I come to bury California’s parking lots, not to praise them.

The evil that abundant parking spaces do lives long after the ground is paved over.

So say the honorable officials and wise engineers of California. They tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit infrastructure like bus or bike lanes. In L.A. County alone, parking covers 200 square miles. Most parking spaces are empty most of the time—people don’t park at home when they are at work, or park at work when they are at home.

Abundant and cheap parking encourages people to drive when they might walk or bike, which would improve their health. More driving means more accidents, and more injuries and death for car passengers and pedestrians. All that driving also creates pollution and greenhouse gases.

So, I understand why our cities are ganging up and sticking their knives into the Caesar of municipal parking requirements, the minimum number of spaces that must accompany new development. These requirements encourage sprawl, since parking requires more money and land, and property is cheaper and more plentiful far from our city centers. These rules also effectively block the construction of smaller, denser, more affordable housing, and the repurposing of old buildings for new purposes.

A number of cities are assassinating these requirements to make it easier to build new housing, without the extra costs and land necessary for parking. This year, Berkeley, following the example of a 2018 San Francisco ordinance, eliminated off-street parking requirements for new developments. Sacramento abolished its parking minimums as part of a broader zoning reform. San Diego and Oakland have eliminated parking requirements near transit, and San Jose may follow suit.

Now, higher levels of government are trying to finish off the parking lot. A bill from Assemblymember Laura Friedman of Glendale would eliminate parking requirements statewide for new buildings within half a mile of a transit corridor or major stop. President Biden’s infrastructure package includes provisions that would make it easier to eliminate parking requirements nationwide, in service of making construction more affordable.

I know such anti-parking policies are well-intentioned and honorable. And yet, I stare into the bleak future of the California parking lot, and my heart feels a strange sadness.

So, I speak now not to disprove what our honorable policymakers and editorial writers say, but here I am to speak what I have seen and known. Parking lots have been, for all their faults, good and true friends to me and our communities too.

Public lots often provide revenues to cash-starved cities. And local parking requirements also provide communities precious leverage with developers. Cities often offer exemptions from parking requirements in return for the developers providing more affordable units, or community benefits like parks, bus shuttles, or libraries to accompany their projects. Anti-eviction activists have used parking requirements to fight new developments that might displace existing residents.

But our state’s leaders say parking is a plague upon our communities. And they are wise and honorable people.

But have not parking lots provided great utility, even life-saving service, during the COVID-19 plague? Think how many more people might have died if our state didn’t have so many large parking lots—from Petco Park-adjacent lots in San Diego, to the Disneyland Resort parking garage in Anaheim, to the Cal Expo and State Fair lots in Sacramento—that could be turned into mass testing sites. Many of these same lots became centers for mass vaccination that finally allowed the state to control the coronavirus. No wonder Gov. Gavin Newsom gave his state-of-the-state speech at Dodger Stadium, surrounded by its ocean of heroic parking lots.

But the powers-that-be say parking lots prioritize cars over humans.

Sure, I did see hospitals use their lots to set up tents and house patients during COVID-19 surges. Communities turned parking lots into tent cities to shelter the homeless safely, and temporarily, with the virus spreading.

But those who would eliminate parking are right honorable public servants. Abundant parking, they remind us, robs our children of better futures. And they speak true.

Yet, with the state closing its schools and failing to provide reliable broadband, parking lots were all many young Californians had left.

Across the state, I encountered students without reliable Internet at home camped out in the parking lots of closed libraries and coffee shops so they could connect to the Wi-Fi they needed to continue their lessons. School districts routinely distributed laptops and books, and collected homework, in drive-through lines in their parking lots. And might our parking lots have saved in-person education itself, had they been allowed to become outdoor classrooms for our children?

Parking lots are bad for business, those honorable parking killers say. But weren’t parking lots also a godsend for business during the pandemic? Cities were aggressive in using their parking lots to allow restaurants and retailers to remain open and serve customers safely outside. Large parking lots became storage facilities for dormant rental cars, and for shipping containers that overflowed from ports whose workers couldn’t keep up with incoming traffic.

When our greatest gathering points closed, did not parking lots step in to provide solace and communal experience? In my hometown of Pasadena and so many other places, large parking lots became drive-in movie theaters. Churches, unable to safely use their sanctuaries, held services in parking lots; I took some comfort from a “drive-in Mass” I attended at the parking lot of Santa Rosa Catholic Church in Cambria.

