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Several events over the past month caught my attention and reminded me how the current economic and environmental crises have exposed the global sense of hubris that is currently playing out in several projects of varying scales.  In a recent set of fall lectures entitled "Architecture After Nature Buy prozac without prescription, ", and hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, architect John May pointed out that we as human beings are adept at creating systems whose design intent is to control nature and 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” capable of solving a vast array of problems inherent in the natural world.  However, these man-made systems do not actually solve these problems, instead they merely exacerbate the ever-widening difference between man and nature.  Worse yet, these systems are quickly outpacing our own evolutionary development, and present the illusion that we are in control, when in fact, we are not.

I couldn’t agree more with John, order prozac no prescription required, Prozac without prescription, and it was refreshing to hear someone not only debunk the current “green mania” that has gripped the architectural profession, but launch a much-needed attack on the discipline of Landscape Urbanism, find cheap prozac, Generic prozac online, which I’ve long thought to be simply a continuation of architectures complicit role in the expansion of capitalist power structures in the contemporary city.  There have been several examples of John May’s theories in the news lately, and while Dubai’s recent collapse has been more or less played out in the press, overnight prozac, Cost prozac, the following two stories are fresh examples of systems infatuation in contemporary urbanism.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, order prozac no rx, Prozac overnight, arguably one of the largest public utilities in the United States (The T.V.A. is probably the largest), prozac online cheap, Prozac side effects, is promoting a vast solar array in the Owens Valley dry lakebed.  Since the completion of the L.A. Aqueduct in 1913 and the other state and regional water projects that followed later in the 20^th Century, prozac cheap price, Order generic prozac, Owens Lake has been almost bone dry, save for periodic irrigation to keep highly toxic dust storms from developing.  According to a recent Los Angeles Times article the DWP, prozac from canada, Order no rx prozac, 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, prozac pill, Find discount prozac, 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 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 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, a newer, more complex problem is created, which now will be mitigated with another more complicated technological system that is intended to solve yet another series of problems, buy prozac without prescription.

Which will no doubt, prozac without rx, Prozac in us, create more problems, and solutions, cheap prozac no prescription, Price of prozac, and problems…

“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, prozac online review. Buy cheapest prozac on line, As more neighborhoods and landmarks are brought into transit's orbit, their relationship to the rest of the city and region shifts, order prozac online, Order cheap prozac online, giving us a powerful means of seeing the built environment with fresh eyes.” –Christopher Hawthorne, L.A, canada prozac. Tablet prozac, Times

On the transportation front, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority has unveiled its newest light rail line, prozac pills, Prozac buy drug, which will take passengers from Pasadena, through Union Station, purchase prozac no rx, Online pharmacy prozac, and on into East Los Angeles.  The Gold Line Eastside extension was originally intended as a subway, but after L.A, prozac non prescription. Generic prozac, voters scuttled funding in the 1990’s for any subway construction, the MTA began looking at other options, lowest price prozac, No prescription prozac, 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, prozac, Order prozac cheap online, which reportedly has the largest number of transit dependent residents in the Los Angeles metro area.   This seems dubious given the low ridership projections, and is another case of poor MTA planning strategy.  Further adding to the Gold Line’s logistical handicap is the fact in runs through Union Station and not Metro Center, low cost prozac, Cheap prozac tablet, which is the main link to the rest of L.A.’s light rail and subway system. Buy prozac without prescription,  However, one can’t dispute the future urban implications that the Gold Line and other light rail projects will have on Los Angeles.  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 the city, where community groups have been unable to sway politicians from pushing these types of projects through the public review process.  What has resulted are a series of localized rail lines, which due to their limited range from existing working class job centers make them inadequate 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 planning and a glut of freeways, which despite continual widening, fail to reduce L.A.’s soul-crushing traffic patterns.

In his seminal book, cheap prozac from uk, Buy prozac from india, Architecture of the Four Ecologies, Rayner Banham demonstrates that the beauty of Post-War Los Angeles from an urban point of view was that it had transpired without any real planning what-so-ever, and that this is what made L.A. so interesting.  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 trope, 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 where 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.  Instead, the rail lines being erected in the city are “urban enablers”(not catalysts as the boosters describe) in that they present a clear message to developers that certain territories and locales once considered economically worthless by both the private and public sectors are now viable receptors for capital.  As these nodes and corridors flourish financially and are infused with development capital (post-recession of course), L.A.’s 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, it is doubtful that it will have any real impact on the crushing traffic and pollution that has made the city infamous in both cinema and the press.  As these new corridors of development are enhanced, and property values rise, the original inhabitants of the now gentrifying neighborhoods will be too poor to stay in their homes and apartments.  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 disconnected from the rest of the city, exacerbating a social problem that will only get worse as the current economic instability exports skilled urban jobs to Asia and replaces them with service work.  The city will not become more connected as Hawthorne suggests in his statement quoted at the opening of this post, but will instead continue to fracture and mutate into increasingly singular environments that are without any kind of deep social or economic linkage.

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, 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 band-aids attempting to heal a larger problem that stems from decades of poor urban planning, NIMBYism, and environmental abuse.  This problem will not be resolved through planning, politics, or infrastructure, but as John May outlined in his talks this fall, 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, and simultaneously embrace forms of adaptation we have not even begun to consider.

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