Los Angeles Beyond Desire Cities and Energy is an ongoing project at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, course in architecture that is investigating how necessary changes in energy consumption and production influence and inform our cities and our ways of life. We believe that studying the differing physical and cultural conditions of varying economies and the characteristics that make each urban environment unique can lead us to new insights and solutions relevant to the ongoing discourse concerning sustainable urban futures.
choose not to use public space and consequently don’t see the need for it. The right to public space becomes ultimately a matter of social justice.
The architect Rem Koolhaas’s seminal work from 2000, Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, emphasizes the fact that consumption and public space have become two intertwined entities that we can no longer separate from one another. Nor can we experience the one without feeling a longing for the other. The American urban environment is consequently a result of a public space completely dependent on entertainment, in which we get out of our car only if we are provided with a climatized, orchestrated, delimited, secure, child-friendly, beguiling, styled, total shopping experience. It is Walt Disney, »America’s most important urban planner« who is perhaps ultimately responsible for setting the agenda for how Americans understand their urban environment and public space.
However, if you move around the cityscape, and in particular, if you try to experience the city through the eyes of its inhabitants, you discover a culture in which alternative spaces seem to propagate and flourish. These are spaces that work on a different set of rules than those we are familiar with. Here, we find a series of solutions that are particular and unique for the city that has generated them. Following another rhythm and interjected, they have been created by forces other than consumption. Perhaps this is because the desire to consume has already been fulfilled in every conceivable way, leaving behind those remaining needs, explicit and crystalline, searching for their built answers. Or perhaps it is because distances are vast, traffic is time-consuming and comprehensive planning has taken a backseat to private development, that individuals and grass-roots initiatives are forced to find their own answers. The city doesn’t seem to provide them. Because after all, its not Disney Land and Universal Studios City Walk that have been the model for, or replaced the need for public space in L.A. It is instead in the semi-private or semi-public sphere that these new answers can be found. It’s as if the conventional concept of public space is almost too fragile to survive exposure to the city’s powerful flow of energy these alternatives must be carefully nurtured in protected zones, at a comfortable distance from the city, but close to the individual and the community. In everything from Rudolph Schindler’s reformulation of the private home into a public meeting place – a tradition that the artist Fritz Haeg continues in his dome-home in Glassell Park – to the architect Michael Maltzan’s semi-public courtyard spaces for children at Inner-City Arts and for homeless at Rainbow Housing in Skidrow, we find the need for contact and interaction of individuals and groups manifested in physical form.
That is our understanding of urban American, one defined by the images we have seen, but is it really correct? Los Angeles, the home of Disney, is in desperate need of public space. This need becomes all the more urgent as overcrowding increases and immigrants continue to pack themselves into the existing urban fabric in the city’s central areas. The bus system, which can be considered the most quintessential of public places to be found in Los Angeles, gives a clear picture of who inhabits this space – those that can’t afford the alternative. People with the economic means
It has been said that the Beach and the Mountains are the only truly public spaces in in Los Angeles. If we read these as clues to what needs are present, then both of these grand social arenas made possible by the very landscapes which define the city itself are evidence of spaces based on something else. Perhaps they are not completely devoid of consumption, but at the least it is subordinate to another sublime experience. When the Olmstead brothers proposed their Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region in 1930, their ambition was twofold – to weave together these
Today we discuss carbon neutrality as a goal for urban development, but we seldom talk about an agenda for the consumption upon which our cities are dependent. How can a city be considered to be carbon neutral when the daily consumption of its inhabitants is made possible by worldwide subsistence on oil and coal production? Does it follow that a carbon neutral city would have to be a post-material one, and in that case, what would that look like? Isn’t it paramount that urban planners seriously consider the content of the city? What can and should the city consist of if we are to succeed in reducing the ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
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two grand landscapes with a network of green spaces, as well as respond to the city’s need for mobility, recreation and play. Here we can identify another possible nucleus to an idea of postmaterial public space. Play, something taken to its logical extreme in the Hollywood industry, was also at the core of the Situationists’ concept for society expressed in The Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord’s psycho-geographic map, The Naked City from 1957, proposes the idea of the city as a fragmentary and episodic landscape in which people are propelled by their own passions, dreams and desires. The city is defined as experiences without need for coherence or continuity. The Spectacular City, our strategy for a postmaterial Los Angeles, is composed of events and pieces of the city fabric that exist parallel to and independent of one another – all offering a nonmaterial form of spectacularity. The plethora of lifestyles and grassroots movements that are the cultural norm here and essential to an understanding of Los Angeles’s uniqueness creates a credible breading ground for this to occur. Could it take place in that most commercial of American urban inventions, the Strip, thereby transforming it into a space for post-material consumption? Can we create a new space – one sublime in scale and spectacular in content – a Fifth Ecology springing forth from the L.A. River that once united those familiar landscapes – the mountains and the beach? Los Angeles has always been a place where new ideas are generated, take root, grow and flourish, later to be commoditized and finally exported to the rest of the world. These new kinds of spaces, springing forth from the fertile ground of dynamic cultural diversity and extreme lifestyle patterns, are Los Angeles’ unique potential. L.A. is a city of destinations, rather than continuity, and public space exists as finite points in both space and time. Can we transplant this experience of noncommercial space in a hyper-public, super-scale or of a semi-public individual scale, to other places and other contexts? Looking beyond the present motopia that we recognize as L.A., we find an individualistic and landscape-scaled concept of public space. Perhaps here lies the key to a post-material urban alternative. Henrietta Palmer, professor in Architecture Michael Dudley, teacher in Architecture
THE FIFTH ECOLOGY. Beyond Desire: Los Angeles