Eldred Street, Highland Park; From California by Choice
Los Angeles is an unconventional city. If Europe produced cities as hulking modernist authoritarian monuments, America remained enamored with the simple detached pitched-roof house. LA’s ingenuity was to build a city of them. A city of houses embodies the American values of freedom and supposed self-sufficiency, of course. But more basically, it indicates the lack of a centralized planned city. Each place’s unity of buildings, public space, landscape and vegetation, rather than distinctive elements, define Los Angeles.
It's harmonized. Very few impressive buildings or dense centers dominate the city’s totality – maybe the Hollywood sign, or downtown. Otherwise, you’ll find mostly single-family housing, scattered apartments, and modest businesses districts from the Pacific to San Bernadino. Architectural styles are generally understated. Ranch houses roll up and over the ridgelines, holding close to the foliage, mimicking – even accentuating – the organic order. The public realm flourishes not in parks and plazas, but spills through cafes and taco trucks, onto sidewalks and parking lots covered with encampments and open-air markets. The sky reaches wide; all else clusters underneath, nothing clearly predominant, mixed and tight-fit together.
Los Angeles’ contradictions continue. Having few dense employment or population centers, it manages to be the densest metropolitan area in the US.[1] It works: you’re never close to all interesting destinations, but always to some. The city’s really a collection of neighborhoods. Typical enough, but here, each is equally vivacious and diverse. You can live, and work, and revel in any neighborhood. There are no business districts that close at 5:00pm, no suburbs deserted all day. The traffic is so universally bad exactly because almost any place has destinations worth visiting. The almost-homogenous mix of business boulevards, suburbs, shopping centers, and parks are busy day and night in a festival of movement. The ‘suburbs’ of LA are lively enough to make many American downtowns envious.
Then, there’s the geography. The abundant and bright vegetation give the city a collective distinct style of a garden city. No towers in a park; but suburbs nestled in canyons, palms lining the boulevards, and reservoirs alongside the aqueduct’s long tendrils pouring in from the Sierra. Beyond, the wilderness mountains rise, a desertic green belt so barren (and protected) that an hour from downtown you can stand alone on the desert plain. Nature’s geography is branded on its street grid and its infamous extensive freeways that link the neighborhoods. Hour-long drives are considered normal. The freeways blanket the city, compressing distance, providing access, and encouraging movement.
Not only is everything easily accessible, but the homogenized diffusion of locations means an Angeleno will might visit any. The constant stream of visitors unifies the neighborhoods’ style. Lives are lived facing the boulevards, making fortunes in street stands, smoking in public parks, wading into the Pacific, greeting neighbors and commuters alike, head always up. Everywhere you’ll find smoothies, environmentalism, misattributed spiritual quotes, dudes, and residents travelling all over the city. And this has a significant effect. What else could explain the civic culture of philosophical, personal, and practical openness that practically defines the West Coaster? New York’s sidewalks are empty in comparison: suits and jeans rushing back and forth, eyes on the destination. Los Angeles always encourages a pause – to draw the visitor in with the city’s universal casual, comfortable affect.
But LA’s harmonization can’t be mistaken for standardization. If it’s formulaically suburban, then it’s formulaic only as far as necessary to allow access. Each neighborhood is immediately recognizable by its particularities. A ridgetop reservoir in Highland Park. Encampments in Little Bangladesh. Neighborhoods that have stuck together forever and neighborhoods gentrifying or disintegrating. It’s undeniably messy: segregation, crime, and complex social relations remain. But the city’s genius is to weave each individual strand into its cultural web, as it does with landscape, buildings, and spaces. Ethnic and religious communities retain traditions, while all are influenced by the potent, diverse city spirit. It sorts conflicts that demand solutions from those which add to the color of life.
The city’s great weakness is that access requires a car. Transit is ineffective and indirect. Walking is a recreational, rather than useful, activity. Ironically, the city’s homogenous distribution of land uses might make the localized ‘fifteen-minute city’ possible, if those fifteen minutes are traveled by car. LA’s freedom is unnecessary universal access. Would promoting more localization irrevocably change the city’s economy, its people, its culture of openness? Would the West Coaster’s practical optimism be dimmed, their conceptual range shrunk, if they didn’t cross half of California and encounter half its cultures and inhabitants every day?
I suspect the harmonization of localized diversity and universal access is indeed essential to Los Angeles’ genius. Its continued evolution should not hinder its open and nomadic spirit, and every effort should be made to maintain what is a really unconventional city.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb12-50.html
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