Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment - Volume 3

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Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 3: Spring 2018 at the

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

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Critical Conservation

POWER & PLACE Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 3: Spring 2018 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Edited by Susan Nigra Snyder & George E. Thomas with Carrie Gammell

CONTENTS 2 INTRODUCTION

4 CONTRIBUTORS

6 A MARTIAN’S GUIDE TO LOS ANGELES Alan Hess

40 TARZAN TO THE TERMINATOR Western Water’s Story through the Lens of the Los Angeles River Rhett Larson

82 RESTORING MILL CREEK Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice & Urban Design Anne Whiston Spirn

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INTRODUCTION

This publication is a record of lectures that were part of the Critical Conservation Colloquia, organized in Spring 2018, by the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program in Critical Conservation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The goals of the course and the accompanying Critical Conservation Colloquia were to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity.

This course is part of a wider GSD initiative borne out of distress over the rising awareness of discrimination and violence against the African American community that resulted in the fall 2015 Black in Design Conference. At that time, Dean Mostafavi remarked that, “The relationship between race and space, the way in which one could say the racialization of space is becoming more extreme, is continuing. These issues have remained absolutely pertinent.”

Critical Conservation is a natural center for this discussion because we focus on places where cultural conflict and the spatial patterns of exclusion such as historic districts and red-lining have suppressed racial, ethnic, economic and religious differences, leaving an indelible imprint on the material character of the city. The array of ideas and scholars presented here exemplifies the broader investigation that Professors Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas are leading through the Critical Conservation research agenda.

The lecture/workshop course 04479: Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment was taught by Professors Snyder and Thomas focusing on the central theme of the proposed transformation of the Los Angeles River from its present form as a concrete drainage channel, created to reduce flooding in the city, to a “naturalesque” recreation that becomes a visual and physical amenity that could very well drive gentrification while it brings new parks to underserved neighborhoods. Four neighborhoods that border on the river were the focus of student research: the core downtown with its bordering ethnic neighborhoods, transforming arts district in the industrial edge along the river, and homeless community; Boyle Heights, formerly a Irish and later Jewish neighborhood, now a center of the Hispanic community dotted with public

and Hope Six housing projects, all rapidly gentrifying with design offices and art galleries; South Los Angeles, with areas of extreme residential density with meager access to parks, large manufacturing buildings and industrial districts organized to exclude residents, and the San Fernando Valley, where the Los Angeles River begins. This last research area is largely a suburban district that includes Studio City, the home of the major television studios, but is bound to the city by the need to access water, while longing to leave the city because of the city’s urban problems. The goal was to foster an awareness and discussion about processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the built North American environment. In the semi-arid environment of Los Angeles, access to water gathered from distant inland sources as far as the Rocky Mountains, is the binding agent that has made the city. But as we learned from Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, “the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.” In Los Angeles water is power.

The MDes program in Critical Conservation has been formed to shape a broader conversation about design and development that engages 21st century questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability to serve an ever more pluralist and global society. Critical Conservation provides designers with a methodological foundation to research the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places—the cultural ecology of place. It provides a theoretical understanding of the social construction of dynamic cultural meaning associated with places, artifacts and history. The knowledge gained provides an understanding that planning involving the uses of history and group identity—critical to place-making—demands that urban ethics be considered as part of the design process. By exposing underlying forces associated with development in a growing urban world, the objective is to unearth the contested, paradoxical and sometimes exclusionary nature of development across scales, from individual to institutions, and site to state.

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CONTRIBUTORS Alan Hess is an architect, journalist, and independent scholar working in Los Angeles. After receiving a M.Arch degree from UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, he practiced architecture but found his focus in researching and writing about the roots of contemporary western design. Hess has been a National Arts Journalism Program Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and received a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to research the work of Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. In addition to monographs on many architects among them Oscar Niemeyer (2006, 2009) and John Lautner (1999), and architectural histories of Las Vegas (1993) and Palm Springs (2001), Hess’ introduced the world to the road architecture of Los Angeles in Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture (1985), revised as Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (2004) and made clear the importance of that most ubiquitous yet ignored building typology, The Ranch House (2004). He has recently received a Clarence S. Stein Institute research grant for his study of the architecture of Irvine, California, one of the United States’ largest masterplanned communities of the 1960s and 1970s. A worthy successor to Reyner Banham, he is acclaimed as the “preeminent authority on Southern California Modernism.”

Rhett Larson, J.D. is senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute of Public Policy and an associate professor of Water Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He took his J.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied with Professor Lior Strahilevitz, who was a speaker in the 2016 Power and Place Colloquium. His interest in water, a natural focus of a son of a western lettuce farmer, led him, after his initial law degrees, to an M.Sc. in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford.

After practicing law in the west for several years, where he encountered Native American Law and Spanish-originated water law, he turned to academia which benefits from his global consulting practice spanning from India to the Middle East, Africa and the entire North American continent. Professor Larson’s research focuses on the intersection of water law with food and energy security, the impact of technological innovation on water rights, and the law governing transboundary waters. He has published articles in leading American and British law journals, tackling such subjects as the sustainability implications of a human right to water, corporate governance reforms to facilitate remediation of contaminated rivers, the water rights of indigenous people based on religious water uses, and the role of water management in aggravating and mitigating armed conflict.

Anne Whiston Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape, Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania with the visionary ecologist Ian McHarg, was followed by practice in McHarg’s design firm. She then was appointed Director of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She returned to the University of Pennsylvania where she chaired Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning before accepting her present position at MIT. Professor Spirn brings an art historian’s eye and cultural and historical training to design, resulting in her landmark text, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), that was recently declared one of the 100 essential books of planning of the twentieth century. The issues raised there were expanded in The Language of Landscape (1998) that proposed that landscape and aesthetics must be understood within human conceptual systems. Her research at Harvard and later at the University of Pennsylvania has focused on distressed communities and the environmental and cultural crises that perpetuate their distress. Her 30-year focus on Mill Creek and the immediate vicinity of the University of Pennsylvania in the West Philadelphia Landscape Project will be the subject of her next book. Most significant is her use of the modern research tools of the information age to engage her professional students as well as middle school students in the local public school system of Philadelphia. In 2018 Ms. Spirn received two major awards in landscape architecture: a National Design Award to honor lasting achievement in American design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award from the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).

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February 5, 2018

A MARTIAN’S GUIDE TO LOS ANGELES Alan Hess

[SNYDER] Welcome. I’m Susan Snyder, and along with George Thomas, we co-direct the Critical Conservation Program of the MDes program at GSD. This is the first of three lectures for the 2018 Critical Conservation colloquia. It’s the third year for the series that was created to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity. The series presents conversations with noted scholars in support of our course, “Power and Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment.” In this course, we analyze processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the built North American environment by investigating places where cultural conflict and the spatial patterns of exclusion have left an indelible imprint on the characteristics of the city. Our intention is to foster an understanding of the urban ethics and political awareness that’s applicable to different parts of the built world by understanding the dimensions of what we call the cultural ecology of a place.

This year we’re looking at the Los Angeles River as an agent of change and power in the neighborhoods that surround it in Los Angeles. As Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, “the cardinal rule of the west is that water flows toward money and power.”

[THOMAS] I’m George Thomas, a co-director with Susan. I have the happy task of introducing you to Alan Hess which is made more compelling in the context of both this building in which we sit (Gund Hall), the exhibit about woman designers in the room around us, and the culture that you encounter here at the Graduate School of Design, which is part of Harvard University, which is part of the east coast, which looks, in every dimension and in every way to the architecture of the east coast, and then to Europe, and to the ideas that have been handed down over time from the European modern masters. I am particularly aware on this campus, amidst landmarks by Henry Hobson Richardson, who is anointed because he went to the École des Beaux-Arts, and, of course, Walter Gropius, who came from Germany and brought the Bauhaus, and Le Corbusier, who brought the French ideas of modern. All of these buildings are part of the connectivity that the east coast celebrates with Europe and the places where high architecture has meaning.

As Susan said, this year our class will explore the Los Angeles River, which is in actuality a concrete drainage ditch that is probably best known for the Terminator 2: Judgment Day chase scene. That massive federal 1930s flood control project is about to be transformed into a Hollywood version of a real river in a series of projects that have major implications for the social and Alan Hess

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cultural history and urban life of Los Angeles. The river borders could become a wet version of New York’s High Line that would change all of the real estate values along its edge, and would push the less well-off away from the river borders into other places. This will be radically unsettling and could turn the river from a vision to a crisis.

To help us understand LA, the city whose core character exemplifies the great American myths of the individual, and the home and the garden, and the person freed by mobility to move around space, we bring today the great architectural historian of the west coast, Alan Hess. I always think of Alan as the successor to Reyner Banham as the narrator of the story of Los Angeles. Alan spent his childhood as the son of a Ford Motor Company executive living in centers where Ford produced cars—Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago; Alan’s father had a new Lincoln or Mercury every year because the car company wanted the products on the road. Alan is a child of the car culture. He was born at the moment that American cars became great rolling fantasy sculptures that were introduced with fanfare every year and were awaited by Americans like the unveiling of this year’s Apple products. After his travels, he returned to LA, went to UCLA for architecture school, practiced architecture a bit, and then began thinking about alternate ways to communicate ideas about design and culture.

Steve Izenour was writing about White Tower burger joints, Dan Vieyra was writing about gas stations, and Richard Gutman was writing about diners. All these books were making the otherwise disdained world of commerce come alive. And Alan said, “I can do that.” And so here we are, 20 books later, some on iconic architects like Frank Lloyd Wright or Oscar Niemeyer—but most on the topics that high architecture has ignored, west coast hip modernists, ranch houses and so on.

Alan has been studying architects whose names are unfamiliar to us on the east coast—William Pereira, whose brother Hal, designed the great movie sets of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. William designed the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco that east coast theoreticians love to sneer at, just as they sneered at the amazing projects of John Lautner, Welton Becket and others. These are the people who created a culture that responded directly to the world that was being created on the west coast in the glittering golden landscape of California in an era in which engineering for military defense became airplanes, and in turn became the futurist buildings and forms of our time. Since we couldn’t take the GSD to LA to meet Alan and hear about LA there, we brought Alan here. Please welcome Alan Hess to the Graduate School of Design and to our community.

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Alan Hess

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[HESS] Thank you, George and Susan. And thanks to the GSD for allowing me to come and talk to you about one of my favorite subjects, Los Angeles. I know that there are people here who do know something about that city, but I’m going to try to start from the basics to explain a number of key themes. George and Susan have asked the impossible—that I be finished in 45 minutes. This is of course an entirely fantastical request, so I will only try to give you a few guidelines, a few mileposts in the road to help you understand what Los Angeles is all about. When you go there, it’s a huge, sprawling city—and I do not use the word sprawl derogatorily. To me, sprawl is a good thing. And as my friend Linda Dishman of the LA Conservancy says, we have historic sprawl, as well. So what do you do about that?

There are certain touchstones which help us to understand cities. For example medieval Siena has at its center its city hall. It faces the civic plaza and beyond are the residential and commercial areas, and then, there is the cathedral. This is a traditional order for a city [1.1].

Los Angeles, of course, is something much bigger, broader, more diverse, more complicated, with more layers involved in the development, and the planning, and the creation, and indeed the design of the city over the years. And despite eastern narratives, Los Angeles was indeed designed. An aerial photograph of Los Angeles shows a totally different scale and organization than Siena [1.2]. On the northwest is Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills, a great residential area; to their east, in the middle of the basin, is the downtown; beyond and inland is the San Gabriel Valley, a vast suburban area matched by the San Fernando Valley to the north. Then there are the beach cities of Santa Monica and the west side. To the south and southwest are what Reyner Banham in his ode to the city, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, called “The Plains of Id,” referencing the vast industrial and residential area between the ocean and the downtown that is ignored by most people interested in Los Angeles. This is the area through which the Los Angeles River runs, so it is important to your subject. Right on the southern coast is the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which looks like the French Riviera dropped into southern California, with beautiful villas and blue ocean views. Finally there is the port, as well. This is just a very rough sketch to alarm you a bit about the scale and complexity of Los Angeles in general.

How in the world are you going to get your hands around this immense area and its complexity and make sense of it in order to do anything meaningful in it? Where to start? I decided to start with the myths about Los Angeles. There 10

are a lot, and I think these myths may well inform your opinion of Los Angeles, so I want to point them out so that they will not mislead you as you go forward.

Let’s start with the myth about LA’s residential design [1.3]. Even to this day, I hear distinguished architects claiming that the only significant architecture in Los Angeles is residential. They point specifically to examples like these four suburban residences: the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs by Richard Neutra; Case Study House #22 by Pierre Koenig; the well-known Charles and Ray Eames House; and my favorite, John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein House.

Note that they represent a spectrum from the International Style to Organic architecture. Each of these houses has been widely publicized and praised for their innovations, but they are not all that Los Angeles architecture is about.

It is clear to me that the commercial architecture of Los Angeles throughout the 20th century is just as innovative, just as modern, perhaps even more so in some ways than these famous houses [1.4]. The commercial examples have been left by the wayside, but they make up a much broader cross-section of the city, and they are also more central to the lives of the average person.

After all, how many people can afford a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills?

There are not that many lucky people. But these commercial buildings—the shopping centers, department stores, gas stations, drive-in restaurants—are where the average person has been able to go and participate in this modern age. They are commercial, but that does not mean that they are not modern.

They are democratic, and they are also technological, using the latest building technologies in various highly creative ways.

Another myth—and again, I hear this repeated all the time—is that modernism was imported into southern California by the Europeans, particularly by the international stylists like Richard Neutra echoing the style of Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus. It is easy to see why people would make this mistake [1.5].

Using the examples of the Craig Ellwood or Pierre Koenig Case Study houses, their steel I-beams are central to their design. It’s easy to relate those to Mies and the International Style.

But the story is a lot more complicated than that. In fact modern architecture began in southern California in the mid-1890s when Irving Gill arrived in San Diego and brought what he had learned in Chicago, in Louis Sullivan’s office, to the region where he would work for the rest of his life. The Dodge House from 1914 is a profoundly modern house with abstracted forms, flat roofs, no traditional ornament at all. Was he influenced by Europe? No. The Bauhaus after all was founded in 1919; Irving Gill arrived at these modern design concepts a generation earlier, by 1904 [1.6].

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There is something that is indigenous to the California culture, to the climate, to the landscape which creates possibilities that urge and inspire western architects towards a new sense of architecture. For example, Gill took the modern technology of concrete, including tilt-up concrete slabs, and he combined it with his understanding of the local culture—in this case, the Spanish missions of the 1800s, which were indigenous and were built in response to local materials, local climate, and the like. Gill blended those forms and features to come up with this new architecture.

