A broken possibility
Los Angeles has always been a tough city for me. It is the city, more than any other, that shaped my world-curious mind.
Walking through the city (by which I mean walking through the entire glittering constellation of cities in greater Los Angeles) sharpened my urbanist intellect by highlighting all at once the profound natural beauty, vast possibility, and enormous brokenness of this place.
It is, in these three ways, a reflection of America itself: endlessly beautiful, endlessly optimistic about its prospects, endlessly disappointing in its lived realities.
The beauty of the place is undeniable. It is the place imagined in the popular culture: a sparkling sea, rolling hills, quiet canyons, colossal peaks, golden light, and vivid sunsets. The people who first came here, who we today call the Tongva or the Kizh, must have marveled in its richness and variety, as did I when my family first came twenty years ago, and does almost anyone seeing the place for the first time.
The indigenous settlements were no doubt compact and made best use of the region's natural bounty while remaining responsive to its many threats. The vast city that rose after their forced removal from this land is quite the opposite: a hardened place that has tried to wrangle nature to serve its own capitalist wants.
The possibilities of the early city must have seemed limited only by imagination. And this is the city of imagination: it is a city whose very foundations are unsound, not only in the land beneath it, always trembling and slipping, but in their connection to the reality of place. Los Angeles exists in part as a speculative venture built, like so many speculative ventures, on exploitation, overheated optimism, and overhyped promises. The famous palms trees and orange groves that are icons of the American westward fantasy aren't even native to the region; they had to be imported and planted. This dream of a city in a fragrant Mediterranean garden was a marketing confection. It was realized only through extraordinary feats of engineering that diverts unthinkable sums of water from faraway agricultural and range lands to feed the ever-consuming metropolis, planting the seeds for environmental destitution across the west and igniting a political battle that is today on the verge of a spectacular combustion.
Los Angeles is an invention, one which took the continent's gloriously sustainable ecology and ruthlessly reconfigured it for short-term profit. How incredibly and perfectly American.
The city that displaced the earth-wise Tongva sprawls for a hundred miles outward from the little pueblo where its modern era began. For one brief and golden moment in its early days its blood ran red and yellow, the colors of the trains and streetcars that connected every corner of the metropolis to its beating downtown heart. That's all been dismantled now, same story as everywhere else, the world's largest metropolitan transit system replaced by an endless, filthy, noisy, and forever sclerotic system of freeways, highways, and overbuilt urban streets. The sparkling sea is lined now by one of those highways, passing not an idyllic and quiet view at the end of the continent but rather an endless parade of garages, the charmless backsides of billionaire beachhouses. The rolling hills are covered in houses, the oldest of a celebrated architectural variety, the later of a soul-crushing tract-style dullness. The canyons are quiet no more: this region, like the country around it, is enamored of the car, which like raw sewage in a flood seeps its filth into every nook and cranny it can reach.
But the peaks still stand sentinel over it all, as they will long after we've wrecked this continent for good. On a long walks in sun-dappled oak glens and up dusty old fire roads the glorious possibility of Los Angeles exerts itself again. The best view of it has always been from above, where the sunsets remain unobscured (if a bit hazy from the city's toxic air) and from where I can discern an order to the chaos. The region's dramatic topography still determines its fate, and in my head I'm dismantling freeways, restoring the train lines, pulling back development here and there so the rivers can breathe and flood again, intensifying it in other places so communities can be more walkable and connected - and just letting Malibu burn.
And that's the possibility the city ignites: despite its colossal waste, its almost inconceivable squandering of its natural assets, I still believe in what Los Angeles could be. When I'm on a peak five thousand feet over the basin and its petty political squabbles I can still see a future in which we come to our senses, turn our backs on a wasteful and destructive past, and start rebuilding for health, community, and connection to this earth once again.
For a thousand years cities were walkable, human-scaled, and made sustainable use of the planet's resources. We can get back there again, and indeed the only way we won't destroy this planet for good is to remake our cities to be more compact, transit-oriented, and environmentally compatible. Getting there is possible, but it's going to take the political courage and shared vision to reorganize American urban life. We have the solutions, but we have to want to use them. I can see the possibility in LA, a place with a remarkable climate, with rivers that once periodically overtopped their banks to flood a fertile land, with forests that periodically burn to maintain their natural cycles, and where so plentiful and accessible that a car wasn't always necessary. LA so profoundly broken, but I can see a restored and healed future.
All of the ingredients are here. All of the possibility is here. I can't imagine a city on earth with more creative vision than this one. And yet the city is so enamored of its vision of individual freedom (a car, a freestanding house and yard, and unearned but permanently increasing property equity), that it has yet to really undertake the work of becoming the intensely beautiful and truly sustainable place that it can be. I believe that with brave and committed political leadership, a public that sees how they benefit from a more sustainable city, and a willingness to be uncomfortable today to build a better tomorrow, Los Angeles can lead the way toward a new future - not a speculative fantasy but a sustainable reality - of what American cities can be.