Next Stop: A Truly Connected Community

It has become commonplace for writers to depict Los Angeles’ future as a dismal, “Blade Runner”-like dystopia of ethnic friction and corporate greed. In truth, the greatest threat to the city’s future may be the dull minds of its urban thinkers.

But a recent proposal to build new schools near two existing Red Line subway stops--one at Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, the other on Lankershim Avenue in North Hollywood--hints at what the city’s future might look like if our civic leaders were infected with a sudden dose of creative imagination.

Conceived by Nick Patsaouras, a retired engineer and former Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member, the plan is intended as a practical--if partial--solution to two seemingly unrelated problems: the Los Angeles Unified School District’s desperate search for sites to accommodate the approximately 85 schools it plans to build in the next five years; and the MTA’s indecision about what to do with large parcels of undeveloped land surrounding many of its subway portals.

The plan was presented at the Jan. 25 MTA board meeting. The Vermont-Wilshire site has since been approved for a mixed-use development that includes a middle school, housing and retail space. And after stiff opposition from local business leaders, a North Hollywood site has been found on Caltrans property next to the MTA site. The next step will be to develop designs for the school buildings.

But why stop there? It’s an encouraging start, as far as it goes. Imagine, for a moment, a much broader urban scheme--one that would link a whole network of new schools to a citywide subway system. The result would be a radical reworking of the civic infrastructure. Knowledge, in effect, would become our new connective tissue.

A team of UCLA graduate students is exploring the idea under the guidance of Santa Monica-based architect Thom Mayne. Still in its early stages, the design--by Andrew Scott and Peter Kimmelman--is unformed, but it is an auspicious beginning. Its potential stems from its ability to work on a variety of urban scales. Locally, the design is conceived as a unique set of civic hubs, each serving the needs of the surrounding community. In effect, each school becomes a hive of communal activity, offering such services as day care, adult education programs and a neighborhood gym.

But what makes the idea compelling is its connection to the city’s broader social infrastructure. By linking each school to the subway system, the scheme treats education as a fluid component of everyday life. It evokes both Bill Gates’ vision of an Information Age, accessible to all, and the old socialist dream of a “school without walls.” The subway becomes a mechanized school corridor; the subway cars mobile study halls.

What’s more, the scheme is surprisingly efficient. Budding actors in East L.A., for instance, could easily attend classes in North Hollywood, where after-school programs could be linked to the neighborhood’s growing Equity theater district. At Exposition Park, a plan is already in the works for a new Science Center school that would tap into the resources of the existing science museum. Those resources would suddenly be available citywide.

Architecture, meanwhile, would also play a critical role. New school buildings would have to accommodate a variety of scales, weaving together context, building and urban infrastructure.

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A model already exists. Designed in 1964, Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt sought to transform a decrepit industrial zone in Staffordshire, England, by creating a mobile university--one directly linked to the region’s existing rail system. In the scheme, which was never built, enormous gantries moved pod-like classrooms from one station to another. Industrial towers were used to house visiting professors and staff.

But the key was the design’s accessibility: Resources could be shifted from one site to another with ease; education would be treated no differently from groceries, a fundamental part of everyday life. The idea, Price said, was to draw the university out of “gentlemanly seclusion,” making education as available to the common man as “the supply of drinking water or free teeth.”

Price’s model, in fact, is a perfect fit for Los Angeles. Unlike traditional cities, Los Angeles famously has no center. It is a collection of miniature enclaves, scattered about with no apparent hierarchy. The glue that holds it together is a series of overlapping transportation networks--its freeways, bus routes and surface streets. A mobile university would add another layer to that existing fabric.

Cynics and pragmatists, of course, will immediately dismiss such schemes as pipe dreams. But not all urban schemes have to be built to have impact. Sometimes, they only exist as conceptual maps, blueprints for an alternate future. At the very least, they can serve to question the often tired formulas that regularly shape our urban existence.

Either way, many of the necessary elements are already in place. The LAUSD, which is in the midst of a $2-billion school building program, lacks an overall plan for its development. And although the MTA has temporarily refocused its efforts on its new Rapid Bus routes, it still has $649 million in federal money earmarked for building subways. Eventually, the city will have to acknowledge that buses and cars will never solve its long-range transportation problems.

Patsaouras is pressing on. He has asked Michael Maltzan Architecture and Tetra Design to prepare a preliminary scheme for the Wilshire Boulevard site. He has also begun discussions with TBP/Escudero Fribourg Architects about developing proposals for North Hollywood.

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Los Angeles, meanwhile, is at a crossroads--a moment when its cultural and social infrastructure need to be aggressively reexamined. Congested neighborhoods, overburdened freeways and continuing sprawl are slowly tearing apart the urban fabric. Those distances are not only physical, they are psychological. They contribute to a deepening sense of alienation. Such notions could be the basis for a larger public dialogue about the city’s future.

The alternative may be another science-fiction nightmare. A middle class sealed off in suburban enclaves, protected by a cordon of trimmed lawns and private security forces. A city of disjointed cells, separated by class and ethnic background, of crumbling freeways and growing desperation.