Another of the myths is about this thing called sprawl. Whether looking at the freeways or commercial strips, this myth claims that there is no plan to Los Angeles. “Everything’s random [1.7]. How can it possibly be humane? How can it respond to public spaces when everybody is going at 60 miles an hour in their private car on the freeway? How do you have society? How do you have civilization in such a place?” We will be getting into these issues but these myths, this misunderstanding, this lack of willingness to look at what was going on (and is going on) in Los Angeles has distorted critical perceptions for decades. We see it in 1932 when Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson curated the International Style exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They had a very specific idea of the style, and it blinded them to what else the International Style [or modern architecture] could be. In their selections for the exhibit they included the Lovell house by Richard Neutra, but they excluded Rudolph Schindler’s Lovell house on the beach—for the same client on a different site. Neutra’s design featured steel. Schindler’s used concrete [1.8].

If we compare the two buildings, the Neutra house was definitely the classic International Style, hence its inclusion in Hitchcock’s and Johnson’s exhibit, but Schindler was going in a different direction. Schindler began working at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright around 1915. He was exploring new things, ideas which make perfect sense in the context of Los Angeles, and what was going on there, and what he was experiencing, but Hitchcock and Johnson could not see it. Hitchcock would later write, “The case of Schindler I do not profess to understand.” Indeed he did not understand a lot of modern architecture.

Now I’d like to give you a couple of ideas about how to interpret what you see in Los Angeles. First of all, addressing the question of sprawl, there are at least two ways of looking at modern cities—are they centralized or decentralized. For example, in the case of a monument like Grand Central Station in New York, the name says it all. It is the Grand Central Station of New York. Most of the trains came in to one point in midtown Manhattan where passengers debarked and dispersed through the city. That’s the traditional centralized, industrial-era city.

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In the decentralized city, the monuments are more likely to look like the original McDonald’s stand, which is much, much smaller than Grand Central Station, but think how many of them there are [1.9]. Think how they were spread all the way around the city to meet the needs of different communities, to be near the people who were going to use them. Such structures—the McDonald’s stand is just one example—are a new type of modern monument for a decentralized multi-centered city like Los Angeles. And they in their own way create social spaces. Think how many people go through Grand Central Station in one day.

Think how many people go through all the McDonald’s drive-ins in Southern California in one day. I think the numbers are going to be pretty similar in terms of how this architecture serves the city.

How has Los Angeles responded to this fact of decentralization as a multicentered city? There are two ways. One is through planning—conscious, intentional planning to respond to this new kind of multi-centered city. A good example of regional planning is the Miracle Mile, a section of Wilshire Boulevard that was planned in the late 1920s and continues to this day as an active arterial and center for the city. A.W. Ross, the developer of this area, had the idea of creating a development which was commercial, residential, and public. He would build high-rise office buildings on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard, and in between he dispersed low-rise commercial buildings, and one block in, just beyond this commercial strip, were residential areas [1.10]. These were a mix 16

of single family homes and garden apartments to serve a range of economic types. So here was an intentional plan to give form to what Reyner Banham later called the linear downtown, one that provided places for people to meet, to shop, to work, and to live, all together.

Another way to organize this multi-centered city was much more ad hoc. It relied on individuals—builders, contractors, business owners, architects—to say, “Oh, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to look at this piece of property. I can buy it cheap and build what I want. I want an ice cream store [1.11]. I’m going to build a building that looks like an ice cream cone” but it’s otherwise a residential area.

It’s not in our traditional sense intentionally planned, and yet there is a genius loci in this planning process multiplied over and over, as individuals came up with solutions for using and for organizing this large, sprawling city.

There are many other examples of these two different types of planning strategies. Broadacre City by Frank Lloyd Wright and Brasilia by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa are examples of the first type with intentional planning. Or there is Las Vegas-- that’s the second kind, where individual hotel owners built individually along the Strip, but over the years it came to develop its own unifying character, organization, and logic [1.12].

This goes back to the myth about Los Angeles as nothing but sprawl. It’s unplanned. It’s random. In fact, planned communities have a long history in Los Angeles. In the 1920s, Carthay Circle was a real estate development that included a theater, a school, shopping, and houses interlinked by streets and green belts, and places to walk, as well [1.13]. Another example is Westwood, a late 1920s planned community with commercial shopping, theaters, and residential areas. It also had the advantage of having the brand new UCLA (which is where I went to architecture school) as a kind of anchor to it. A third example is Westchester—planned on a mass scale just before World War II, and followed after the war by Panorama City and Lakewood. You can see an incremental increase in the scale and sophistication of these master planned communities, but each developed in response to the need for residences for the war industry, for war factories, and after the war, to provide for returning servicemen and their families. Each was planned with commercial, residential, and workplaces all at once.

The long history of such planning in southern California leads to Irvine in the 1960s which was one of the largest master plan communities in the country, comparable to Reston, Virginia, or Columbia, Maryland, but which hasn’t quite gotten the same cachet as those eastern examples. I live in Irvine. I love it [1.14].

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The first village was built in 1965 from plans by William Pereira, with green belts and planned communal spaces. There are pools and tennis courts. There are libraries and schools planned into this community. There is a variety of different housing types also planned into this community. The architecture balances unity and variety. Forty years after it was built, when I was looking for a house to move into, I knew had to live in Irvine. It was just such a pleasant place to live. It kept true to its original concept, and it was still working after 40 years.

Another great master plan—and perhaps the most influential master plan project in the country—is Disneyland, by Walt Disney himself with in-house planners Marvin Davis, John Hench and others [1.14]. Not only did Disneyland provide a new place for recreation for families as the population was exploding in California after World War II, but it was all planned very purposely and continues to grow according to its original concepts.

What is commonly called sprawl may look chaotic, but we have to remember, for example, what Chicago looked like in the 1890s. Robert Bruegmann, the University of Illinois architectural historian, describes Chicago in this period of time as congested [1.16]. It was polluted. It was messy. It was chaotic. What a bad example! Why would you want your city that way? But we know what came out of Chicago in the 1890s in terms of architecture—Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, and Burnham and Root, and others, who fundamentally reshaped the 20th century and our American sense of modernism.

Out of these seemingly congested, chaotic areas came really great ideas. Here again is this American idea of vernacular genius. Just go out and try something.

If it works, do it again. Change it a little bit. Adapt it, but out of that freedom can come a great sense of the city. So for example, on a commercial strip like Riverside Drive in Burbank, you cannot help but notice the Bob’s Big Boy with its giant sculptural billboard [1.17]. And then you look down the street and see another building with a tall sign on it. In modern western cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, vast distances of the commercial strip are organized, they are brought together by the design of individualized pieces of architecture.

How did this idea come to be? This has been one of my studies for a number of years now. These roadside buildings, commercial buildings, drive-ins, coffee shops—in California, we call them coffee shops. They are like the diners here on the east coast with a similar function in society, and similar customers, and so forth, but they do have a different character. In California, we built drive-ins in the 1920s. A restaurant owner said, “I want to have a drive-in now. Everybody owns cars. They’re going about their daily business in the car. How can I get them to stop in at my little restaurant? Well, I’ll make a small building with a 18

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kitchen in it. I’ll leave a lot of parking around it. I’ll put it in a good site, a good intersection, and I’ll put a sign on the roof so that, as they’re driving by at 20 or 30 miles per hour, they’ll be able to see my restaurant.” These became extremely popular [1.18].

So here is where the vernacular genius contributes to the shape of a city. We have a problem. We’re going to solve it in the most direct way. This is what the form is. From this direct process developed the prototypes, the templates, for how you deal with car-oriented customers who are hungry. But the Los Angeles designers of car-oriented buildings didn’t stop there. In 1928, Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright and also an architect designed the Yucca-Vine Drivein Market. He lived in Los Angeles and of course he saw its growing drive-in architecture. He saw and comprehended the changes that were going on in the American city. LA didn’t quite look like Chicago, where he grew up, but he took the LA drive-in vernacular template as an opportunity as an architect to design something new [1.19]. He used inexpensive materials like corrugated metal. He used neon signage. He designed it for nighttime just as much as for daytime.

These are the sorts of ideas that he noted in the vernacular drive-in template and he evolved it forward.

It didn’t stop there. There’s a whole tradition—an ongoing tradition of using these vernacular templates as architecture. Look for example at Simon’s DriveIns by an architect named Wayne McAllister [1.20]. Wayne McAllister? Who is he? He’s not in any of the history books. Richard Gutman, the diner historian here in the audience, has heard of him. I consider McAllister’s drive-ins to be the most modern buildings in the world in the 1930s—more modern than anything Mies or Gropius or Corbusier was designing at the same period. They are not only an expression of modern technology, modern materials, neon signs, and such, but they are addressing one of the very fundamental purposes of modernism, which was to bring the advantages of the modern age to the average person. Wayne McAllister wasn’t just building beautiful homes up in the hills for people who could afford them. He was designing a drive-in that people would use every day and that made them part of the modern era. To me the function of modern architecture is to use modern technology, including the automobile, and modern materials, and to apply it to improve the general democratic experience.

Notice also from the lit sign in this photo that these buildings were open 24 hours. There are no front doors to these buildings. They’re intentionally designed to respond to the California climate and lifestyle. We do not have winter in southern California. In fact we’re still having summer in Los Angeles 20

right now. In 1949, John Lautner—another apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, incidentally—designed Googie’s coffee shop on the Sunset Strip [1.21]. I love this shot, because it’s taken through the windshield of a car. This is how it was designed to be seen, and you immediately see that it is noticeable. You cannot miss this building. Its roof there, the black and white area, was made of sheets of off-the-shelf steel decking like you would use in any high rise office building at the time. Here it’s exposed as the roof, and then it juts up to be the sign.

The sign is an important part of the architecture. It’s part of the function of the architecture. The architecture has to be seen so that it can attract customers so that it can sell food.

This whole architectural phenomenon was ignored or misunderstood by most critics from the 1920s on. This Googie restaurant was the topic of an article in 1952 by editor Douglas Haskell in House and Home magazine. He wrote a satirical article sneering at the buildings entitled “Googie Architecture.” Like the hostile word “baroque” used for non-classical post-Renaissance design, Haskell unintentionally gave the whole style—this modern road-side architecture—its name, which we use to this day.

Googie is one of those wonderful words, like Gothic. It’s a little bit silly and a little bit demeaning, and yet when you look at what it actually implies, it’s extremely serious and important architecture. Douglas Honnold, another architect in southern California, was the architect for Tiny Naylor’s [1.23]. Notice how the car is engaged in these designs, just as it is in one of the Case Study houses by Pierre Koenig. The car is part of the architecture. The car is part of the kitchen, for heaven’s sakes. There’s no need to hide the car in a garage or someplace out back. The car is part of the family. The car is part of the architecture. And just as it helped shape the Case Study houses, it shaped these commercial buildings all over Los Angeles.

There are other parallels between these techno buildings in architectural history. In the teens and the ‘20s in Soviet Russia, the constructivists were very interested in an architecture of communication, of propaganda. Speaking to the public was very important in the constructivist buildings, just as 30 years later it would be in the Googie buildings of Los Angeles. There are entirely different intentions—capitalists selling products, vs. communists creating a new society— and as nearly as can be discovered there was no direct connection between the styles, except in their shared purpose of communication. The Googie architects—Armét and Davis, in this case—were not studying the constructivists, but arrived at similar forms out of the conditions in Los Angeles. The fact that people were driving cars, the fact that there was a strong commercial Alan Hess

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architectural scene, the need to connect the building to the surroundings, using modern materials like glass and inexpensive industrial materials used in new and unexpected ways, led the Googie architects to arrive at solutions parallel to those of the constructivists.

So again there was this ongoing tradition in Los Angeles architecture evolving a new type of modernism. The Googie Style wasn’t just a single building brought out for one particular solution. It was an ongoing development by many architects over the years responding to changing conditions. For example, the Simon’s that you see here was by Wayne McAllister [1.24]. Remember that name. Working with him in 1935, when he was designing these, was a young architect named Stanley Clark Meston. In 1952, Stanley Clark Meston designed the original prototype for the McDonald’s restaurant. You can see the parallels, the use of lighting at night, the advertising and communication purpose, and so forth, but it’s updated. It’s for a new period.

These buildings represent a serious ongoing trend in modern architecture, and, in fact, these buildings take me back to my original point. We know these great residential buildings like Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, and the classic Julius Shulman photograph of it cantilevered above the city—steel, and glass, open to the city, almost as if it was a plane flying over the city. This is a famous 22

Fig. 1.23

Fig. 1.22

Fig. 1.25

Fig. 1.24

example of modern architecture. We write about it, we include it in our history books. The Googie coffee shops, like the Norm’s by Armét and Davis, are just as modern, using the same concepts—open, glassy, except at Norm’s it’s open to the immediate street scene rather than the blanket of city lights [1.25]. That’s the whole purpose of all that glass, so that when you’re dining inside, where you’re air conditioned and protected, you are still part of this kinetic energy of the street outside, the car culture. In LA the car culture wasn’t to be shunned, but embraced. And their forms, signage, et cetera are elaborations of it.

So when we look at the residential architecture of Los Angeles and praise it, as we rightly should, we should also be looking at the commercial architecture of Los Angeles and understanding what it was, because it created some really marvelous buildings. There’s a painting that I love by Charles Payzant of the California School from 1936 [1.26]. Notice that there are two buildings in it. The shadowed spire is Bullock’s Wilshire on the Miracle Mile that we previously saw.

It is by Parkinson and Parkinson and it’s still there. It is a tremendous building.

But Payzant also includes one of Wayne McAllister’s Simon’s Drive-Ins. It’s in the foreground, in the light, and detailed and was clearly seen as part of the LA scene.

There are other commercial buildings that contribute to this innovative modern Alan Hess 23

landscape, too—theaters by S. Charles Lee, gas stations by Smith and Williams (with, incidentally, the Pegasus flying horse of the Mobil Gas Company created by the California artist Milliard Sheets as a sign-sculpture above the gas station [1.27].) I have had to cut out so much, but if only I had more time I could have shown you other marvelous examples.

There were also public buildings that reflected this decentralized city as well, for example, Union Station [1.28]. It’s modern. You can see the logic of the circulation of the system. The inter-city trains come in on one side. The suburban trolley cars come in at the other side. Cars and buses come in at another place. Pedestrians walk in from downtown. It’s a wonderful logical modern plan which is in use to this day, and it is a public space to this day. It has gardens. It’s a wonderful place to go. If you ever have a chance arrive by train into Los Angeles, please experience it.

But one of the interesting things is that Union Station is also a commercial building. When it was being planned—it took decades to get this built—the architects and the city leaders wanted a traditional classical building like Grand Central Station, or Washington’s Union Station, a Beaux-Arts building with columns. That’s what a real city has, they thought. Instead, the train companies, which are commercial businesses, of course, said, “No, no, no. We don’t want that. We don’t want that sort of monument. We want a building that advertises Los Angeles. We want the commercial intent of this building to shape its architecture. So the station must tell of the romance of the Spanish history of Los Angeles, the missions, the color of Spanish tiles, and so forth, the beauty of gardens, as in the missions—gardens with plants, and flowers, and fruits—we want all of that designed into the building, because this is an advertisement for Los Angeles to entice customers. It has a commercial purpose, and we want the architecture to respond to that” [1.29]. And of course the commercial people were right. They created a beloved building which is still in use today. It is going to be the hub of a larger transit system going into the future, as well, and incidentally, it’s right near the Los Angeles River..

