The Gridlock Kid

Have you been to London recently? How about Dubai? For that matter, how about Bogota, Colombia? Each of these cities is thriving, and their collective success makes clear the battle Los Angeles faces during the next several decades to stay successful on a global scale.

It also raises a question: Is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who came into office nearly three years ago with brio and youthful promise, doing enough to keep L.A. from slipping from the top tier of world cities? In many ways, his political legacy may depend on it. And in an age of hyper-competition among world cities, so will the health of the metropolitan region--and maybe of California as a whole.

The idea that major cities of the world, rather than the nations they belong to, will be the rising powers of the 21st century is a fashionable one these days. Paul Saffo, a futurist based at Stanford University, calls the rise of the city-state and the fall of the nation-state one of the biggest stories to watch in 2008.

Distinct from the so-called mega-cities--those sprawling and often poverty-ridden metropolitan centers with more than 10 million people, such as Lagos or Cairo--is a new class of “super-cities” that includes London, New York and Shanghai. These wealthy cities set the world agenda in finance and fashion and just about everything in between. Instead of military power or the muscle of a national government, their influence relies on their ability to stay nimble in a quickly changing world economy and to lure a young and talented workforce.

In the fully connected era of globalization, London is infinitely more relevant to the rest of the world, not to mention a lot richer, than the United Kingdom as a whole. (As urban scholar Richard Sennett puts it, “London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York.”) The same is true, to a more obvious degree, in the United Arab Emirates, a loose amalgamation of seven oil-rich city-states that includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Miami has emerged in the last decade as the de facto capital of Latin America.

The new Age of Cities is also, not surprisingly, an Age of Mayors. London has the remarkable Ken Livingstone, who has made planning and design the priorities of his administration and, not coincidentally, landed the 2012 Olympics. New York has Michael Bloomberg, who has taken more of an interest in urbanism, transit and architecture than any Gotham mayor since John Lindsay. Bogota reversed its reputation as a murder capital in large part due to its former mayor, the eccentric Enrique Penalosa, a darling of the world media. And Chicago has Richard Daley, the scion of a political machine who has made sustainability and green architecture programs the centerpiece of an aggressive, inventive push to make his city a world player.

When Villaraigosa took office in July 2005, he looked for all the world like the newest member of the Dynamic Mayors Club: a young, ambitious Latino leader for a young, ambitious Latino city. He appeared poised to build on the advantages L.A. has always had--a global brand name, an idyllic climate, a diverse economy with a workforce to match.

Promising to assume a higher profile than the managerial caretaker mayors who preceded him, Villaraigosa pledged to take bold steps to keep Los Angeles competitive with its global peers, including putting a comprehensive transit system in place. The mayor and his appointees also promised to make the city more walkable and its streetscape more humanely designed, changing a planning process that has always favored cars over pedestrians and traffic flow over the creation of successful urban spaces.

Nearly three years into his tenure, though, the mayor’s grandest plans have barely inched forward. Instead, he has fallen into the politically expedient trap of pushing for wider freeways and streamlined traffic on the city’s major boulevards.

Other bold-sounding efforts, such as his plan to plant a million trees, have been as much salesmanship as substance. (The Times’ David Zahniser has reported that there’s reason to believe that many of the trees the city has given away as seedlings and claims to have planted never made it into L.A. soil.) Among planners and architects, a sharp sense of disappointment in the Villaraigosa administration has become both widespread and impossible to ignore. The skidding economy and the city’s budget shortfall have made the outlook only gloomier.

To be fair, part of the problem is systemic: The L.A. mayor’s office is relatively weak by national standards, and it looks downright anemic by global ones. It must be frustrating for the mayor to watch as Livingstone piles up new administrative powers, or as civic leaders in China and the Persian Gulf approve hugely ambitious projects practically by snapping their fingers.

Even on a rhetorical level, though, Villaraigosa has squandered valuable political capital. When he returned, wide-eyed, in 2006 from a two-week tour of Asian cities and wondered why L.A. couldn’t have a skyline like Shanghai’s--instead of pining for, say, a public transit system like Hong Kong’s--his star was already dimming. And after he suffered his Monica Lewinsky moment, admitting to an extramarital affair with a TV reporter, he did what many politicians do when hit by scandal: He retreated into a shell, concentrating on career survival. It’s pretty tough to carry out damage control and boldly remake a city for the 21st century at the same time.

So what are the three most pressing issues Villaraigosa should look to solve during the balance of his administration? That’s easy: Transit, transit and transit. It’s hard to imagine a Los Angeles 50 years from now attracting new brain power or the foreign investment that might pay for bold new architecture without a successful effort to free Angelenos from gridlock and give them other ways to navigate the city.

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Christopher Hawthorne is the architecture critic of The Times. Contact him at christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com.