You could even say parking lots saved democratic politics, as election rallies and events moved to drive-in. Might our fair state still be slurred daily by President Trump, without the dedicated service of so many parking lots to Joe Biden’s campaign?

I know that, after the traumas and loss of the last year, I am weak-minded and prone to cling to the familiar. I know that our honorable policymakers are right, and that we should rejoice, not cry, at the demise of the California parking lot. But my eyes, clouded by tears, see the progressive movement to reduce parking as both comedy and tragedy, of the kind Shakespeare might have written.

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Infrastructure is a double-edged sword. For every case in which it is desperately needed, there is another case in which it enables the rapid proliferation of urban expansion and its domino effect of deleterious land use practices.

One project in Ecuador, with which I’ve been involved over the past decade, allowed me to consider how to stem the detrimental effects of sprawl by decommissioning existing infrastructure rather than investing in more of it. Another, in Haiti, led to a rethinking of how public services might be delivered in a measured, more tactical manner that encourages consolidated, not expansive, growth. One might call it min-frastructure.

Such thinking reflects a historic shift in how infrastructure connects to urbanization. Just a century ago, long before the advent of so-called “smart cities,” infrastructure went hand in hand with urbanization. As cities grew, the infrastructure servicing them grew at the same pace.

In recent decades however, the desire for more planned and efficient development (from flows of water to waste and power systems) has meant that infrastructure often comes first, in order to create the market for urbanization. In this way, it increases the value of land to make development possible—thereby becoming a tool of real estate speculation. The unintended consequences of this infrastructure-first approach can be huge. After infrastructure and a first generation, planned development are put in place, an “echo” effect of uncontrolled growth often follows, eventually exceeding the capacity of those original services.

The infrastructure-first model has also proven increasingly difficult and risky to implement. Onerous processes of appropriations, approvals, bidding, and oversight have made the public sector incapable of delivering projects without embarrassing scheduling and cost overruns. (Think of California’s high-speed rail.) In response, government overseers have resorted to piecemeal or pay-as-you-go methods of execution—a symptom not simply of mounting government deficits, but of taxpayer distrust.

New housing development, northeastern Haiti (Inter-American Development Bank, 2015). Photo courtesy of Roger Sherman.

The effect has been to lessen the appetite for investment in public works, and to raise doubt about the efficacy of the idea of infrastructure as an extensive, world-building instrument. Rising in its place is a new model, more localized in scale and reach. Instead of the massive service network designed to irrigate expansion, this new approach is geared toward treating specific needs.

I first came across the idea of a measured, “battery-powered” infrastructure in Providencia, a new town designated for development by the Ecuadorian government in the Amazon. It’s in a spot where eco-logic dictates there shouldn’t be a town at all: along the Napo River across from Yasuni National Park, one of the most bio-diverse patches of the planet. But Providencia is being planned in association with a newly-completed port: part of a new, South American-financed river-transport axis to speed the export of resources extracted in the Amazon from Manaus, Brazil in the east (upriver and across the Andes) to the Pacific port of Manta (and then onto Asia).

The new town is located amid indigenous communities, colonist farmer cooperatives and multi-national oil drilling concessions. The region, called Yamanuka, has been steadily deforested over the last three decades, beginning with the clearing of service roads to drilling sites. Those roads in turn opened the door to the unplanned branching, or “fishboning,” of new, unpaved streets by colonists seeking to reap profits through land speculation related to the imagined success of the port. During the long and slow completion of the latter, those speculators bided their time with subsistence farming, absent access to the most basic of utilities and social infrastructure.

The plan for Providencia is designed to reverse this trend. Instead of building infrastructure first, it starts with identifying where not to build. Existing forest is declared off limits, its edge establishing a natural barrier and shape for the town. This not only protects the forest, but reverses the previous pattern of development. It also engenders desirability, creating an interest in Providencia among those who previously colonized and deforested the hinterlands. Infrastructure is deployed tactically, offering a fuller range of services within a more confined area—a “luxury” for those living in the town. Access to utilities (clean water, sewerage, electricity, gas, and wifi/cellular reception) is complemented by a social infrastructure that includes a regionally-scaled market (a larger sales platform); an eco-hotel offering higher-quality jobs, education, and recreation facilities (including daycare for the many woman-owned cooperatives that populate the area); and access to quality healthcare.