Of course railroad stations have always been public spaces in traditional cities, but there are public spaces in the commercial strips, the commercial buildings, the sprawl of Los Angeles too. They are destinations whether you’re part of a car club and you go to Bob’s Big Boy every Friday night to meet your friends, showing off their cars, or you’re just from out of town and you want to pose in front of the Bob’s Big Boy statue [1.30]. Or maybe your group is protesting the threatened demolition of Norm’s restaurant in a protest organized by the Los Angeles Conservancy in 2015. I include the protest because Matthew Weiner, 24

Alan Hess 25

Fig. 1.30

Fig. 1.29

Fig. 1.28

Fig. 1.27

Fig. 1.26

the creator of the AMC series “Mad Men” was in attendance. He told me that he thought this was an important building to save because he conceived of Mad Men at this Norm’s restaurant years ago, a couple of decades ago. This is an LA type of public place, proving that you don’t just need to be sitting at a cafe in Paris in order to write a great novel—or a TV script. A Norm’s coffee shop works as well.

There are many other facets to modern commercial design in California, but the final point I want to touch on concerns three large scale commercial architecture firms doing major buildings and complexes throughout the country, but especially in southern California. First there is Victor Gruen who had an office on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. His wife, Elsie Krummeck was his partner in the firm of Gruen & Krummeck. In their work they explored new possibilities for the shopping center and the department store. For example, their Milliron’s Department Store in Westchester was designed with parking on the roof as a solution to the limited size of the site [1.31].

And there is Welton Becket, who designed the Capitol Records building (a famously cylindrical office building shaped by economizing on the length of HVAC ducts on each floor that also happens to recall a stack of vinyl records) as well as the Music Center on Bunker Hill in downtown [1.32]. And there is another of my favorites, William Pereira, who designed the spider-legged Theme Building at Los Angeles Airport, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and many other buildings that shaped the city and life in the midcentury boom [1.33]. These are important architects. Yes, they were commercial. They’ve been dismissed by high art critics for years because of that commercial purpose in comparison to so-called “boutique” firms such as Richard Neutra and Craig Ellwood. Yet their work is incredibly significant as a major part of the long trajectory of modernism in industrialized America.

Let’s briefly review that trajectory. I see a series of architects in America beginning after the Civil War who used new technology in new ways—the root of modernism. They designed pragmatic buildings. They’re often commercial buildings, and they’re often buildings for democratic uses. There is Frank Furness in Philadelphia beginning in the 1870s. His ideas continued with one of his employees, Louis Sullivan, in the commercial office skyscrapers of Chicago in the 1890s [1.34]. Those ideas continued with Frank Lloyd Wright in suburban architecture, and Irving Gill in San Diego, and with Albert Kahn and the strikingly functional and influential auto factories of Detroit after 1900. As we have seen, architectural innovations provoked by the auto and commercial uses continued on to Los Angeles in the 1920s and beyond.

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Alan Hess 27

Fig. 1.35

Fig. 1.34

Fig. 1.33

Fig. 1.32

Fig. 1.31

The exploration of modern forms and types spread well beyond drive-in restaurants, however. This creative impulse, freed from conventional limitations and fueled by California’s atmosphere encouraging experiment, produced strikingly original designs. Look, for example, at four major buildings that all opened in just one year (1939) in Los Angeles: the May Co. department store, the NBC Radio studios, the Union Station that we have looked at, and the new Disney studios in Burbank, still in use to this day [1.35]. These were all power centers for the economy, technology, and culture.

This free exploration of new ideas continued. For another example, Los Angeles is based upon water. You have to bring in water, at great effort, to grow Los Angeles. So what do we do? We build two landmark buildings that glorify the symbolism and the function of water [1.36]. There is the Metropolitan Water District headquarters by William Pereira, and, under construction at the same time, Albert C. Martin’s building for the city’s Department of Water and Power on Bunker Hill. These two buildings, both having to do with water, were strategically placed across from each other on hills and used some of the best architects in Los Angeles at the time.

The freeways are also a very important part of the city’s infrastructure [1.37].

They were also designed. One of my favorite interchanges (how LA is it to have a favorite freeway) is where the 405 and the 10 freeways meet, creating a wonderful kinetic experience if you’re driving in the right direction. It was designed by one of the first female civil engineers in California, Marilyn Reece.

There’s even a plaque for her there.

Or there is Disney studio that I mentioned before—a high tech workplace from 1939. It was a factory, it was a research center for new technologies of optics, electronics, and sound, and it was a leader in creating a workplace environment to support creative people [1.38]. The landscaping, the offices, the amenities, restaurants, recreation, et cetera, were designed by Los Angeles architect Kem Weber, working closely with client Walt Disney. This campus became the template for the Silicon Valley workplace of today.

Media as well had its innovative monuments too: CBS Radio by east coast modernist William Lescaze, NBC Radio by the Austin Company of Cleveland who would later design the NBC TV studios in Burbank, and then in 1952 CBS Television City by local designers Pereira and Luckman [1.39]. Designed at the very dawn of the television industry, when nobody knew what television was going to become, the building is still in use for its original purpose today. That is a mark of good planning and foresight by, specifically, William Pereira.

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Fig. 1.37 Fig. 1.40

Fig. 1.39

Fig. 1.36 Fig. 1.38

Train stations, broadcast studios, department stores, office buildings: add these major institutional structures to the web of democratic power centers bringing the benefits of new technology and lifestyles to daily life in the drive-in restaurants, backyard swimming pools, and car washes used by average citizens and we see that Los Angeles created a modern landscape of tremendous meaning, purpose, innovation, and pleasure [1.40].

Alan Hess 29

Fig. 1.41

Fig. 1.42

Fig. 1.43

Fig. 1.44

Fig. 1.45

Now I want to turn attention briefly to residential architecture in LA. It is important and, in contrast to the popular myth, it is not all Miesian minimalism.

For example the Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames and the Carling House by John Lautner, both from 1949, each used modern technology, prefabrication, and steel construction, and yet embodied a spectrum of concepts ranging from the International Style to Organic modernism. They demonstrate the incredibly wide variety of experimentation in Los Angeles residential architecture. One of my favorite architects, for example, is Lloyd Wright. Three of his early houses from the 1920s, the Sowden and Novarro houses and his own studio, may be rooted in his father’s philosophy, but apply it creatively using the topography, the history, new technology, and the climate of Los Angeles to create a very original modernism. This spectrum of creativity 30

continues throughout the years with wide-ranging talents such as Wallace Neff, Paul R. Williams, A. Quincy Jones, and John Woolf. Each of these architects explored different aspects of what Los Angeles meant, showing in their designs how they were inspired by the southern California character [1.41, 1.42, 1.43].

And again, we need to correct the myth if we think that this is all simply a variation of Mies. Even the Eames House, one of the most famous examples, uses lightweight steel trusses. These are rooted not in Mies’ skeletal I-beams, but in the native aircraft industry of southern California; Donald Douglas, who founded Douglas Aircraft in the early 1920s in Santa Monica, helped develop aircraft technologies that made super-strong lightweight frames. Out of the aircraft industry came the use of lightweight modern technology in architecture.

The airplane industry employed quite a number of Los Angeles architects during World War II, who were exposed to these lightweight technological solutions, and that experience inspired what they did later. Thus Rosie the Riveter pounding together airplanes during World War II, led to the shapes and the forms that John Lautner used in his Silvertop House [1.44]. .

From all of these examples, intertwined with the democratic adoption of the auto, the free thinking liberated from the academic strictures of the east coast, and the economic engine of commercial industries, we can see that California itself is a muse. It inspires architects in new directions. Their journeys are worth studying. You certainly know the famous Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, who employed a young Swiss architect, Albert Frey, in 1929. Frey soon thereafter immigrated to New York, where he designed the Corbusian Aluminaire House for a 1931 exhibit in New York. You can see the connection. But then Albert Frey got in his Ford, and drove across the country, eventually settling in California.

Along the way he took photographs of ordinary vernacular buildings—gas stations, markets—that attracted his eye along the roadside [1.45]. When he started designing houses, including his own, they took on very new forms. Were they Corbusian, or were they Californian? My contention is that, after decades working, living, being exposed to the culture, the climate, and the industry of the Golden State, that California influenced Frey’s architecture more than Le Corbusier [1.46].

These influences do not only apply to single family homes. There is California public housing as well, including the work of Richard Neutra and Paul R. Williams—good residential architects who also designed public housing. But we also have vernacular examples, like the dingbat apartment house—small buildings with parking underneath. And there is also the large master-planned Park LaBrea, as well, blending Le Corbusian Ville Radieuse high-rises in a park with California garden apartments [1.47].

Alan Hess

31

Fig. 1.47

Fig. 1.46

Ironically all of these large scale mass-produced industrial impulses came together in the suburban Ranch house, which took off after World War II. There are any number of variations of the Ranch—small traditional ranch houses, or modern ranch houses like the Eichler houses that have become a brand in their own right, featuring indoor/outdoor spaces. But these houses were built by what was virtually mass assembly line construction. Modern technology was applied to the problem of how to create huge numbers of appealing houses very, very quickly. So for me, the icon of modernism is not Villa Garches by Le Corbusier with the car parked in front of it, but the simple mass-produced ranch house with a Model T parked in front of it; the worker who could afford the house could afford a car as well, because of modern industry [1.48, 1.49].

To sum up, I’ve given you a couple of the ideas of how you might crack open this egg of Los Angeles when you—students, especially—are out there. It’s hard to do, because so many negative myths have been piled up about the city over the years. You need to get beyond those. For example, this 1934 article from Modern Mechanix, “Bizarre Eat Shops Built to Lure Trade,” included this giant ice cream cone stand [1.50]. That’s the level of insight with which the media, both popular media and critical architectural professional media, interpreted most Los Angeles architecture. And yet there were many through the years who saw much more. On the left is a giant milk can used as an illustration in Norman Bel Geddes’s 1932 book Horizons [1.51]. He wrote, “as a genre, the result might be known as Coney Island architecture, but it is symptomatic and interesting on that account. Unquestionably a new liveliness is coming into architecture, and we may yet hear of it as one of the seven lively arts. It can certainly be made as vivacious as the tabloids, the talkies, or vaudeville.”

To really get to know Los Angeles, I recommend several local critics and writers, such as Pauline Schindler and Esther McCoy, for example, who wrote for many, many decades. But McCoy found that most of the messages sent west to east got “jumbled at the Rockies.” This was the roadblock to having California 32

Fig. 1.49 Fig. 1.50

Fig. 1.48

architects and their concepts appreciated. Circling back around to one of the most influential critics, Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1940 took a tour of the west coast and wrote about it in Arts and Architecture magazine, but he just piled on all of the standard misunderstandings over the years that we still need to break through. For example he saw a drive-in and was actually impressed by it [1.52].

Something in the back of his head said, this is interesting stuff going on here, but it was so far out of his understanding that he did not follow his intuition about it; despite his praise, he said the drive-in was essentially “anonymous.”

Well, it wasn’t anonymous. It was designed by Wayne McAllister and his wife, Corinne McAllister. Hitchcock could have looked them up in the telephone book, and talked to them, and asked, where did this come from? How did you come to design this? He did not bother to do that. We can thank people like Reyner Alan Hess 33

Banham of course, who was one of those who was able to see Los Angeles in a different way, on its own terms [1.53]. And I must say, being here at Harvard, I have to pay proper honor to J.B. Jackson, who was a student here in the 1930s and taught here at GSD in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and had a great influence on me as well. I recommend his writings, which are quite available to this day, in helping to break through biases and seeing things in a new way.

So my lessons for a guide to Los Angeles: Understand the history, the order, the logic of the place. Accept the logic, the technology, and the lifestyle of the car. The car is changing today, and it will continue to change. Technology will change it, obviously, but we need to respond to those possibilities as creatively as we did in the past. California offers a freedom to experiment, a freedom to try new ideas. Academies and traditional architecture schools and publications did not rule California as they did elsewhere, enforcing a narrow mode of design as the right direction for modern architecture. In California there were a 1,000 flowers blooming, multiple experiments under way—John Lautner being one of the great experimenters of the day.

You should get over the idea that sprawl is inherently negative, as well—we need to question that. There’s a logic behind it. We need to understand it. It’s not all good. We do need to solve some of its problems, but it is a suburban metropolitan urban form that has its own purpose and advantages to be understood.

And then finally remember the lesson of the simple ranch house as one of the best examples pulling together all these themes. It is technological as a mass assembly line process of building. It is commercial in finding a widely popular imagery. it was also democratic, literally bringing modernism to the masses in their way of life. This is modern architecture too.

Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE] [QUESTION] Obviously, there are comparisons between Levittown and what’s happening on the east coast, post-World War II processes, and a lot of the LA building. So there was a national culture of housebuilding independent of high architecture, as it were.

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Alan Hess 35

Fig. 1.53

Fig. 1.52

Fig. 1.51

[HESS] Yes, but I would point out that that Californians pioneered the process of assembly line production for tract housing and all the management that went into it; how do you bring in the materials in sequence? How do you organize the trades at the right stage? That system was actually first applied on a large basis in California before World War II and in defense housing by a couple of developers, Marlow and Burns in Los Angeles, and David Bohannon in the Bay Area. Levitt then used it very effectively after the war.

[QUESTION] Hi, I know you spoke briefly about the LA River Project in your talk, but I’m wondering, given the amount of industries—a diverse array of industries that exist in Los Angeles, what sort of industries and communities will experience negative disruption as a result of the river project in your mind?

[HESS] A lot of them. It will have a big impact and on a number of diverse communities, the communities right around downtown along the river. For example, older industry in the downtown edge—we’re already seeing the impact in the Arts District today, which was once an industrial area, but is now being gentrified, with art museums, galleries, et cetera coming in there. So we’re already seeing that, but this effect will also spread out in the Valley. The San Fernando Valley extension of the river is yet another interesting ecosystem itself with suburban homes, as well as industry. So what is the impact on that going to be? It’s not the most prosperous part of the San Fernando Valley, so it is ripe for change in terms of the housing there. Then south of downtown, large stretches of industrial corridors and blue collar residential communities will be affected.

Now, again, these are largely areas of vernacular architecture—interspersed residential and commercial. They are not the fanciest parts of town, so there hasn’t been the sorts of planning and ordinances to guide develop there, but the river project offers that opportunity.

[QUESTION] What do you do with those areas now without affecting the fact that they have reasonable housing for many, many people, and for many of the workers who have been working in those industries?

[HESS] I’d just say look closely at the fabric of what’s around each part of the river and see what’s going on there. It’ll be different at each place. Build on each area’s 36

strengths to retain the diversity of culture, economies, and purposes.

[QUESTION] Thank you for the great talk. My name is Richard Gutman. I was referred to occasionally in this talk for my work about diners, and I was very encouraged by your reference to the anonymous and to the vernacular, because I think many of these traditions and the interesting buildings that you pointed out were influenced by people who were untrained or not professional architects.

