Several events over the past month caught my attention and reminded me of how both the current economic and environmental crises have exposed the global sense of hubris that is currently playing out in several local projects of varying scales in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. In a recent set of fall lectures entitled “Architecture After Nature“, which were hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, architect John May illustrated that we as human beings are adept at creating control systems whose design intent is to territorialize nature and eliminate it’s incompatibilities with our built environment. May goes on to say that these control systems have become so complex that they present themselves as “environmental cure-alls”, which promote solving a vast array of conflicts that frequently arise in the juxtapositions inherent between the man made and natural environments. However, these man-made systems do not actually solve these dysfunctional meetings between man and nature. Instead, they merely exacerbate the effects wrought on humanity when natural systems collapse or collide with man made networks. Worse yet, the control systems we have become so fond of relying upon are quickly outpacing our own evolutionary development, thus presenting the illusion that we are in control, when in fact, we are not.
I couldn’t agree more with John, and it was refreshing to hear someone not only question the current “green mania” that has gripped the architectural profession, but launch a much-needed attack on the discipline of Landscape Urbanism, which I’ve long observed to be simply a continuation of architectures complicit role in the expansion of capitalist power structures in contemporary urbanity. There have been several examples of John May’s theories in the news lately, and while Dubai’s recent financial breakdown has been more or less played out in the press, the following two stories are fresh examples of systems infatuation inherent in contemporary urbanism.
A view of the Sierras and the dry Owens Lake, November, 2009.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest public utility in the United State, is promoting a vast solar array in the Owens Valley dry lakebed. Since the completion of the L.A. Aqueduct in 1913, as well as the later additions that followed later in the 20th Century, the Owens Lake has been almost bone dry, save for periodic irrigation to keep highly toxic dust storms from developing. This court-mandated environmental solution has done little for the local ecology and the region has followed a pattern of slow decline as its water resources were diverted one-by-one to the larger municipalities to the south. According to the recent Los Angeles Times article on the array, the DWP, which has been struggling to convert a percentage of its power output into “green energy”, is now proposing the 660 acre solar array on the dry lake bed arguing that it will not only provide Angelenos with the eco-friendly power their consciences desire, but will theoretically also keep the dust down on the dry Owens Lake bed.
Because of its relationship to the California State Lands commission, the DWP is proposing that it be exempt from the environmental review process. If the project is successful at skirting both the State environmental review and dodging the inevitable onslaught of localized NIMBYism that is sure to follow, then the size of the solar array will be increased to an even larger portion of the lake. Environmentalists argue, with a fair degree of certainty, that the structure will displace the migratory bird population that has come to rely on the ankle-deep flooding of the lake. This proposal is indicative of John May’s argument in that by creating one system to deal with L.A.’s water deficiency, another, more complex problem is created, which now will be mitigated with yet another technological control system that is intended to solve yet another series of problems which extend beyond the territory of the original control system itself. This will no doubt, create more problems, and more solutions to those problems, which ultimately will fail, and will lead to more problems to be solved. As ecologies are wrecked and whole habitats undergo environmental collapse, the expansion of the control system will endure, and as John May notes in his lectures might eventually become the only spatial terrain we have left to inhabit.
Evening traffic on the 101 Freeway, as viewed from the new Gold Line Eastside light rail overpass exiting Union Station.
“In fact, the progress we’ve already made on a subway and light-rail network — full of delays and misjudgments as it has been — is remaking the physical and psychological terrain of Los Angeles in some profound ways. As more neighborhoods and landmarks are brought into transit’s orbit, their relationship to the rest of the city and region shifts, giving us a powerful means of seeing the built environment with fresh eyes.” –Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times.
On the transportation front, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority has unveiled its newest light rail line, which will take passengers from Pasadena, through Union Station, Little Tokyo, and on into unincorporated East Los Angeles. The Gold Line Eastside extension was originally intended as a subway, but after disastrous cost overruns during the early phases of construction, L.A. voters scuttled funding in the 1990’s for any new subway construction, killing the project for almost 20 years. The MTA began looking at other options, which included light rail and a rapid bus system, called Metro-rapid. The new part of the Gold Line (an earlier section of the line goes through Pasadena to Sierra Madre) is intended to serve East Los Angeles, which reportedly has the largest number of transit dependent residents in the Los Angeles metro area. Despite its high immigrant working class population, this seems dubious given the low ridership projections from the MTA for the line. Being that it is the victim of NIMBYism and political sabotage, the MTA has been relegated to playing a virtual “shell-game” with its emergent rail network, since its projects generally take a minimum of 10 years to plan and implement. The time required to plan and build these lines is quickly outpaced by demographic shifts within the city, meaning that many of the constituencies that were meant to be served by the system are long gone by the time it arrives. Further adding to the Gold Line’s logistical handicap is the fact in runs through Union Station and not Metro Center, which is the main link to the rest of L.A.’s light rail and subway system. This logistical gaff has made it virtually impossible to efficiently get to the other trains on the line, and requires a transfer on the Red Line subway to the center of Downtown. One can assume that a commuter headed to the western or southern sections of the city and initiating their commute from East Los Angeles will probably have to transfer in Little Tokyo to a bus in order to avoid the inevitable delays associated with multiple transfers.