To accomplish all of this, the planning team (of which I was a part) employed a soft form of infrastructure known as Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). Normally used only in areas of high land cost and density, TDR is a land-use gambit that enables a swap of ownership and rights to property. A push to the pull of Providencia’s desirable scarcity, TDR enables owners of outlying properties (or fincas) to forfeit their claims in the forest in exchange for the right to move into Providencia and enjoy its access to superior municipal services and a growing eco-tourist market.

The fincas are then sold back to the State and returned to public control, where they are reconsolidated into larger tracts. This in turn enables the land to be collectively farmed—now according to principles of agroforestry, a form of reforestation that combines agronomy with forestry, through the mixing of differing combinations of species whose proximity to one another reflexively accelerates productivity. The consolidation of plots also enables the removal, or “deboning” of the fishbones of roads whose proliferation is associated with deforesting activities. All but the most necessary of these rights-of-way are removed; the remaining ones constitute only the necessary links in the new global transport axis through the region. It also preserves the indigenous economy’s supply chain, connecting locally-owned micro-enterprises to the market. In this way, the plan for Providencia enables the indigenous economy to ride the coattails of the global economy through its proximity to the port instead of being overrun by it; as importantly, it makes it possible for the population prosper because it preserves the forest, not at its expense.

I encountered a similar problem in the vastly different context of northeast Haiti. There, the RN6 highway extends east from Cap Haitien to the border of the Dominican Republic, connecting four villages: Limonade, Caracol, Trou du Nord, and Terrier Rouge. This rapidly urbanizing area possesses fertile soil and grazing land, unspoiled coastal beauty and marine life, a new industrial park (PIC), and a university. These assets are, however counterveiled by poor land-use practices, an absence of regulation and enforcement on informal construction; and the lack of any record of land tenure. There is minimal to no utility service (solid waste, sewer, water, gas), contributing to slow economic growth and high unemployment; a low standard of living, including a plethora of health problems; and environmental degradation, from erosion due to lack of flood control, to contamination of soils under both farmland and habitable areas.

Both large international lenders (World Bank, EU, InterAmerican Development Bank, etc.) and NGOs have invested in infrastructure in the region, but these projects are dispersed. With little to no integration or consolidation of uses, they are seldom transformative in their cumulative impact. To the contrary: The scattered nature of infrastructure investment there has exacerbated as many problems as it has solved, increasing traffic and accidents along the highway by requiring greater and longer trips for people to meet their daily needs, from commuting to taking kids to school to fetching clean water to shopping. A grander, more ambitious infrastructural plan is not the answer, because the government cannot be relied upon to execute projects of any complexity.

I was a part of a team charged with developing a prioritized strategy for infrastructural investment. We eschewed a single comprehensive plan in favor of a series of opportunistic, targeted (site-specific), catalytic interventions that could be executed in any order, as the unstable political climate permitted. Rather than being of single purpose, as past investments have been, these bundles, as we called them, are comprised of a robust combination of facilities designed to attract people simply by consolidating and reducing the number of trips required of them to accomplish their daily routines. The infrastructure bundles include differing combinations of: a transit center, market, health center, job training center, agricultural processing facility, and municipal services such as water supply and green waste station.

Since the region uniformly suffers from a lack of services, bundles were located not on the basis of need, but by proximity to existing infrastructure assets. The bundle approach is acupunctural: Each is precisely located, on ”known” unclaimed land adjacent to the RN6 highway, within reasonable walking or biking distance of existing population (residential/educational/employment) centers. Accordingly, one bundle is located adjacent to the industrial park at Caracol, the region’s largest employer; another is in Limonade, near the University, and a key transfer point between public transit to and from Cap Haitien and private transit services eastward. By consolidating development around a few select hubs of activity, the daily itinerary of area inhabitants is simplified and made more convenient, with the net effect of reducing and easing travel on existing infrastructure. True to acupuncture’s counterintuitive principle—that the point of intervention may not be coincident with the locale of its effect—one bundle, which includes a cold freight terminal, is not even located within the study area. Yet its impact is expected to significantly alleviate traffic congestion from PIC to Cap by allowing export trucks to travel at night, when the RN6 is empty.

