant-garde designers constitutes a revival of the best features of the 1920s city. This for me is not criticism but praise.

The most obvious and important project is the work of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to make Los Angeles in the 21st century once again a world center of light-rail transportation, and also an important commuter rail and even subway city. The impetus toward a balanced transportation system for Southern California seems unstoppable.

As well, people are rediscovering the local, exemplified by the revival of Old Town Pasadena and the success of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. At the same time the emergence of Los Angeles as the nation’s most important immigrant destination has given the city what it lacked in the 1920s: an intense diversity of ethnic neighborhoods, with highly active commercial cores. These factors together have revived for Los Angeles something that critics thought had disappeared forever: vital public spaces.

Los Angeles is now the site of perhaps the most ambitious project in the nation to re-create a “new urbanism” based on past values: Playa Vista on a thousand-acre site near Marina del Rey. Playa Vista is a conscious attempt to re-create the values of the 1920s Los Angeles in a “walking community” with generous landscaped public plazas.

Housing is predominantly multifamily, with courtyard apartments, duplexes and quadruplexes as well as townhouses. Streets were built for walking and to discourage automobile use. Over half the site has been set aside for open space, most notably a wetland preserve and open bluffs, recapturing some of the balance of built and open space that Los Angeles used to possess.

Yet the re-creation of these local centers puts back on the agenda the question of downtown. Does Los Angeles in the 21st century need a downtown on the 1920s model? Can the Los Angeles downtown become once again a true center for its region? Any genuine downtown revival must first overcome a 70-year legacy first of neglect and of ruthless interventions to create a corporate downtown that excludes the very public spaces downtowns of the past were built to embody.

To give up on downtown is to give up both on the prospects for an efficient mass transit system transforming the region, and also to give up on the ideal of a regional “common ground” beyond the racial, ethnic and economic turfs that presently divide the region. Great cities have always reimagined themselves through a complex process of innovation and remembrance. The need to recapture the past is at least as important as the need to adjust for the future. Baron Haussmann’s 19th century rebuilding of Paris was designed both to adapt the city to the needs of industrial capitalism and to reaffirm the classical heritage of the French metropolis.

As Los Angeles struggles to cope with the crises of a postmodern, postindustrial, post-urban world, the city requires both innovation and a renewed sense of what is valuable in its past. Precisely because the present is dominated by political, environmental and social disintegration, we turn to the past--not out of nostalgia or escapism--but for those models of working democratic institutions and vibrant public spaces which we urgently need to build the future.