That was certainly the case of the diner, in which thousands of buildings were made by craftsmen and not necessarily designed by professionals. And I’m wondering what you feel about that. How does that work today? How does the entrepreneur or the person who wants to make a statement fit in with that?

Can they do it, or is it kind of just this anomaly from history?

[HESS] Well, I think it’s one of those examples where we can see the usefulness of pragmatic experience used effectively in the right hands—I don’t really like to call them untrained, because they really knew what they were doing, but they didn’t fit into the conventional architectural categories, and yet they came up with wonderful ideas. So I think its essential to be aware that that happens—and I think that happens today just as much as back then. There is still a source of energy, and ideas, and so forth that could be drawn on to revitalize different neighborhoods and still keep them useful to the people who created them or who live in them.

[GUTMAN] Well, presumably that cross-pollination between the architect and the client, whatever business or whatever building it is, leads to some kind of maybe new idea or new expression, or a copying, or a reworking of something else that has impressed someone. And I think you showed that over and over again here.

[HESS] That sort of experience still goes on today, as well. I didn’t get into today’s Los Angeles as much as its background, but this phenomenon is happening even in these outlying suburban areas to this day—with creative ideas for businesses, as well as forms and so forth. So yes, there’s potential there.

[QUESTION] To attack the conceptual context head on, is it ever possible, or could it be possible for southern California/LA to get away from the car culture and to design buildings in sections that are more ecologically friendly, that are based Alan Hess 37

more on public types of transportation that’s been pioneered centuries ago in other parts of the country?

[HESS] Well, I see that definitely there are changes coming to the automobile industry in future decades. I think the solution, though, is not to eliminate the automobile, but to build upon it and its infrastructure, because to alter all of that, to get rid of it, would be extremely expensive. But there are ways to build upon it, and we are seeing evidence of new ways of using highways—either adding light rail or of using apps and so forth to make the car more efficient.

And that’s what I see as the future—using the car more efficiently in terms of energy and in terms of usage. Often that includes redesigning cities and zoning to meet the new opportunities so that you have concentrations of development in certain areas, but I really don’t think it has been helpful to completely demonize the automobile, as has been common in certain commentaries.

I think the car has done so much. It has served a purpose. It has problems which need to be addresses, but building upon those, I think, in a creative way, and understanding why it was so successful, and what real problems it did solve— this might be one of the ways that entrepreneurs today can learn how to help our systems evolve.

That’s my feeling. I live, for example, in Irvine, which was built in the early 1960s, and it was designed specifically to solve a lot of the problems that were already being recognized about the car oriented suburbs. So, for example, my house, which was built in 1972—I can walk to the library, to the store, to a coffee shop.

If I had children now, they could walk to school along green belts—beautiful, safe green belts, instead of busy streets. So there are these traditions of thinking about how to solve the problems of the automobile that have been going on for quite a while, and I think we need to understand those.

[QUESTION] You talked about the history of architecture responding to kind of the current changes, such as the automobile. So I wondering, what do you think the changes are today, and how might they have started to become incorporated in architecture?

[HESS] Changes to the automobile?

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[QUESTION] No, to life in general.

[HESS] To life in general. Wow. I see the dynamism of the commercial development process. And again, I’m living in Orange County. There’s a lot of it going on, and it is being responsive to any number of changes in demographics and lifestyles.

In particular we have a large Asian population in our area, and the commercial development process is responding to things like that—new types of housing, new sizes of housing, new types of retail centers. So there are ways for it to be adaptable in that way. Demographics are certainly changing; technology is coming up in any number of ways to change how people live. I think you need to look at all of those carefully and come up with an idea of what direction it might go in. It may need your ideas in order to go in a positive direction.

Fig. 1.54

[APPLAUSE]

Alan Hess 39

March 5, 2018

TARZAN TO THE TERMINATOR Western Water’s Story through the Lens of the Los Angeles River Rhett Larson, J.D.

[THOMAS] Welcome to this afternoon’s talk by Rhett Larson. Rhett is a professor in the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at the University of Arizona and he is someone whom we think will be very important to all of us at GSD in the future. We had a wonderful conversation at dinner last night him and this morning he met with our students. These have been extraordinary experiences. When you hear a lawyer taking on the issues of culture and science simultaneously, it is absolutely remarkable. Rhett comes to us as on the recommendation from one of the speakers in our first year’s series, Lior Strahilevitz of the University of Chicago Law School. When we called Lior and said we’re looking for someone who can talk about water law, he said there’s only one person, and he’s in Arizona and you’ll love him. And as usual Lior has proven to be completely correct.

Rhett studied history and microbiology at Brigham Young University, which is an unusual combination, and then from there went on to the study of law at the University of Chicago and then was offered the chance to take a couple of years at Oxford University for a scientific degree in water management. Thus he brings his unique background to bear on the set of topics that interest us this year, because our Power and Place course is looking at the Los Angeles River and power. In many ways the course is asking questions about law and regulation and environment and all of the issues that are part of the larger world that we live in.

We would also note that law and law articles remain a really great source of relatively dispassionate, less ideologically framed sources of information.

Law itself is a cultural product and a response to the issues of the day and culture that together give us a larger perspective. One final point about his name – I asked him “Rhett Butler? Gone with the Wind?” And Rhett said “Yes. His mother had seen that movie two weeks before he was born and liked the name”. So his life began from the cultural complexity of modern media. We are delighted to have him here, Rhett, thank you for coming, for making the trek, and for being today’s speaker.

[LARSON] Thank you all very much for being here. Thanks especially to George and to Susan for organizing and for inviting me. And thanks to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for having me. As you’ll see, I get pretty enthusiastic about this topic. So I will try and keep my enthusiasm under control. But I get really excited when we talk about water policy. I understand that you’ve been studying, thinking about, and talking about the Los Angeles River.

Rhett Larson

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What I hope to be able to do today is to look at broader water and legal issues through the lens of the Los Angeles River to help you understand western water law and water policy in particular, but then I want to go even broader and help us see some global water issues, again through the lens of the Los Angeles River. A couple of the ways in which I want us to think about this topic have been the ways in which the Los Angeles River has been featured in popular culture. You might not be aware of this, but in 1928 the Los Angeles River, or rather the banks of the original Los Angeles River were the setting for the jungle scenes for the movie, The Mighty Tarzan [2.1]. You might think, going back to our initial image of the concrete ditch, how in the world could that concrete monstrosity ever be confused for a jungle. Well, as recently as 1928, it was so lush and beautiful that it could stand in for the jungle.

On the one hand, there is this iconic representation of the Los Angeles River as Tarzan’s jungle and then on the other hand, for those of you if you haven’t seen the chase scene in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, then I don’t even know what to tell you. But if you haven’t, you should just go find it right now. It won’t even hurt my feelings if you run out to go see that movie. The iconic scene is the motorcycle chase, which if you didn’t know any better, you would assume was taking place on an abandoned freeway. You would never imagine that they were in a river.

I want to talk about how to understand water law and water policy through these two lenses, through these two themes. First there was a Tarzan era of western water law and policy and that then there was and perhaps continues to be a Terminator era of western water law and policy. And then I want to talk about the future. Where do we go from here? To talk about the future, I want to talk about another iconic Los Angeles resident, Bruce Lee [2.1].

As you will see Bruce Lee’s philosophy of martial arts is right there for you.

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. If you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.

You put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” So if you get anything out of what I’m talking about today it’s that in order to manage water, you must be water.

Let’s talk first about the Tarzan era of western water policy. Now, if you think about the theory, the themes of Tarzan are clashing cultures. You have Lord Gray Stoke being abandoned in the jungles of the Congo and then being raised by a tribe of gorillas and then he comes into conflict with other tribes and then ultimately is rediscovered again by the British Empire with another clash of cultures. At the same time there is a romantic relationship between 42

Fig. 2.1

The “Tarzan Era” of Western Water

A Wild, Untamed, & Deadly Jungle

Romantic Relationship between Humans & Nature

Fig. 2.2

Clash of Civilizations & Values

Rhett Larson 43

apes and a human being and between human beings in general and the jungle.

And yet like that romantic relationship, with its dangers and hazards, Western water policy functioned much in the same way.

We can understand the Tarzan era through the way that the Los Angeles River worked. In 1870, Los Angeles was a city of about 5,000 people, a tiny, sleepy little place. Steelhead trout still spawned in the Los Angeles River. Tongva and Chumash people still clung to some of their ancestral lands and were trapping waterfowl along the banks of Los Angeles River. The city of 5,000 people was almost entirely dependent on a highly variable river. The river did not flow very much when it was flowing. Its ordinary high watermark was very low. But it had dramatic flood seasons [2.2]. By 1900, thirty years later, the sleepy little village of 5,000 was 100,000 people. Growth meant that Los Angeles had to find water. In fact, the manager of the Los Angeles water district at the time, a notorious figure in history, named William Mulholland, said, “If we can’t find the water, we won’t need the water.” Basically, he was saying if we can’t find an additional water source besides this sleepy, tiny, highly variable little river, it won’t matter because we’ll always be a tiny little town. We need to find some new source of water.

So what was their new source of water? The new source of water was over the mountains in the Owens Valley. The city would build the Los Angeles aqueduct transporting that water over the mountains, using a gravity-fed system. You must also see Chinatown, which depicts the classic rural-urban conflict of Los Angeles buying up all of the land of farmers in the Owens Valley. Now you might ask yourself, well, how did all of this work out? In Los Angeles there were all kinds of (false?) reports in the news, pushed by Mulholland, about the risks of drought. Suddenly money began to flow to pursue water rights in the Owens Valley. The city agents bought up a lot of land and bought the water rights, and transported all of that water, so that by 1928-- interestingly, the year that The Mighty Tarzan was filmed-- by 1928, 90% of the population in the agricultural production in the Owens Valley was gone.

Here is one clash of civilizations, which is the clash between rural and urban interests. Now, one thing I wanted to flag—and hopefully we can talk about this a little bit more during the Q&A, or if you’re interested, I’m always happy to talk about hydro-politics which has never looked like regular politics.

Regular politics has always been this divide between conservative and liberal.

Hydro-politics has always been different. It’s never broken down along those lines. It’s always broken down on urban versus rural, or tribal versus non44

tribal, or industry against industry, but in this particular situation it was urban versus rural. And this continues to be the case. Owens Valley is the ghost that still haunts Los Angeles water policy. To this day, when a big city goes to a small rural community and says, we need your water, the first thing that small rural community says is “We will just end up being like Owens Valley.”

And the answer might be, well, Owens Valley was fairly compensated. We paid above market value. Los Angeles paid above market value for the Owens Valley water. But they actually paid above market value for the use of that water in crops in the Owens Valley, not the premium that should have been paid for water uses in Los Angeles. And even though the farmers were willing to sell off their land and their water rights, all of the ancillary industries and communities that depended on the presence of that agriculture were decimated by that sale. So when you go to a community and you say we need to buy out your water rights or temporarily lease your water rights, those rural interests are terrified that the big, powerful cities will come and not just steal their water, but steal their way of life.

It’s easy to go to a farmer and say, well, 70% of the water that’s used in the western United States is being used for agricultural purposes. You’re getting more than your fair share. You need to give up water so that the cities can use it. The water becomes a symbol of a way of life. It becomes a symbol of their future. It becomes a symbol of their last vestiges of political power. The more I hear our national conversation about politics, the more national politics no longer sounds like conservative versus liberal. Instead it begins to sound like hydro-politics. We live in a world now where politics in general sounds like the politics of water. It sounds like people arguing over how do I preserve my way of life. I used to live in a world where I was politically powerful and my industry was acknowledged and respected, and there were lots of my kind. And now I don’t live in that world anymore. And I want to make my world great again like it was. By understanding our ongoing national conversation in the context of what farmers go through when they talk about large, rural to urban water transfers we can better understand our national situation Another clash of civilizations that was occurring at the turn of the 20th century was the clash between indigenous tribes and indigenous people and incoming settlers and the continuing presence of Mexican citizens [2.3].

So Chumash and Tongva people continued to trap, continued to live, but gradually were pushed further and further out into the margins and lost their water rights. In 1906, the United States Supreme Court recognized in a seminal case, Winters v, United States, that every single tribal reservation in the United States is implicitly guaranteed an amount of water [2.4]. By virtue Rhett Larson 45

of being a federally recognized tribe, you’re guaranteed a water right. How much water do you get? You get the minimum amount of water necessary to meet the primary purpose of your reservation? What is the primary purpose of a tribal reservation? It is to establish a permanent homeland. And how much water do you get to establish a permanent homeland? The answer is the amount of water that’s practical to irrigate.

Just think about all of the assumptions that the law builds in about what tribes should be doing and how we quantify that. This remains a major issue in tribal water policy and tribal water politics. Do we settle for what the court will give us? Will the courts base that quantity of water on how much of our land is arable? Or how much of that land is it feasible to bring the water to? And whether or not it’s economical to bring water to that land. Or do we negotiate a settlement? And if we are a tribe that has unique socio-cultural values in the water, if we are a tribe that has unique recreational values in the water—we’re looking for eco-tourism—then we might not care about how much of our land is practically irrigable.

For example, think of the Hualupai Nation. The Hualupai tribe in Arizona is a Grand Canyon tribe. They’re in the uplands. There is not a lot of arable land, but what is the resource that they have? They have a river. And they have a beautiful, natural environment. And they can get lots of money from ecotourism. They don’t care about how much land they can irrigate. They want water in the river because they want people to go fishing, and they want people to go whitewater rafting. So what they see as their water right isn’t a water right in the way that the law usually contemplates it. It’s something different, which is why they negotiate differently.

At the exact same time that you’re seeing these conflicts between Western settlers and indigenous people in the Los Angeles River basin, you’re also seeing a legal conflict between the presence of Mexicans and the presence of incoming white settlers from the United States. In 1848, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, the United States recognized the water rights of certain communities in those territories that were taken under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo. What that meant is that there were certain presidios and certain missions, certain alcaldes—forts, missions, and village water ordinances—that had implicit water rights. These water rights came from Spanish colonial law that actually precedes modern Mexican law. There are water lawyers who spend their entire careers doing nothing but looking back into colonial Spanish law to understand what cities own, what their historic water rights are. And, in fact, as we get into talking about the redevelopment 46

Fig. 2.3

Tribal Reservations

Depiction of Chumash Village on Los Angeles River

Winters Rights & “Time Immemorial�

Navajo

Fig. 2.4

Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla

of Los Angeles River, some of the claims that LA is making for more water in the river are not based on United States law. They are based on Spanish colonial law, what we call Pueblo water rights. So Los Angeles claims that it began as a Spanish Pueblo settled in the 1780s by Spanish settlers. And because of that settlement, continued under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, they have Spanish colonial water rights.

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Prior Appropriation JUNIOR USER 1970 water right

Public Trust Doctrine & Usufructory Rights

SENIOR USER 1910 water right courtesy: wikimedia

Fig. 2.5

First-in-time, First-in-right Beneficial use without waste Forfeiture – use it, or lose it Diligence & “relation-back” Call on the River & the Futile Call Doctrine

The other clash of civilizations going on is a clash between the conception of water rights from white settlers. Most of the white settlers who went into California in the 19th century were people who brought with them the English common law concept of what it means to own water. That law is grounded in water rights under riparianism. Riparianism means if you own land that directly abuts the river, then you have the right to take a reasonable amount of water out of the river. How much is reasonable? It’s about as much as you can take out before your neighbor yells at you.