As the United States debates the nature of badly-needed infrastructural investment, my experiences working in Ecuador and Haiti have led me to ask whether less might sometimes be more. For instance, might it be more efficient to have targeted, place-based infrastructure rather than large networks that connect places? Can we use infrastructure not in blind service to the manifest destiny of unmitigated urban expansion, but rather as a way of delimiting and shaping it? And is infrastructure best planned as a top-down enterprise, or might it be better to learn from these examples from the Global South and use infrastructure to solve local problems tactically?

The rise of digital communication and transitions in the technologies of mobility requires new thinking, not just new infrastructure. That new thinking might do well to place less emphasis on the insufficient supply of infrastructure, and more on how we utilize, recover or reduce the excess capacity we have now.

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In the 21st century, California, and Southern California in particular, is once again poised to be reshaped by trains and rail lines. Public investment—from the $68 billion marked to establish a bullet train from L.A. to San Francisco to the half-cent sales tax that will, among other things, expand light rail throughout L.A. County—means more trains will be pulling into more stations throughout the region in the coming decades. In the next two years, Angelenos will be able to take the train from downtown to the beach.

In advance of the Zócalo event “Are Trains the Future of L.A.?”, we asked transportation scholars, writers, and policymakers to tell us what a successful rail system would look like in Los Angeles. What kind of ridership would such a system have? And how would it affect traffic, quality of life, and commerce in Southern California?

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The concept, which focuses on making streets safe and accessible to everyone, is supposed to challenge both our auto-dominated mindset and our sprawling urban form by reimagining “streets for people.” The promised result: cities that are more walkable, cyclable, livable—and more sustainable.

It’s not just the environmentalists who are pushing the idea. Realtors proudly tout the “Walk Score” of their properties, a 0-100 numerical index based on the ease of access to local services on foot. Local businesses talk up the benefit of increased foot traffic in walkable neighborhoods where customers have no parking woes. Houston Mayor Annise Parker has argued that Complete Streets, by emphasizing accessibility, will help her city meet its diversity goals. And public health experts are in love. The New York chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians has proclaimed the health benefits of Complete Streets: “The pedestrian plazas, car-free spaces, neighborhood bike networks and world-class bicycle lanes [of New York City] are vital to the public health of our city. These changes help pave the way for a city that breathes cleaner air and is in better physical condition.”

But there are real questions about whether, in embracing Complete Streets, cities are examining all of their policies, and being inclusive enough. People already using the streets are sometimes excluded.

Take L.A. and its diverse collection of street food vendors you can find selling the tastes of distant homelands along the sides of streets, or bags of oranges and ready-to-drink coconuts from street medians. Though prevalent, sidewalk vending is illegal in Los Angeles—and yet the city is about to enact Complete Streets policies. How can the city not see the vendors as part of a vibrant, multicultural street ecology, whose absence would render the street incomplete?

In Denver, lowrider cruisers were once part of the cultural landscape on the Northside, but have been delegitimized by the city through anti-cruising municipal codes and urban design. You can see the impact in Sloan’s Lake Park, on Denver’s northwest side, where urban designers transformed the internal south loop of the road system by incorporating it into a lake-encircling walking path. In effect, they promoted walking, jogging, and cycling—normalized in mainstream middle-class cultural and spatial practice—while frustrating fans of lowrider cruising.

In New Orleans, urban planners state that Claiborne Avenue, especially the sections in the Treme and the 7th Ward, will become the “most complete street in the world,” a “corridor of culture.” But they’ve ignored the vivid street culture already practiced there—and the strong feelings among some African-American residents—about displacement and gentrification. “Completeness” in the redevelopment of New Orleans’ black core is not all that complete; the city is being reimagined and remade for a specific group of citizens while it is being dismantled for others.

Streets should not be thought of as merely physical spaces, amenable to neat and cookie cutter redesigns around walkability or cyclability for the middle classes. Streets are so much more than that—they are symbolic, social, and multicultural spaces with many possible functions. When the narratives of those already using the streets, particularly those in diverse communities, are missing from the discourse and practice of Complete Streets, the result is actually incomplete streets.

The ways in which Complete Streets narratives, policies, and plans are currently envisioned by the middle and creative classes, and implemented by urban designers, is incomplete. The current approach is systematically reproducing many of the urban spatial and social inequalities that have characterized our cities for the last century or more. Cities need planning and design processes that include those whose perspectives haven’t been included in the past—and that approach streets as dynamic, fluid, and social places reflective of local cultures and communities.

