there are some arguments to be made; for example Martha Crawford’s The Ecology of Fantasy and certainly Mike Davis’ The Ecology of Fear argue for very different notions of networking and different orders of urban paranoias as drivers for the ongoing formation of Los Angeles. But to the degree that any of those are true you can still assess (or access?) the four ecologies or start adding onto them, Banham’s model has proven through history as a durable one that you really still can work from those four to develop a way of reading this city or a lot of, I think almost any, post war American city in a more fruitful way than you can with earlier working models. CC: If Banham was dropped into L.A. now, what would he perceive as radically different? His all ecstasy and liberation driving on the freeway has becomes almost a standard, a kind of modern revolution, the next stage: L.A. is the city of the future. On the other hand the city is radically different: it has become super dense and so there is an open question: has L.A. reached the extents of what it is, or what it has been, and necessarely, because of space has disappeared, there has to be a next layering and therefore a next direction, a next strategy of development … JD: The atrophy of our freeway infrastructure would break Banham’s heart at some levels. But your question touches a very interesting bifurcation in the way people come to love Reyner Banham. Architects tends to like Banham because Banham likes the speed: we like the fact that he might be in his car moving through the city and trying to matching how to come to terms with cities and buildings in a totally different way; for theorists and historians the majority of Banham’s worth is tied up in the legacy of pop and the celebration of the ephemeral of contemporary life and a kind of disposable culture – that is what makes Banham a controversial figure in terms of his green politics. I think Banham, in today’s L.A., would find things to love in any case even if the traffic was worse. But in terms of design, in terms of how you decide to move from his work, that bifurcation and the question of whether Banham is centrally preoccupied with how advanced consumer culture can play out – including the creation of better and faster and smoother automobile rides – or whether he is fundamentally about the traversing of cities, a more situationists’ reading of Banham that has more to do with how movement and urbanism are interrelated, is an important question. Personally I come down more comfortably on the latter but there is a lot to be said for the former. For a lot of his celebration for the transit infrastructure, I think at this point Banham would be more excited by the way some Asian cities move enormous numbers of people around than the way we decided to live with Autopia as he described the basic framework of our freeway system. CC: The beauty of L.A. has been the creation of a true city where personal mobility is taken to the extreme: that is one of the conditions of L.A. that makes it what it is. Now we have a huge amount of resources trying to create the so called mass transit. If the subway system, if the light rail system do succeed here, what would they do to L.A.? Would L.A. be more conventional like every other cities? The Berlage Institute Research Report No. 33 2009/2010
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