This system worked fine and existed in California and continues to exist in California. However, in order to encourage more settlers to come out West, into a hostile environment, the United States created a new kind of water right that never existed before. This is the idea of prior appropriation. Prior appropriation is a first-in-time, first-in-right law [2.5]. This means that the first person who got there, dug a ditch and diverted the water out of the river had a senior priority to that quantity of water for that use to any other subsequent water user. So let’s say in 1910 someone diverts a million gallons to irrigate corn. And then in 1970, a junior user shows up and diverts a million gallons to irrigate corn. What happens if there’s only a half a million gallons in the river?

The 1910 water right gets everything and the 1970s water right gets nothing.

That’s what will happen if you go to court.

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Now, what happens in the real world is we bring the lawyers together, order club sandwiches and Diet Cokes, and we work out a deal. But the lawyers will begin by recognizing the senior water right. Now, you might be asking yourself, what is the priority date of a Native American tribe in this system? And the answer is their priority date is time immemorial. They are senior to everyone on the river. Now, what this law does is it starts driving people to run, literally run, into the desert. How do you get smart, hard-working, ambitious people to invest a lot of money in the desert? You tell them it’s a race. And if you win the race, what’s your prize? The most valuable resource in the universe, which is what water is because, let’s face it, the big blue rock that we’re spinning on right now is only interesting because it’s blue. If it were any other color, we wouldn’t care about it. It would be just another rock.

We can go more into this if you’re interested. For example what does a prior appropriation for water rights mean for the future of space colonization and space development? Right now, if you ask yourself who owns the water on Mars, the answer is the first person to get there. Do we want that to be the rule? It’s a great law to encourage people to run into the middle of a hostile environment and invest. It’s not a great law for managing that resource into the future.

Let’s talk about the Owens Valley and some of the challenges that comes around pricing water. Water is inherently difficult to know its value. It’s one of the reasons why in the Owens Valley, there is a great article by University of Arizona economist Gary Libecap, who says that the water users in the Owens Valley were fairly compensated based on the amount of money that was usually paid for water rights for farming. But when they sold it in an inter-basin transfer to Los Angeles, did they really get a fair price at that time? This can be thought of as the water / diamond paradox. What Adam Smith was writing about in The Wealth of Nations is the idea that water has an extremely high use value, but a very low exchange value [2.6]. We need water for life but we don’t want to pay a lot for it. On the other hand a diamond’s scarcity and cultural value means it has an extremely high exchange value, but a very low use value. What is it about water that keeps it from being priced effectively? In part it is that sometimes water just falls for free out of the sky. So why should I pay a lot for something that falls for free out of the sky?

Another part is our understanding that water is a human right, which means if water is a human right, should you have to pay for it at all? But if you don’t pay for water, if you don’t internalize your costs of consumption, then how can water infrastructure be financed? And what incentives do you have to conserve water?

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The Water - Diamond Paradox

“The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.�

Fig. 2.6

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Bifurcated Systems

A Line in the Sand

Aquifer

Water Table

Pumping level Well casing Well screen Impermeable layer

50

Fig. 2.7

Cone of Depression

drawdown

well

One of the other challenges that was happening in Los Angeles at the time was, because they had such a variable water system, because it was hard to live harmoniously with nature and be a large city, they either undertook large, inter-basin transfers such as that from the Owens Valley, or they sunk a lot of wells. You drill a lot of wells and you run into a really difficult challenge in water law, which is a bifurcation of your legal regime. We treat surface water as if it is one kind of resource, and we treat groundwater as if it is a completely different kind of resource. So at the time in California, you had riparianism—old British common law governing how use water, tribal water rights, Pueblo water rights from Spanish colonial law, prior appropriation water rights—first in time first in use—and a completely separate regime governing groundwater. And the groundwater regime was a basic rule of capture, meaning suck as much of it out of the ground as you want as long as you own the land [2.7]. But the problem with this is that it assumes that you can draw property lines between the water. And anybody with a seventh grade understanding of hydrology knows that there is a connection between surface water and ground water. How did all that water get into the ground?

From the surface.

These challenges surrounding water management continue to haunt California and the city of Los Angeles to this day. We struggle in the west to reconcile all of these disparate legal regimes to know how to manage water.

And this clash of civilizations, this clash of different ideas and values about what it is to own water continues to frustrate water planning in Los Angeles.

One of the other challenges, though, is not just this clash of civilization, but also the theme from Tarzan, which is that this was a dangerous river. In the 1920s, during the Dust Bowl, you had lots of Okies—think of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath—leaving Oklahoma and going to California in search of work. These were climate refugees, similar to climate refugees who we talk about now. These climate refugees were fleeing a desiccated landscape to find work. They arrive in Los Angeles. And when you arrive into a city and you see this green, verdant Tarzan-esque jungle along this river, where do you settle? You settle along the river, which is what these Okies did. As the Okies settled along the river in these informal camps, they did not appreciate the variability of the river and how dangerous the flooding system was. And every year, for years, hundreds of Okies would die in flood events on the Los Angeles River. On New Year’s Day 1934, over 150 people died in one flood event on the Los Angeles River. In fact, Woody Guthrie, the famous American folk singer, has this beautiful song about the New Year’s Eve flood and the Okies that were killed in that flood event.

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A variable river is a dangerous thing. It’s beautiful. It’s wild. But it’s deadly. And what have we done in an attempt to live harmoniously with something this deadly? We do what we do with lots of deadly natural things, we cage it. And when you cage something, you tame it. You control it, and you deprive it of something that makes it wild and fascinating and mysterious. The way that the Los Angeles River was caged was that the US Army Corps of Engineers lined it and effectively turned it into a storm channel. Now, the United States Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction over the management of all navigable waters. The attempt to define what is navigable is another complex issue in the law.

Once the US Army Corps of Engineers invests in that water infrastructure, it has sovereign immunity from any lawsuit that might be brought because of damages wrought by the flood event. So if there is a flood event in the Los Angeles River, and let’s say someone is fleeing with a cyborg on a motorcycle in the bottom of it, and all of a sudden there’s a flash flood event and that cyborg and the young ward that he’s trying to protect are killed in the flood event, can they sue the United States government? They can’t. The United States government is immune from liability.

Something similar occurred on the 17th Street floodwall in New Orleans [2.8].

On August 29, 2005 in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, a federal floodwall, atop a levee on the 17th Street Canal, the largest and most important drainage canal for the city, gave way here, causing flooding that killed hundreds. This breach was one of 50 ruptures on the federal flood protection system that occurred that day. In 2008, the US district court, the Eastern District of Louisiana, placed responsibility for the floodwalls collapse squarely on the US Army Corps of Engineers. However, the agency was protected from financial liability in the Flood Control Act of 1928. You might say “that’s not fair. It’s not fair that the federal government should escape liability.” But ask yourself what would happen if we imposed flood liability on the federal government? What would they do? Would they stop investing in flood control? And is that what we want?

Now, let’s talk about the Terminator era [2.9]. What are the themes of The Terminator? We talked about clashes of civilizations. We’ve talked about dangerous, untamed rivers and attempt to tame them. What are the themes of The Terminator? Now, while The Terminator is a deep and complex piece of art, there are several themes that I think we can talk about. At the core is the idea of harnessing the power of technology to be able to grow and to develop, but in that 52

Fig. 2.8

growth and in that development, we run the risk of losing our connection to the natural world and in turn losing our control of that technology.

Let’s talk about how this works in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, again, even though it acquired all of that water from the Owens Valley did not have enough [2.10]. So it began to look for other water sources. What are the other water sources that it sought? It sought water from the Colorado River.

The Colorado River serves seven states and two countries. It’s a beautiful, incredible river that carved out the Grand Canyon. And Los Angeles leaders said what we’ll do is we will dig a giant ditch and we will divert water all the way from the Colorado River on the far eastern border of California and divert it into Los Angeles. To do this they created the Metropolitan Water District and the Colorado River aqueduct.

Every time Los Angeles gets thirsty, what does Los Angeles do? It seeks water from another basin. It can’t rely on the Los Angeles River because the river Rhett Larson 53

Harnessing the Power of Technology to Grow and Develop, but Losing Our Connection to the Natural World and Losing Control of Technology Meant to Serve Us courtesy: wikimedia

Fig. 2.9

The “Terminator Era” of Western Water

is simply too variable. It is not a reliable water source. So it either sucks its groundwater dry, or it takes water, arguably, from someone else. This was the age of what was called “reclamation” in the era of the Dust Bowl. The federal government created the Bureau of Reclamation during the Great Depression.

To provide jobs during the Depression the government created the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the “we can take it boys.” The “we can take it boys” were men who began working in reclamation projects funded by the federal government which financed large dams, large reservoirs, large infrastructure projects to dam up water and to divert it into farms [2.11]. It is because of the “we can take it boys” and the Bureau of Reclamation that you can affordably eat a salad right now in the cold of March—because farmers in the Imperial Valley and a bunch of farmers in the Whelton-Mohawk Irrigation District are farming those vegetables. If they weren’t, you would not be able to afford those vegetables. They would be very expensive.

Let’s think about the power of what water can do. You move water from these rivers, and you move it out into these arid regions and it transforms the landscape. But in transforming the landscape, we lose some connection to the water. Now as you see here, people can play in an irrigation ditch [2.12]. But we have moved away from a wild, untamed, variable system to a lined channel.

This photograph shows the exact same stretch, but only a few years later [2.13, 2.14].

54

Fig. 2.10

To return to Los Angeles—the city seeks to free itself from this variable system and looks for water from another basin. To help you understand how this works, imagine the world is like a golf ball and each divot is a drainage basin. In each divot the catchment all the water drains to a common point, and the boundary line around the catchment is what’s called the watershed.

Los Angeles seeks inter-basin transfers. They want to go into somebody else’s divot and put their water into the LA divot. Inter-basin transfers are exceptionally controversial, because people say that it is a form of mining water. The water will not return to the system. If we pull water out of the same divot and put it on top of our crops and our cities, ultimately all of that water will just return to the basin. But if we take the water out of the basin and export it, the concern is that we’re mining the water. Clearly, Los Angeles mines water in response to its challenges over the Los Angeles River.

This situation gives rise to what I think I can safely say is the most complex area of law in the entire world, which is the Law of the River, the law that governs the Colorado River. In 1922, the seven states and two countries that share the Colorado River entered into the Colorado River Compact. And initially all that compact did was split the river evenly; 7 and 1/2 million acre feet to the upper basin and 7 and 1/2 million acre feet to the lower basin. In 1944, when we were seeking an alliance with Mexico as part of World War II, we entered into the 1944 Rivers Treaty and guaranteed Mexico 1 and 1/2 Rhett Larson 55

million acre feet of water (enough water to cover 1 ½ million acres with one foot of water), every single year. This water was basically what we assumed were the dregs of the system; it was the water that was left over.

What happened next was that California attempted to induce Arizona to join in the game but Arizona didn’t want to sign onto the compact. So California pushed a political agenda that passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act. The Boulder Canyon Project Act effectively divided the waters of the lower basin between California, Arizona, and Nevada. California gets 4.4 million acre feet Arizona gets 2.8 million acre feet, and Nevada gets 300,000 acre feet every single year. Arizona fought tooth and nail to stop the Boulder Canyon Project Act. And in 1963, Arizona sued California. In law, when two states sue each other, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction. It goes straight to the United States Supreme Court. And in Arizona v. California, the Supreme Court essentially sided with California and recognized the divisions made by the Boulder Canyon Project Act. This decision empowered the US Department of the Interior to effectively be the manager, or in legal terms, the Master of the River. But the decision also excluded from all of Arizona’s allocations, all of Arizona’s own rivers. So the Gila River and the Salt River were all excluded which saved Arizona.

Now what does this mean? It means that inside of the river basin we have something called a structural deficit. If 7 and 1/2 million acre feet go to the upper basin. 7 and 1/2 million acre feet go to a lower base and 1 and ½ million acre feet goes to Mexico, but we lose about 1 and 1/2 million acre feet every single year to evapo-transpiration alone, this means the entire legal regime that governs the critical water supply of millions and millions of people in an arid region assumes that there is 18 million acre feet the river every year. But we know from tree ring analysis that the 1,000 year average is about 13.5 million acre feet, which means when we talk about drought, there is always a drought, because the river is over allocated. There is never enough water to meet everyone’s demands.

So what has happened? California built the Colorado River aqueduct and uses the Metropolitan Water District to deliver an enormous amount of Colorado River water to California. In order to induce Arizona to agree to the Colorado River Compact, California agreed to help finance the Central Arizona Project. Now Phoenix builds a giant canal to divert Colorado River water into Phoenix. We depend upon these large scale diversions. Phoenix would not exist at the size that it does and LA would not exist at the size that it does if we did not divert the Colorado River that way. What happens now that there’s not enough water? In 2007 the Department of the Interior 56

enacted shortage sharing guidelines. They’re based on the elevation of Lake Mead, which is the largest reservoir on the system. If the water level drops below 1,075 feet above sea level, Arizona will lose 320,000 acre feet. Nevada will lose 13,000 acre feet. And Mexico, which has agreed to shortage sharing in separate treaties, will lose 50,000 acre feet. That is a situation when there is a relatively light shortage. To give you an idea, as of this morning, the water level in Lake Mead was at 1,081.68 feet. Every day we wake up and worry about the elevation of that reservoir. We drop below 1,050, we face heavy shortage. If we drop below 1,025 we face extreme shortage. If we drop below 1,000, there is no law. It’s like the crazy violence in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Just to give you a taste--one of the benefits of the system, as crazy as it seems, is we obsess at 1,075 in the entire West. All we think about is how we can stay up above 1,075 feet. But at 880 feet above sea level in Lake Mead is what is called “dead pool,” the level at which the reservoir drops below the outfalls which is less than a 200 foot drop from 1075 feet.

One of the reasons that Cape Town, South Africa is in the catastrophic situation that they are in right now is because they didn’t worry about their reservoirs at 300 feet above deadpool. They started worrying about the reservoirs when they were reaching dead pool. Today we are currently in negotiations as Basin States on the Drought Contingency Plan. The drought contingency plan addresses how will we live in this world. But, how will we adjust to have the new climate that simply is not delivering enough water?

So far, frankly, the internal politics of each state are a greater obstacle than the politics between the states. Arizona and California don’t get along very well when it comes to water. In fact, in the 1930s, California began building Parker Dam. As they were building Parker Dam, Arizona had spies and their own construction crew. When California crossed the Colorado River into Arizona’s territory, the spies that were hired by Governor Morse at the time rode into Phoenix to warn him that California had invaded Arizona. The governor called out the National Guard troops to attack California and blow up the Parker Dam. Harold Ickes, at the time the Secretary of the Interior, caught wind of Arizona’s impending attack on California and called out the U.S. army to intercept Arizona and keep them from igniting a civil war.