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All that sounds great for the occasional shoppers and diners who visit downtown and for its growing young, urban professional population. But what about the rest of L.A.? In advance of the Zócalo/UCLA event “Will Downtown L.A. Rival the Westside?”, we asked people who study, work, and live downtown the following question: How will downtown L.A.’s emergence change life in Southern California?

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The post Architect Qingyun Ma appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Do Architects Really Shape Cities?

Great buildings can define a cityscape, but how much do the grand plans of architects influence daily life?  During a panel moderated by San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King, no one could agree on an answer. But everyone acknowledged that one of the big challenges facing architects and planners today is keeping up with the pace of a rapidly changing world.

One of the great challenges of architects in Los Angeles is that no one with any political power cares about architecture, said architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis. Culturally, the role of the architect in L.A. is to make pretty objects that people talk about; the architecture, he said, can only reflect the nature of the city’s values. This makes it difficult for Southern California architects to be catalysts for cultural change.

Architect Válery Augustin of Dn/A disagreed. “I think architecture matters,” he said. “But I think it matters in ways we as architects haven’t been able to fully tap into.” It’s not about the built form or a budget but about how a great space makes people feel—how we experience it every day. Good architecture, he said, provokes questions and makes people think differently about their cities.

Project for Public Spaces founder and president Fred Kent said he doesn’t think architecture “is anywhere near as important as it should be,” but architects themselves need to focus more on the people in their buildings and how they’re using them. The field has become so rarefied and isolated—in its own tiny world—that it can be difficult for laypeople to understand it.  He added that buildings need to be able to change over time, and that the future of architecture—and public spaces—is flexibility.

So what, asked King, can architects do in Los Angeles to change the city?

Augustin said that architects in L.A. need to figure out “how to work in these small in-between areas, the middle ground”; we like to talk about big projects like Disney Hall, but incremental changes can likewise have far-reaching implications.

“I think the architecture of the future,” said Kent, “is about small-scale things,” like the base of a building bringing the street around it to life.

“Your discussion is incrementalism,” responded Mayne, “which is laissez-faire.” Mayne thinks that the way cities are growing—and how large they are growing—is going to make for a more radical shift in what comes next for architecture and design.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience query about beautifying digital billboards turned into a discussion about what makes for a beautiful streetscape.

“We live in this radical, heterogeneous place,” said Mayne. He drives down the incredibly ugly Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica to get to work—but he finds Lincoln preferable to the sleep-inducing landscaped roads of Orange County that hide cars and buildings. “I really miss all that junky crap,” he said.

Another audience member wanted to put in a word for iconic buildings like the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, which has elevated the city.  Kent responded by asking her how many people sit out in front of the Disney Hall and use it as a public space.

Mayne said that Disney Hall and similarly ambitious buildings can be enjoyed simply as images that represent the city, whether or not they’re used as public spaces— especially in Los Angeles, which you see from your car.

Kent countered by polling the audience informally to find out if they were content to see the city by car, to which the answer was no—proof enough for him that while iconic architecture is good, people using it is much better: “If you created some life at the base of the Gehry building, it might be worth it.”

King jumped in to note that, while walking around Disney Hall yesterday, he saw plenty of signs of life—people on the steps were being photographed, and the shops were full. “There were people there,” he said, and “I didn’t get robbed.”

How Do People Reinvent Spaces? 

L.A.’s buildings and streetscapes aren’t the products of architects—but rather of residents, weather, immigration, social change, and history, argued members of the afternoon’s second panel.

To demonstrate how change works in L.A., photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara showed his photographs of different buildings around the city that had changed over time. Between 1992 and 2012, the structure at 7316 South Broadway in South Los Angeles changed from a plain-white Baptist church with three crosses projected into the air to a flat-roofed building (the crosses were lost to high winds) that included both a Pentecostal church and a store offering Christian books and herbal remedies. Vergara also showed a meat market on South Vermont Avenue and 42nd Street, where a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. was transformed into a Barack Obama mural.

Such change, agreed the panelists, is emblematic of Los Angeles—and how architectural change really happens.

“This reclaiming of the built environment is the stuff of history,” said California Historical Society executive director Anthea Hartig. “The history has changed over time. The evolution is this incredible set of narratives that are layered.”

