Opinion asked designers, artists and architects how the land in Chavez Ravine should be used:

The L.A. Dodgers have always been a franchise apart, in a city apart. The reputation the Dodgers have created is partly due to their paradoxical aloofness, their repose on the cutting edge, the goofy future-is-now crispiness of Dodger blue that finishes the transition from “da bums” to palm trees and vastness. The future needs space--not to be filled, or even striped, but to reveal the horizon, which will again, someday, be blue.

So why can’t Dodger Stadium nourish paradoxes forever? While “experts” who counsel “competitiveness” in real-estate terms only seem to be tuned in to the L.A. thing, Angelenos are capable of leaving well enough alone when they recognize something valuable is at stake. A legacy of 40 years is something to be respected and preserved--not as a museum, but as part of the horizon.

It is this horizon that makes Los Angeles the center of the universe; the Dodgers are its team. They rock. Why rush to be like other cities? The current situation at Chavez Ravine does present the image of “Los Angeles as Suburban Paradise,” which is what it is and why everyone is there. We have always known that traditional models of urbanism don’t work in L.A. So instead of trying to make Los Angeles fit some East Coast ideal, why not value the reasons for its difference?

I grew up in Los Angeles, but I have lived (reluctantly) for more than a decade in San Francisco, where the “experts” have followed these models. San Francisco’s sad attempts to replicate its own charm by recreating its own past should serve as a cautionary tale for L.A. San Francisco’s “toon-ification” has ensured it will have no authentic future and a past that can only be regarded with suspicion.

The smugness of this yearning for the past, born of seeming self-awareness, is more objectionable than the frank wistfulness of Camden Yards, where the Disney factor is so overt that visitors can’t help knowing they are attending a game in a theme park. Far from preserving everything of value in the heritage of a city, these sorts of places erase and replace.

There is a reason the area around Dodger Stadium was not originally developed: Within the (sub)-urban mythos of L.A., it is marginal land. However we may deplore such thinking now, it was slated for public housing because it was seen as less valuable.

It would be far more interesting--and L.A.--to explore the anomalous aspects of this so-called hole in the city rather than fill it in with some nostalgic Disney pastiche.

The city should officially adopt the approach now taken by archeologists to conserve their finite resources--bury the whole issue, walk away and leave it for future generations, who might have a better, more responsible way of handling it. This will seem like naive waste to the developers, and a breach of entitlement to the rights groups, but I don’t think either has the vision to avoid squandering this chance.

L.A.’s vision of itself has never been the same as the rest of the country’s until the rest of the country comes along. That exceptional kookiness is part of L.A.’s charm. Dodger Stadium’s presence in L.A. is similarly, and appropriately, anomalous. A call to reform the stadium’s context must be taken as a sign of L.A.’s waning confidence as the capital of contemporary culture.