Fortunately, U.S. troops arrived in time and we avoided violence between the two states. At the exact same moment, martial law had been declared in both Texas and Oklahoma in a trans-boundary dispute over the Red River. In fact at this same time in the 1930s, there was correspondence between Adolf Hitler and his generals speculating that the United States would not enter into a global conflict because they are about to descend into a water-based civil war.

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The Age of Reclamation

Fig. 2.12

Fig. 2.11

Great Depression & Civilian Conservation Corps

58

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Fig. 2.14

Fig. 2.13

So we in Arizona don’t get along great with California [2.15]. We get along much better with Mexico than we do with California. So interestingly, in Minute 319 between the United States and Mexico and again more recently in Minute 23, Mexico has agreed to shortage sharing, which means if there is a drought, Mexico will accept less [2.16]. What is in it for Mexico? Why do they accept less? Mexico accepts less because we agreed help to finance some infrastructure for them and because we give them storage capacity behind our dams. So even though our national politics right now are not strengthening our diplomatic relationship with Mexico, within the basin that relationship is strong. And one thing that’s important to emphasize is our hydro-diplomatic relationship with Mexico is one of the most important diplomatic relationships that we have as a country. And being able to maintain a strong, cooperative relationship with Mexico is in the absolute best interest of the United States. It is a gross oversimplification to think that the only challenges that we deal with our neighbors are issues of drugs or immigration.

They have become a critical partner and a close friend in the management of the Colorado River. And it is important to invest in the relationship with Mexico because that relationship is what allows us to more effectively manage the river.

Now, California, in this Terminator era, is also trying to respond to the challenges of groundwater overdraft. Part of the challenges of groundwater overdraft is that California has enacted the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act [2.17]. Part of this act allocates authority down to the local level to manage groundwater supplies. The problem with this is that the law does not become effective until 2040, by which time a lot of the rising drought conditions will have done much of the damage that they’re going to prevent. In the end, groundwater is not a meaningfully sustainable water supply. So you might say, well, water’s renewable. Why would we worry about its sustainability? But groundwater effectively is like a bathtub that every single day is increased by one drop of water from the faucet. For now, the bathtub is full. But if every day one drop enters the bathtub and every day you take out a bucket, it’s not a renewable situation [2.18]. We could drain all of the aquifers in California. But if we did that, it would take literally millions of years for them to recharge again [2.19].

One of the great challenges that is happening in California right now is the relationship that we have over groundwater. Part of this is the struggle that we have about maintaining water in the river for natural purposes, or for stream flows for fish and the environment. Farmers in California quite rightly get upset when people say “You get 70% or 80% of the total water supply.

It’s not fair for farmers to get that much water.” And farmers will respond, “No, we don’t get that much water. We get 70% of 50%. 50% goes to the 60

environment.� For a lot of farmers and rural communities in California, they argue give less water to the environment, give more water to agriculture, or give less water... away.

Now, there are obvious environmental implications for taking away water to maintain in stream flows, because those in stream flows preserve those ecosystems or maintain those ecosystems. Moreover there are important anthropocentric reasons for maintaining in stream flows. You need the power of that river to push back against a rising ocean. The more that ocean rises with climate change, the more it not only displaces communities, but you get saline intrusion into coastal aquifers. It is in the best interest of California farmers to let enough of the water reach the ocean, because we need that water in the river to fight back the ocean. Otherwise the ocean is just going to continue to intrude in those coastal aquifers. The bank of water that those farmers will need when it’s not raining will become salty and they won’t be able to use it anymore.

Drainage Basins

basin boundary tributary river

Fig. 2.15

Governing Water

ground water

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Sharing the Colorado River The Law of the River The Colorado River Compact 1944 Rivers Treaty Boulder Canyon Project Act Metropolitan Water District Colorado River Aqueduct Central Arizona Project Arizona v. California The Structural Deficit Minutes 319 & 323 courtesy: u.s. bureau of reclamation

Drought Contingency Plan

Fig. 2.16

Dept of the Interior Guidelines

Colorado River Inter-State Allocation

7.5 maf to Upper; 7.5 maf to Lower; 1.5 maf to Mexico

Fig. 2.17

(1 acre foot = 325,851 gallons; 43,560 cubic feet; 1,233 cubic meters)

62

Lake Mead 2007 Shortage Sharing Guidelines

Jan 1st elevation

Arizona Reduction

Nevada Reduction

Mexico Reduction

1075’

320,000 AF

13,000 AF

50,000 AF

1050’

400,000 AF

17,000 AF

70,000 AF

1025’

480,000 AF

20,000 AF

125,000 AF

Fig. 2.18

No reductions to California In Minute 319 & 323, Mexico agreed to voluntary reductions

Managing Groundwater in California

California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act

Fig. 2.19

Critical Overdraft Problem Medium & high priority groundwater basins, stakeholders form groundwater sustainability agencies by 2017 to oversee plans by 2020 & 2022, in order to achieve “sustainability” by 2040

Rhett Larson 63

So where do we go for the future. How can we be more like Bruce Lee? Let’s talk about Bruce Lee’s theories and how we can be water [2.20]. To be more like Bruce Lee, we need to prioritize our water management in the west. The most important priority is not conservation. Much of the low hanging fruit of conservation has actually been achieved in the western United States. There’s lots of water recycling. People are doing a much better job desert-scaping their yards. Most of the advances we need to make in conservation will be expensive. They’ll cost a lot of money. How do we know how much money we need to spend? We need to understand our water better. So the most important thing for western water right now is better monitoring, better modeling, better data sharing. We need better information. We also need to resolve water rights disputes.

Much of the water rights that go on in the western United States are subject to ongoing adjudications. Nobody knows who owns what. And because we don’t know that, it’s difficult to move the water around or to transfer it or to compensate people who are losing their water. And we need to enhance our adaptive governance regime, which means like Bruce Lee said, “In order to manage water, you must be like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes a cup. We have to be like water” [2.21]. You put us into a new climate, we adapt to the new climate. But right now our water system is far too rigid. Next, we need to focus on water conservation. Then to the extent possible, we need to store our water better, which means greater incentive for ground water recharge. And then we need to augment our water supply, if necessary.

So one of the things we can talk about when it talks about connecting us more closely with water is how do we design cities, communities, and infrastructure to connect us more closely with our water supply? One of the challenges that we have in the West is that people don’t live with their water.

And when you don’t live with your water, you don’t appreciate your water.

You don’t respect your water. You don’t value your water. In other places with water issues where water is valued, there are beautiful designs. This design for example in Rajasthan in India is just an exceptional piece of infrastructure that connects people to their water supply [2.22].

In Los Angeles, the idea of revitalizing the Los Angeles River becomes a means to discuss how do you connect a city again with water. And if you can connect them with water, what will that mean? Will it mean that they will value the water more appropriately [2.23]? As you can see, here are schemes for the Los Angeles River, the early parts of the restoration of Los Angeles River. I think most people in this room are aware of the efforts the 64

Be water, my friends

Fig. 2.20

Toward a Bruce Lee Era of Western Water

enter the dragon film - 1973

Western Water

Meeting the Bruce Lee Standard

Fig. 2.21

1. Understand Our Water • Improved monitoring and modelling • Resolve Water Rights Disputes • Information sharing and stakeholder participation • Enhance adaptive governance 2. Conserve Our Water • Reduce nonrevenue water • Invest in efficiency and recycling • Encourage a “hydro-culture” 3. Store Our Water • Careful reservoir management • Incentives for groundwater recharge 4. Augment Our Water • Forestry Management • If necessary and willing buyer, can be done responsibly

Rhett Larson 65

courtesy: wikimedia

Fig. 2.22

courtesy: wikimedia

Fig. 2.23

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Los Angeles River and its revitalization. Frank Gehry, an exceptional architect, has been hired to help develop the Los Angeles River. But the plan has already become extremely controversial. It’s become controversial for a whole host of reasons. For example, if you want to be able to turn the Los Angeles River into an honest-to-goodness river again, what’s the most important thing you need? What makes a river a river? Water.

Where are you going to get that water? Are you going to go to rural communities in the San Fernando Valley and tell them they need to give up water so that there can be a beautiful river infrastructure system in Los Angeles? They are going to fight you. Someone will have to give up water in order to maintain flow in that river. Do you want to use the restored river as a ground water recharge facility? This is something that people have been talking about. Frank Gehry has talked about using the river for ground water recharge, managing it. To do that you slow the water flow down, removing the concrete channel, and allow the water to percolate into the ground. The problem is that if you’re going to remove the channel from the river but still have it be an effective flood control measure, the channel will have to be seven times wider. So if we’re going to recharge the aquifer and remove the lining, then we’re going to have to take a lot of land from many people. This then runs the risk of becoming green gentrification. The idea that people will be displaced in the name of better green infrastructure and other trade-offs is politically difficult.

How do we have a system that allows us to adapt to being able to bring this resource closer to people and allow them to connect with their water when water rights are tied up with other communities, when our flood infrastructure is as rigid as it is, and as necessary it is to protect human life?

Do we bring the river closer to people and then bring disease vectors closer to people? What happens if you build a big river that runs through the middle of Los Angeles and you have a West Nile virus outbreak? Now this mosquito breeding habitat is suddenly closer to people. It’s not something people thought about. The idea of bringing water closer sounds great and it sounds like an important way of connecting people to their resource—but there are unforeseen consequences.

There all kinds of political controversies that surround this issue. Should we favor ground water recharge? Should we favor habitat restoration? If you favor habitat restoration and you’re connecting fragmented habitat communities—that sounds really wonderful. But at the same time, people want bike paths. Do you want bike paths on the same path where mountain Rhett Larson 67

lions live? Again, there is the issue of flood management, this is a risky river.

This is a dangerous river. And the idea that you could simply un-cage it without consequences is dangerous. If you want to un-cage it, you better be ready for the consequences of un-caging it. It is a wild animal. As you know there’s something beautiful and fascinating and mysterious about a wild river, but that is true of a wild tiger too.

Los Angeles is one of the most park poor large cities in the country. We can help bring more open spaces, more parks to Los Angeles through river revitalization. But what are those parks going to look like? Are they going to be turf parks that require irrigation? Are they going to consume a lot of water? Do we go to farmers and rural communities and tell them you can’t grow the lettuce that everybody gets to afford inexpensively in the wintertime so that LA residents can have more parks? That’s a difficult sales pitch for a lot of people. And it is not just a difficult sales pitch for FROG, which is the Frogtown Resistance to Ongoing Gentrification. These groups oppose the revitalization because they don’t want to be displaced. Do you on the east coast oppose the revitalization because you like being able to afford salads in the wintertime? And do we provide these kinds of amenities for the city if it means that other communities are going to have to give up their water?

This means we have to talk about ways to either move our water supply around or augment our water supply [2.24]. We could desalinate. But desalination is expensive. It’s energy intensive. It has significant environmental externalities. We could engage in bulk water export. You would call up Canada and say, let’s fill a tanker with water and we’ll ship it down to California.

But water is heavy and it costs a lot of money to move it. And that amount of water will disappear in an instant in California. Do we engage in better watershed management? This means, do we manage our forests better? Do we move scrub brush and invasive species, so that more water gets to the river basin? This sounds great. There’s a lot of consensus in the West about better forestry management for improved water supplies. But what is scrub brush to one person is essential nesting habitat for another. Or do we engage in cloud seeding? Do you want to have a bunch of airplanes flying over Los Angeles or over the Sierra Madres and spitting out silver iodide and frozen carbon dioxide to make it rain?

Cloud seeding sounds like a magical solution to the problem, but cloud seeding has all kinds of environmental consequences, potential environmental consequences, all kinds of complicated legal questions. Who owns rain if you make it rain? And then there are all kinds of complicated legal questions like, 68

Western Future?

Augmentation

Desalination Bulk water imports

courtesy: wikimedia

Fig. 2.24

Watershed management Cloud seeding

who’s liable if you make it flood? Because you might be thinking, well, that just sounds like science fiction. There’s no way in the world that this cloud seeding nonsense works. In fact, it works so well that there’s an international treaty that bans its use in military affairs. It’s called EN-MOD. And why? Because in the 1970s, the United States in Operation Popeye used cloud seeding to flood out Vietcong roads.

So if water augmentation is difficult, what do we do alternatively? We need to build more adaptation into our system. We need to be more like Bruce Lee. How do we adapt? We need to know where we can adapt and at what cost we can adapt. Let’s think about a tree in the way that we imagine adaptation: the roots are not adaptive [2.25]. The roots are hidden. You’re not going to alter the roots. They are what they are. They are social and cultural norms and our traditions. We value them. We preserve them. We want to transmit them.

The trunk—the trunk—is slightly more adaptive. You have a little bit of give in a trunk. But a trunk still is pretty resilient. And it puts a premium on legitimacy.

Think about the Constitution as a trunk. The Constitution is not a particularly adaptive instrument. It’s hard to change the Constitution. The Fifth Amendment guarantees against the government taking your private property.

It also prevents flexibility in water rights because the government can’t just come in and say “You own this water? Not anymore. I’m going to give Rhett Larson 69

Leaves: low resilience and highly adaptive requiring little disruption; premium on responsiveness and participation

Branches: limited resilience and fairly adaptive requiring moderate disruption; premium on predictability and competence

Roots: socio-cultural norms & traditions; premium on preservation and transmission of community values, extreme resilience with limited adaptive capacity requiring extremely disruptive condition

Fig. 2.25

Trunk: high degree of resilience with slight adaptive capacity requiring exceptional disruptive condition; premium on legitimacy

The United Basins of America

courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey

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Fig. 2.26

John Wesley Powell’s Vision

it to somebody who needs it more.” The Constitution precludes that from happening. So there is not a lot of give in the system. But maybe we don’t want there to be a lot of give. What about the branches? These branches are much more flexible. You might think of this as legislation. There may be high political cost to negotiate the legislation, but it is not impossible to change something like the Clean Water Act if we wanted to.

And then you might think about the leaves, which are almost too adaptable.

They get blown around. These can be grass roots social movements that rise up in response to a problem, and then disappear again. Each one of these layers of adaptation has costs. To get leaves to adapt costs nothing. But to get us to adapt legislatively or constitutionally will require a significant shock.

Think about how difficult it is right now in the Colorado River basin for us to negotiate a new way to live in this changed climate. We can’t find a way to do it. This is because even something as shocking as the droughts that we have endured in these recent years have not forced us to adapt yet. So adaptation isn’t just about adaptive capacity. It’s also about the shock that forces you to adapt. And sometimes that shock has to be significant and the shock has to hurt.

I don’t want people to be afraid. I don’t want people to panic. But a little bit of water concern is an important thing for everyone to have in their heart. So what are some other ways that we might be able to adapt? Well, when John Wesley Powell was commissioned by Congress to go into the western United States, he made a proposal [2.26]. He said that state boundaries should be based on the watersheds. Each dimple, each drainage catchment should be the jurisdiction. And that way you internalize all of your water consumption.