However, one can’t dispute the future urban implications that the Gold Line and other light rail projects will have on Los Angeles, though my speculative projections differ from those of City Hall and Metro’s board. Due to relentless waves of NIMBY opposition in more affluent parts of the city, L.A.’s rail network has developed primarily through poorer sections of Los Angeles. What has resulted are a series of localized rail lines, which due to their limited range from existing working class job centers, make them inconvenient to most of L.A.’s transit-dependent population. In addition, the slow operating speeds of most of these trains make taking one’s car a much faster option within the area serviced by the light rail. While MTA planners suggest that light rail will ease congestion, one is doubtful that these transit projects will be able to undo fifty years of poor urban planning and L.A.’s glut of freeways, which despite continual widening, fail to reduce L.A.’s soul-crushing traffic patterns.
In his seminal book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham demonstrates that the beauty of Post-War Los Angeles from an urban point of view was that the cities Post-War development patterns had given birth to a whole new kind of urban organism. Banham’s book stands today, more as an academic reading, than as a guide to the city, since the urban fabric of Los Angeles has mutated drastically since Banham’s observations- both geographically and socially. However, if one was to use Banham as a muse, then L.A.’s rail mania and the new urban fabric it produces could easily stand in as a fifth ecology. Whereas Banham delineated the city into geographies, whose articulations were most apparent in the architecture, infrastructure, and pop-cultural stereotypes that he observed on his driving tour described in the book, this new archetypal occurrence is neither geography nor pop-cultural detritus. Without much analysis one can see that they present the message to developers and the politicians who support them that certain territories and locales once considered economically worthless by both the private and public sectors are now viable receptors for capital. As these rail corridors and the existing social nodes that they connect flourish from infusions of development capital (post-recession of course), L.A.’s traffic congestion will not decrease, but rather another layer of congestive urbanism and physical complexity will be overlaid upon the existing city. While planners, politicians, and the press promote these rail lines as projects that bring Angelenos closer together, evidence from the existing lines shows that L.A.’s rail system will have little impact on the crushing traffic and pollution that has made the city infamous in both cinema and the press.
However, while the arrival of rail and it’s connectivity to other select parts of the city is a welcome ecologically and economically friendly alternative to the automobile, a much more sinister reality awaits the neighborhoods that will be linked together with the emerging light-rail network. As these new corridors of development are enhanced by the addition of light-rail, and property values rise, the original inhabitants of the now connected neighborhoods will become victims of gentrification. These unfortunate economic casualties, marginalized by California’s lack of educational investment and job creation since the 1970’s, may be pushed into areas even more isolated from the rest of the city than their prior environs, thus exacerbating a social problem that will only get worse as the current economic instability hastens the export of L.A.’s remaining working-class manufacturing jobs to Asia and replaces them with service work. Thus the city will not become more socially connected as Hawthorne suggests, but will instead continue to fracture and mutate into increasingly singular environments that are without any kind of deep social or economic linkage to one another, much less the city as a whole. These locales will develop not in the traditional sense outlined by Banham, but instead will generate new territories who’s desirability hinges on its connectivity via rail and freeway rather than the traditional ecologies of terrain and ocean. It is this connective tissue that will certainly be the most interesting as it certainly will create a new kind of Angeleno- one who does not know a world beyond the train or bus, and certainly one who does not need or want what the rest of the city beyond this new network has to offer. These grey and white collar members of L.A.’s culture industry (the only major non-service industry really left besides the City’s logistics and shipping sectors) will use the train because it offers them the moral satisfaction of environmental consciousness, not because they depend on it to make a living. Unlike their working class counterparts, who rely on mass transit to live out their daily lives, and truly need an expedient and ubiquitous option, many members of the culture industry work from home or on flexible schedules that allow them to commute at their leisure. Thus for this privileged minority mass transit will become a lifestyle choice akin to buying a rare Trappist ale or outfitting one’s home with designer furniture. Where artists and the converted lofts turned into galleries and foodie troughs once came to signal a neighborhood’s arrival as a hip destination, light rail too will eventually define the lives of L.A.’s creative class and the neighborhoods they occupy. The losers in the scenario are the working poor of the city, who priced out of every locale within the inner city will be eventually forced into exile on the fringes of the well-connected metropolitan center, where public transit options are either too expensive or too costly for a working class family to afford.
The cautionary tale here is that no amount of planning and infrastructure can save the contemporary city from continued social and developmental instability. Adding more rapid transit on the limited scale that L.A. is proposing will not solve its freeway congestion, or legacy of exurban hubris, just as covering up the city’s past environmental transgressions in the Owens Valley with solar technology will not repair the ecology of that area. These strategies are merely infrastructural band-aids attempting to heal a larger problem that stems from decades of poor urban planning, socio-economic inequity, NIMBYism, and environmental abuse. These problems will not be resolved through planning, politics, or infrastructural salves, but as John May outlined in his talks this fall, change will be experienced through potentially catastrophic systemic failures that will force us as a society to reconcile our relationships with the natural and built realms, simultaneously embracing forms of adaptation we have not even begun to consider.