UC Riverside cultural historian Catherine Gudis referred to the changes documented by Vergara’s photographs as the “storyscape” of L.A. She said that such change needs to be preserved to show the full story of the city’s built environment: “Buildings are containers for memory.”

The discussion’s moderator, Getty Museum educational specialist Peter Tokofsky, asked Gudis what, given all this change, she would put on a tourism poster of L.A. She suggested attractions and places that embody the city’s change and diversity—like MacArthur Park.

Architect Peter Tolkin said that his own work was an attempt to apply today’s L.A. narratives to the built environment—while contributing to the changes the panel was discussing. As an example, he showed photos of Saladang, a Thai restaurant in Pasadena that marries Thai and Californian styles. Tolkin said that his client was an orphan in Thailand who worked her way up in restaurants before opening her own place. “She was straddling multiple worlds,” he said. “She wanted something that was not just from her place—but something connecting from where she came but also about here.”

In the question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to make predictions about where such change would occur next. Vergara suggested that L.A.’s many alleys were ripe as spaces for transformation. Hartig suggested that people’s engagement in civic life would make changes. Gudis pointed to the L.A. River—revived as a working waterway after years of being ignored—as a model.

Tolkin suggested that the preference of people to drive less, to move to transit and bicycles, could be transformative, as Angelenos focus on spaces closer to home. “One of the things that’s happening with the city is that it’s turning back inward,” he said. “People don’t want to be traveling great distances.”

Who Designs Tomorrow’s Los Angeles?

What planners of the future forget, explained visual futurist and Blade Runner designer Syd Mead during the third and final panel of the day, is that they can’t just get rid of the past. “The future starts with the now, “ said Mead. “You overlay the future onto what was already happening.”

Even then, your vision may be fanciful. Moderator Greg Goldin, curator of the A+D Museum, projected onto the screen a 1988 image by Mead: his vision of downtown Los Angeles in the year 2013. Tall, imposing towers flank the 110 Freeway, upon which maglev (magnetic levitation) cars drive.

“Actually, it’s credible,” said Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture, gazing at the image. “It’s too bad we didn’t build it.”

“Everybody loves a maglev,” said Goldin.

Cautioned Mead: “Just don’t walk in the street in wet weather.”

Ma argued that while Mead’s vision may not have come to life in Los Angeles, it bears a resemblance to what has happened in China’s major cities. Visions of the future in one place can become a reality in another place.

Urban planner James Rojas argued that one aspect of the Mead’s vision is outdated: the reliance on automobiles. “That future was based on cheap oil and no pedestrians,” said Rojas. “In L.A. today, we can’t build bikes fast enough. This future of cars is obsolete for the next generation.”

Ma said he views USC’s immediate surroundings as a laboratory for getting rid of cars, but dramatic changes in our building or living habits are unlikely to happen without something interfering with life as we currently know it. “It’s some form of catastrophe that brings the future to you,” Ma said.

Mead was skeptical of his co-panelists’ post-car visions. “A bicycle is a fantastic little machine,” Mead said, pointing out its engineering wonders. “But it’s dependent on weather, your age, your athletic ability, and the terrain.”

Rojas countered that Latino immigrants, many of them carless, have created urban communities of mom-and-pop shops on corners, within easy walking distance of residences. That, too, may be a future.

All the panelists seemed to agree that finding a system in which cars can be reduced in number but kept in service all day by different users—a fleet of autos shared by everyone, essentially Zipcar-style—would be a positive development.

As for what sort of places these bicycles, shared cars, or maglev vehicles will take us to—that’s still up for grabs.

“Developers and politics create a city,” said Mead. But Angelenos don’t show up for elections. “It’s tragic. The city will be created for them.” Mead added that “too much planning without sensitivity to who’s going to be there is a huge black mark to much of what gets called urbanization.”

Ma agreed, but argued bad planning, not the act of planning, was the problem—and that lack of planning could be even worse. Even minutely planned cities, like Brasília in Brazil, have become viable as places to live.

Rojas said engaging the public was essential. “If we don’t have input for our plans, then the plans fail,” he said.

Questions from the audience touched on the role of parks, of preservation, and of social capital. Do Angelenos even care about what their city evolves into?

Yes, said the panelists, and that’s why they want to talk about it. “I do think,” concluded Ma,” that one of the most important and lovely aspects of L.A. is that it’s not finished.”

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