All of your water pollution and all of your water scarcity stays in the basin.

And we also lower transaction costs by making everybody familiar with the water supply. This way the United States can’t externalize its water problems to Mexico by polluting water or damming water. And we don’t have people in Washington DC who know nothing about the Colorado River attempting to make decisions about it. We put all of the governance in the basin itself. The problem with that is can you really politically redraw state boundaries like that? It may be impossible.

But there are creative ways that we might be able to solve this. For example, what might happen if you created treaties and interstate compacts that create governance regimes that cover the entire basin and then give those regimes a fiduciary obligation to manage the resource to the benefit of all jurisdictions?

If you don’t do that, then there will be a hydro-hegemon in the basin. Or there Rhett Larson

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will be one jurisdiction—California in the Colorado River—who will simply boss everybody else around. They are the hegemon. But if you create a fiduciary obligation to treat all equally, there is at least a legal hook that creates some equity in the system.

Now to introduce adaptive capacity, we can do one of two things. We can re-imagine what western water law means, which is a stronger public trust doctrine. This is the idea that every drop of water is owned by the state and held in trust for the benefit of all citizens. In that situation the water is owned by the state and people who own water rights own only a usufructuary right, the right to make use of a quantity of it. Because that usufructuary right is not a fully-fledged property right, we can actually take that property right away and reallocate it. This would be a pretty dramatic reimagining of western water law. Or we can create more effective and more equitable water markets that make it easier for us to transfer water rights around to those who need it more and to create discounted banks of water rights for those who will inevitably lose.

Finally, I want to close by taking an even further step back for Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee said “Be water, my friends.” These eras that you see in the Los Angeles River, they track broader ways that we think about sustainability in the world. In the past we had an industrial paradigm that was a time of just

courtesy: wikimedia

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Fig. 2.27

natural resource policy paradigms

using every drop of water. Any drop of water that reached the ocean was a drop of water wasted. Rachel Carson came along and wrote Silent Spring; Love Canal happened and we recognized the concerns for the environment and pollution. More and more data comes and we realize that it’s not just pollution we’re worried about; we are worried about climate change. And right now, the dominant paradigm in thinking about natural resource problems is climate change. We think about it in the context of carbon footprints and degrees Celsius and feet of sea level rise.

I don’t think we should talk about climate change any more. And it’s not because climate change science is bad. It’s not. And it’s not because climate change isn’t important. It is because the paradigm is incomplete. Just like pollution was important, but that paradigm wasn’t enough, we needed to have the climate change paradigm [2.27]. We need a new paradigm. Right now the real problem is not climate change. Climate change simply makes the real problem worse. The real problem is that population growth and increased consumption from economic development means that we will need 50% more food, 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water by 2030. This will happen regardless of climate change, even if we could wave a wand and stop climate change. Climate change just makes this problem worse. And, let’s face it, climate change is having a hard time selling, at least in many places where it needs to sell. This is the way that climate change conversations often happen.

An expert or advocate says, “You need to worry about climate change.”

Somebody else responds “I love it when the climate changes. Leaves changing colors and flowers blooming. Climate change is the best.” So then we say, “No, no, no, no, no, its global warming.” And someone else says “I love global warming, or I love snow from polar vortexes.” And then someone responds, “No, no, no, no, no, it is sea level rise” and someone else says “Then I’m closer to the beach.” And then the concern is raised “No, no, no, no, no. It is going to be two, four, maybe six degrees warmer. It’s going to get that much warmer today.” And someone who hates winter asks “What’s the big deal?” And the answer might be “Well, no polar bears and glaciers and the Arctic.” And again there is an answer “I don’t like any of those things and I don’t live near any of them.”

We have to talk to people about the reasons climate change will matter to them. Why is climate change going to matter? It is going to matter because of droughts, floods, plagues, and wars. That is why climate change matters, which means, referring again to Bruce Lee, we have to be water. The new paradigm should be water security [2.28, 2.29]. We should be talking about water security. Water is not a part of the climate change problem. Climate change is Rhett Larson 73

Water Stress & Water Security how water availability may change, as temperature, populations & industrialization increase

million liters available per person per year extreme stress high stress moderate stress no stress

courtesy: center for environmental systems research, university of kassel .

Fig. 2.28

2050

Water Security

Fig. 2.29

acceptable quantity and quality of water at acceptable costs and risks

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Embedded Water

Fig. 2.30

Virtual Water

Fig. 2.31

Food/ Water /Energy Nexus

Rhett Larson 75

a part of the water problem. Everything is water. Water is embedded in all of our goods, all of our services [2.30]. It is inside of my clothes. It is inside of my food. Water is health and disease. Water is prosperity [2.31]. And it is poverty.

Water is gender equality and gender inequality. One of the greatest threats to gender equality in the world right now is the number of girls and young women in developing countries who spend hours and hours every day just getting water supplies. We bring clean water closer to those communities, and that results in more girls and women in school. Water is racial discrimination and greater racial equality. Water is war. And water is peace.

So we need a greater focus on water. In the words of Bruce Lee, “If we are water,” that is a more integrated and more resonant paradigm than the one we’re living in right now.

Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE] [QUESTION] What are the externalities you mentioned of desalination?

[LARSON] Historically desalination has only been used in countries that are extremely energy rich and extremely water poor. So the oil-rich Gulf States like Saudi Arabia can afford to desalinate. It takes an enormous amount of energy to push that much water through a membrane and remove salt. One of the externalities is the carbon footprint. You’re going to have to burn a lot of fossil fuels to achieve the goal and that has negative impacts. The other externality is the disposal of the brine waste stream. When you’re done desalinating that water, there’s this concentrated brine stream of waste, which has an extremely high level of salinity. Then there are costs to clean the membranes as well. And the technology usually raises water temperature and discharging heated water is toxic to the environment, especially if you discharge it back into a marine habitat.

Now with all of that said, I actually am a desalination optimist. I actually think there’s a bright future for desalination. We just aren’t quite there yet. Take for example some of the most cutting edge desalination facilities in the world. On the Llobrigat in Barcelona in Spain and Tianjin in China, in Ashkelon in Israel, some of these systems are actually remarkably energy efficient. Take for example the plant in the Llobrigat in Spain. In the 1980s, we could generate a 76

single cubic meter of fresh water from seawater with about 35 kilowatt hours of energy. The facility in Spain right now can generate a single cubic meter of freshwater at 2.5 kilowatts. What has happened? How has the technology come that far? Three things have really made a big difference. Number one is photovoltaic solar energy, more solar power. Number two is when we co-locate the desalinization facilities with power generation and with wastewater treatment; this dramatically lowers our cost. So the closer you get the desalination facility to the power generation, you get less transmission loss. Your energy is more efficient. And if you get your desalination closer to your wastewater treatment plant, then again your waste disposal cost is much lower.

The third improvement is in the pressure transfer systems. The waste stream has a certain amount of pressure in it. There is new technology that recycles that pressure from the waste stream into the production stream. Now, what’s the big innovation? The big innovation in the future is what happens if we take this waste stream and you can use it to culture cyanobacteria, blue green algae. And then you can take that blue green algae and use it as biofuel for the desalination plants. If we can crack that code and we can turn our waste into our energy, then desalination becomes a game changer. But we might be 100 years away from that.

[QUESTION] Do you know if LA right now has an urban growth boundary?

[LARSON] It doesn’t. OK. That’s it. That’s the question. And if you think about LA, imagine that you want to undertake the LA River revitalization project. What would you do? You need water for it to be a river. So if your object is a river, you have no choice but to acquire water rights. If you’re Los Angeles—and let’s imagine you’re representing the city of Los Angeles—you might attempt to assert Pueblo water rights and say because we were an alcade in 1780, the Spanish government granted us certain water rights. Those water rights are dated back to 1780. So they predate everybody except for some indigenous tribes. So we have superior title to everybody. And we are laying claim, we’re putting what’s called a call on the river, to take that water based on our Pueblo water rights. The problem is that Spanish colonial law for Pueblo water rights generally recognized the water as only the water that was inside of the city and only water that would be used by the city. And it is not clear that the law would even recognize Los Angeles as having Pueblo water rights because not every community that existed before the treaty Guadalupe Rhett Larson 77

Hidalgo is a Pueblo for purposes of the water rights. And even if they did, it’s not clear that Spanish colonial law will recognize Los Angeles getting those water rights.

So then what do you do if you’re Los Angeles? Do you go to the tribe in Agua Caliente and try and lease tribal water rights? You could attempt to do that, but you need an act of Congress to allow them to have an off reservation lease. Or do you go to the San Fernando Valley and try and buy out water rights from farmers? You know what they’re going to say. The first thing out of their mouths will be “Owens Valley, you’re just doing the same thing to us that you’ve done to farmers before.”

The whole thing becomes this really complex, not just legal, but political issue.

The issues surrounding gentrification and displacement are there. But there’s an even more fundamental issue, which is if you’re going to turn it into a real river, where are you going to get the water?

[QUESTION] So you said the first come, first served rule in terms of water gives Native Indian reservations time immemorial status. How can something like the Dakota Access pipeline be built if it’s going to threaten their water rights in a sense?

[LARSON] The Dakota Access Pipeline is a threat to water quality, not necessarily to their water quantity. And the amount of water that they have a right to is dictated by the Winter’s Doctrine. But the quality of their water is protected by the Clean Water Act. The Dakota Access Pipeline was built because they got the necessary permits from the US Army Corps of Engineers, again coming into play, and from EPA to be able to build that pipeline. Does the pipeline potentially threaten their water quality? It absolutely does. But it is unlikely that they’re going to be able to assert their water quantity rights in order to protect their water quality. There are ways but it is difficult to do. And this just goes into one of the fundamental challenges of water policy, which is we draw silly little lines all over the place in our water policy. And we treat ground water and surface water as if they’re different things. And we treat water quality and water quantity as if they’re different things. But in the end, the cleanliness of our water depends on a lot on the quantity of our water.

The solution to pollution is dilution. And if we want to be able to have cleaner rivers, we need rivers with more water.

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[QUESTION] You mentioned a couple times in your presentation rigid infrastructure.

Could you just help us imagine what a less rigid infrastructure or flexible infrastructure would look like for the LA River?

[LARSON] For the LA River, you have to understand the idea of adaptive capacity— resilience is a word that has dual meanings. On the one hand, things that are resilient are strong. They hold up well against change. But resilience can be a bad thing as well. A resilient, fascist regime is bad. You don’t like resilience.

Adaptation is the same thing. A system that adapts can be great. But too much adaptation can be dangerous. The Tarzan era of the Los Angeles River is a perfect illustration. Then it was a wonderfully adaptive river. There were not that many people, and that amount of people pulling the amount of water that they needed came out of a very small river, and they either moved away from the river or they died whenever it flooded. If we’re going to have an adaptive infrastructure in the Los Angeles River, it’s going to come at costs.

And the costs will either be more threats from flood events or we’re going to have to do some expansion of upstream dams and reservoirs in order to do more flood management. Or we’re going to have to expand the bottom of the Los Angeles River.

There are a lot of upsides to the expansion of the bottom of the Los Angeles River. One possible solution would be to combine infrastructure with law and policy so that we could create a regime that allowed for credits for ground water recharge. So if we expand the bottom of the Los Angeles River and we displace all of these populations, what can we do to help them? One thing that we could do is to create a managed ground water recharge system in the bottom of the river. If this effectively recharges the aquifer, then all of the people who are benefiting from the healthier aquifer system will have to find some way to compensate the people who were displaced.

Another way would be to give the people who are displaced credits to the additional water supply that’s being generated because they’ve left. And if they have those credits, they can sell those credits to other farmers or other municipalities who want to pull groundwater out of the ground. So if we expand the base and have a managed groundwater recharge supply and then give displaced people access to be able to sell the additional supply that they created by moving, maybe that’s a more adaptive regime.

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[QUESTION] Does this mean that if you can recharge the lower basin near where the river empties out into the ocean, that would then help with the incursion of salt water?

[LARSON] Yes. [QUESTION] So there is a real benefit to the region, because otherwise mostly bringing water down and dumping it in the ground in LA doesn’t do you a lot of good.

[LARSON] Right.

[QUESTION] But there is a positive, if you can, in fact, protect the river mouth and protect the region itself. That becomes a value, which would then tie into what you were just talking about.

[LARSON] Right. You could create some sort of system where there are premiums for coastal aquifer protection, because the coastal aquifers are the more vulnerable ones. The more water you put in estuary systems for the protection of freshwater coastal aquifers, there should be some premium on the credit that is generated.

[QUESTION] I would like to know more about the centralized watershed system. What are the pros and cons besides the political controversies that it would generate, if such a system were applied as a planning model?

[LARSON] Let’s take a look at a couple of recent legal disputes on river basins to give you a sense of the way that this works. In the Delaware River Basin, the Delaware River Basin Commission is a multi-state compact. A compact is effectively a treaty between states to manage a resource. All of the states that share the Delaware River Basin entered into a compact. That compact created the Delaware River Basin Commission which is a governance organization.

That organization is so powerful that it can issue permits. It can enforce permits. It can issue fines. It can issue bonds. It can finance itself. It is an 80

honest to goodness government. But it is so powerful, that its own members can be afraid of it. So, for example, if Pennsylvania decides that they want to engage in fracking and New York doesn’t want allow that to happen, New York can use its political power inside of the Delaware River Basin Commission to issue a moratorium on fracking in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania will see its involvement in the River Basin Commission as a sacrifice of its own sovereignty. So it’s this Goldilocks problem. If you make the River Basin Commission too powerful, you will scare states away from cooperating. If you don’t make it powerful enough, then it can’t accomplish anything.

This is what happened on the Red River Basin Commission. Texas and Oklahoma recently sued each other in the United States Supreme Court.

Texas said we’re allowed to go into Oklahoma to pump Oklahoma’s groundwater and ship it back in to Texas. And Oklahoma said, over our dead bodies. They sued each other in the United States Supreme Court. And what they’ve effectively found was that the Red River Basin Commission didn’t even have data on how much water was there. And so there was a provision in the compact that said if there was surplus water, Texas could take some of the surplus. But the River Basin Commission is so underfunded that they didn’t even have any data on how much water was in the system so they don’t know if they have a deficit or a surplus. So having an entire jurisdictional basin level governance regime requires striking a very difficult Goldilocks balance between too weak and too strong.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Rhett Larson

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April 2, 2018

RESTORING MILL CREEK

Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice & Urban Design Anne Whiston Spirn

[SNYDER] Welcome to the last of our three lectures for the Critical Conservation Colloquia. This is the third in a series that was created to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity. The series presents conversations with noted scholars in support of our course, Power and Place, Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment where we analyze processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the built North American environment by investigating places where cultural conflict and spatial patterns of exclusion have left an indelible imprint on the character of the city.

The course is part of the Critical Conservation Program of the MDes area at GSD that looks at conflicts over place-making that often involve the uses and abuses of history. Geographer Doreen Massey observed that in the ongoing debate about the identity of a place are conflicting interpretations of the past used to legitimate a particular understanding of the present that can then be wielded as arguments for what the future should be. By addressing whose history is being told, whose future is being created, who benefits, who is excluded and included, we focus on issues of social justice as applied to the design and continued transformation of places.

Our intention in the Power and Place course is to foster an understanding of urban ethics and political awareness that is applicable to different parts of the built world by developing a broader understanding of the dimensions of the cultural ecology of a place over time. This year we’re looking at Los Angeles through the frame of the Los Angeles River. And as Marc Reisner noted in Cadillac Desert, the law of the West is that water flows toward power and money.

[THOMAS] I’m the other part of the duo that runs Critical Conservation and I get the pleasure of introducing Anne Spirn. To most of you, she does not need to be introduced because she is already famous in so many ways here. Anne is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape, Architecture and Planning at MIT. She is the third speaker in our series, the first, Allen Hess, came all the way from Los Angeles, just about as far away as you could go and still be on our continent. Alan was followed by Rhett Larson, from the University of Arizona who introduced issues of water law. And now Anne comes all the way from MIT.

Anne Whiston Spirn 83

Restoring Mill Creek:

Power and Place GSD 2018

Fig. 3.1

Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice, and Urban Design

Anne has been part of Susan and my life or a long time. She arrived at Penn from Radcliffe with a degree in Art History, and as my memory serves, she was admitted to the doctoral program in Art History where I was studying.

And then a year in, Anne decided that the really important work was occurring upstairs with Ian McHarg, and Anne marched upstairs and said, “I want to be in this program.” And in the era of risk taking that graduate school was at that point, which was much more fun than the regularized world of the present, the Landscape program said “Fine”. And Anne disappeared from Art History and became part of a new world. This was to the benefit of everybody because Anne brought her historian’s and cultured eye to issues of landscape and design that has really informed her work ever since and makes her such an important part of the way we see things.

We celebrate her teaching career. After gaining practice experience in the McHarg office, Anne came to the landscape program at Harvard where she wrote The Granite Garden. She then returned to the University of Pennsylvania as the chair of the Landscape Architecture department and began the process of looking at Mill Creek and its environment and asking important questions about a landscape that was devalued, unloved, and ill-regarded in the very shadow of the university. Her work and her process leading to her discoveries are a model that all of us can learn from.

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Please welcome Anne Spirn.

[APPLAUSE] [SPIRN] I want to tell some stories about power and place, not just about the power of politics and money, but also about the power of natural forces and the power of individual people. These are stories of invisible forces and the pitfalls of failing to recognize and address those forces. They are stories about learning to see these invisible forces, to help others to see them and to produce designs and plans that recognize and reveal the invisible.

My first story begins with The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, which was published when I was an associate professor in Landscape Architecture here at the Graduate School of Design. When I first met my future editor in 1979, she asked: “What’s your book about?”

“It’s about nature in the city and how differently we’d design cities if we thought of the city as part of the natural world instead of separate from it.”

“What’s your goal?”

“To change the way cities are designed and built.”

“So who’s your audience?”

“Architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners.”

“Do you think architects, landscape architects, and urban designers and planners control the way the city is designed and built? What about politicians? What about developers? What about journalists? What about citizens? And do you think architects read? I am not interested in publishing a book aimed at a relatively small professional audience. But you’ve got a good idea for a book that would appeal to a large general audience. If you change your mind about the audience, send me a prospectus.”

I started teaching at Harvard a few months later and realized that it was hard to get students to read. They were too busy with studio. I had also come to appreciate the power of a book to shape a clientele during the five years I worked for Ian McHarg in his firm. His book, Design With Nature, attracted clients who were persuaded by his ideas. During the deep recession of the mid 1970s, when 40 percent of architects were unemployed, McHarg’s firm still had work. I decided to write a book for a general audience that would create a clientele for the kind of work I wanted to do in the field now known Anne Whiston Spirn 85

as ecological urbanism, which did not exist then. I sent a prospectus to that wise editor, and the rest is history [3.4].

After The Granite Garden was published in 1984, it was widely reviewed, and my phone started to ring. Potential clients said, “I read your book, do you have a professional practice?” I had to think seriously about whether to open my own office. I looked around me and didn’t see anyone who had a professional practice who was also teaching, writing, and doing research, and who was married with children and not divorced. I had a husband and a fouryear-old son and no interest in divorce! Several of my peers were doing well in practice, but I didn’t see anyone who was doing the kind of research and writing I wanted to do. So I decided not to open a professional office, to stay in academia and to create a research practice to do demonstration projects geared toward changing the way cities are designed and built, where I could choose projects and “clients.”

Another response to The Granite Garden was, “I can see how your ideas apply to new towns, but what about existing cities [3.5]? They’re already built.” So I looked for opportunities to demonstrate how this might be accomplished and decided to focus on vacant urban land as an opportunity to restore the urban natural environment. I taught my first vacant urban land studio here at the GSD the same month that The Granite Garden was published. Parts of Boston, like Roxbury and Dorchester, had extensive vacant land. The City of Boston didn’t know how many vacant lots there were, somewhere around 15,000 vacant house lots was the estimate. Here you see some of the vacant land that I found in Roxbury/Dorchester in 1984 and 1985, and a few years later, I also found in West Philadelphia [3.2, 3.3].

The common wisdom was that this land was vacant because of disinvestment, such as historic redlining. Redlining refers to the practice where banks refuse

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West Philadelphia, 2012

Fig. 3.3

West Philadelphia, 1988

Fig. 3.2

to give loans for mortgages and home improvements in areas designated as

1984

Fig. 3.4

City and Nature Air Earth Water Life The Urban Ecosystem

But what about existing cities? They’re already built.

 Vacant Urban Land, Boston

West Philadelphia Landscape Project

Fig. 3.5



Anne Whiston Spirn 87

“risky.” The Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1933 created uniform appraisal criteria to evaluate the safety of mortgages. They sent out agents who evaluated every single block in neighborhoods in cities across the country [3.6]. Their ratings ranged from “A” or green, as the “best” areas, to D or red as “risky.” An HOLC map of Philadelphia from 1937 shows some blue areas in the areas around Penn, which were deemed still “sound,” but not as good as green. There are extensive red areas on the map. The criteria for designating the red zones (D) and yellow zones (C, declining and “somewhat risky”) included the presence of older buildings and, particularly, any neighborhood occupied largely by African-Americans. In “A” zones, on the other hand, the vast majority of residents were of Anglo-Saxon heritage, not immigrants and not Jews. Real estate agents and assessors had been using such criteria for years, but the HOLC maps made the designations official.

When I started mapping vacant land in Boston in 1984, it became quite clear to me that disinvestment alone could not account for the pattern of vacant land I was seeing. When a friend told me that the Dudley Street neighborhood of Roxbury/Dorchester was more than 30 percent vacant, I envisioned a pattern of scattered vacancies, like Swiss cheese, but when I went out in the field, I noticed that some parts of the neighborhood had no vacant land while other parts were almost entirely vacant. This was not a random distribution.

Hilltops and upper slopes were mostly intact, and valley bottoms were mostly abandoned Thevacant land was aligned in a broad linear pattern, which strongly suggested an underlying process that was producing connections across property lines. (This aerial view from the 1970s, where orange represents abandoned land, depicts this pattern.) The keys to the puzzle were in the topography and in historical atlases. Open land in the valley bottoms had once consisted of small residential properties, mostly triple-decker apartments, so the large extent of open land was not due to abandoned institutions or industry. Historical atlases also showed the site of the former stream that once flowed through the valley (the Dudley Street neighborhood straddles the boundary between Roxbury and Dorchester because the stream was the original boundary between the two). When I mapped the topography, the vacant land coincided with the lowest elevation.

This was not the first time that I had encountered the force of a buried river.

Years before, when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, a section of the Mill Creek sewer had collapsed right by the entrance to my supermarket [3.7]. The entire street from sidewalk to sidewalk, a block long, had caved in. I looked down into this huge hole and saw a big brown rushing river. It 88

Home Owners Loan Corporation Rating System A or Green (“Best Areas”): new construction and homogeneous population (“American business and professional men”), in demand as residential location B or Blue (“Sound Areas”): “still desirable”

Philadelphia Bulletin, August 27, 1971.

Fig. 3.7

D or Red (“Risky”): areas “in which things taking place in C areas have already happened” (including any neighborhood occupied largely by African Americans

Fig. 3.6

C or Red/White (“Somewhat Risky”): “definitely declining,” “within such a low price or rent range as to attract an undesirable element”

was a revelation: we are walking on underground rivers, and clearly were oblivious to invisible forces. Given this experience, it probably was no coincidence that I discovered the correlation between buried floodplains and vacant land years later.

Anne Whiston Spirn 89

1985 90

Fig. 3.9

Fig. 3.8

Combined Sewer Overflows and Pollution in Boston Harbor 1985

Fig. 3.10

Topographic Map of Dudley Triangle, 1985.

In 1985, the big environmental issue facing the Boston region was the pollution of Boston Harbor by combined sewer overflows (CSOs) [3.8]. The proposal on the table was to build a huge sewage treatment plant to treat all the sewage from communities in the region. Engineering firms were getting ready to compete for the contract to design the facility, and contractors were preparing to vie for the opportunity to build it. But I made a different proposal.

Let’s take a look at vacant land on buried floodplains in valley bottoms [3.9, 3.10]. They afford the possibility for detaining storm water before it gets into the sewer in order to reduce the volume of water that contributes to combined sewer overflows.

This was not rocket science. My proposal applied good principles and precedents of landscape architecture. Frederick Law Olmsted had designed Boston’s Fens and Riverway to reduce flooding in the 1880s [3.11]. Since the 1960s, the Denver Stormwater and Flood Control District has used green infrastructure to reduce the speed with which water gets into the South Platte River in order to reduce floods [3.12]. Denver’s Skyline Plaza was originally designed by Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s as a basin to collect and detain stormwater runoff from rooftops of surrounding office building and the surrounding sidewalks [3.13]. My proposal merely applied this approach to reducing CSOs in addition to preventing floods.

Anne Whiston Spirn

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Fig. 3.11

The Riverway, Boston (2016). Designd by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1880s.

Fig. 3.12

Denver Stormwater and Flood Control District, Harvard Gulch, 1973

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Fig. 3.13 Fig. 3.14

Denver Stormwater and Flood Control District, Skyline Plaza.

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The Boston AIA chapter invited me to give a public lecture in the spring of 1985 on the future shape of Boston, where I first presented this proposal [3.14]. Following the lecture, I was taken around to members of the governor’s cabinet to present my ideas. I was so optimistic. I really thought my proposal could happen. I was naive. Power and politics were already in play. There was no way, however sensible the ideas were, however much money would be saved, there was no way that this proposal was going to happen. That was the beginning of the political education of Anne Spirn. I completely underestimated how vulnerable an unconventional approach is to politics and power. Powerful interests are vested in a gray approach to storm water and sewer infrastructure, both the engineering and the construction firms in Boston’s case. Also there is a tremendous aversion to risk, particularly on the part of politicians and engineers.

In 1986, I left Harvard to chair the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. There I started the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) as a laboratory for generating, exploring, and testing models for how to restore the urban natural environment while simultaneously rebuilding low-income communities [3.1]. One of the first things we did was to map buried streams and once again I found the same correlation between vacant land and buried floodplains that I had discovered in Boston.

In this map of West Philadelphia, the orange line is the Mill Creek, a combined sanitary and storm sewer [3.15]. The blue lines are former creeks, now buried.

Mill Creek (the former stream and current sewer) drains the storm water (and all the sewage) from more than one-half of West Philadelphia [3.16]. We digitized the topography, located the valley bottom, then designated land within ten feet in elevation above the low point of the valley bottom as “buried flood plain” [3.17]. (These digital maps, by the way, in 1988 were state-of-the-art.) Once we had created the maps, we discovered internally-drained depressions within the buried floodplain. My hypothesis was that, if we went and field checked those depressions, we would find a concentration of vacant land and damaged buildings [3.18]. And we did. In one of those depressions within the buried floodplain, building walls and steps of houses were subsiding in the late 1980s. The land was deforming, and the buildings were moving with them. Twenty years later, all the buildings on that block, but one, were gone [3.19]. Once you understand the processes at work, you can see signs of the buried river and its floodplain. Cracks in building walls and misshapen doors and windows are a great marker of invisible forces. They tell you what is going on.

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1988

Historic streams and Mill Creek sewer (orange) in West Philadelphia. 1988.

Fig. 3.15

Mill Creek

Mill Creek sewers (main sewer in orange), West Philadelphia. 1988.

Fig. 3.16

1988

Mill Creek Watershed, enclosed low points in buried floodplain ,West Philadelphia. 1988.

Fig. 3.17

1988 Anne Whiston Spirn 95

My research assistants and I have continued to map the buried flood plain as new topographic information becomes available. By 2010, new data enabled the creation of more accurate maps of the buried floodplain [3.20].

The gray area on this map is the buried floodplain, and the dashed areas are depressions within it. The red areas are vacant land and the green areas are open space. There are some small individual vacant lots (I call them “missing teeth�) outside the buried floodplain, but when you see big vacant tracts in a residential neighborhood, they are often within the zone of the buried valley bottom. Several years ago, a colleague, Adam Levine, found nineteenthcentury topographic surveys of West Philadelphia with a five-foot contour interval [3.22]. One of my research assistants digitized the contours from the nineteenth-century surveys, geo-referenced the maps, stitched them together, and then overlaid it with contemporary topography [3.21]. Now we know exactly where the buried flood plain of Mill Creek is and exactly how deep the fill is.

Redlining and disinvestment as well as politics and money play critical roles in producing abandonment on buried floodplains in low-income neighborhoods.

But politics and money alone cannot explain the pattern that we found in the Mill Creek neighborhood. Sewer construction, historic development practices,

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House and vacant land on depression within the buried floodplain, 2012

Fig. 3.19

Damaged buildings on depression within the buried floodplain. 1988

Fig. 3.18

and water flow also played important roles.

Topographic contours. City of Philadelphia GIS database. maps.psiee.psu.edu

Fig. 3.21

Fig. 3.20

2012

Anne Whiston Spirn 97

Fig. 3.22

Buried floodplain (2015). Buried in up to 35 feet of fill. Each color change: 5 additional feet of fill.

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Fig. 3.23

2015

Buried floodplain (2015). Buried in up to 40+ feet of fill. Each color change: 5 additional feet of fill.

Fig. 3.24

2015

Image captions: [3.22] Note the course of Mill Creek on this nineteenth century map and the former stream’s correlation with the diagonal of sewer and open land in the late twentieth century.

[3.23] This map depicts the same area with the open creek diagonal buried in up to 35 feet of fill. Each color change is an additional five feet of fill.

[3.24] The buried floodplain for the entire Mill Creek Watershed.

Anne Whiston Spirn 99

Home Owners Loan Corporation Rating System A or Green (“Best Areas”): new construction and homogeneous population (“American business and professional men”), in demand as residential location B or Blue (“Sound Areas”): “still desirable”

Fig. 3.26

D or Red (“Risky”): areas “in which things taking place in C areas have already happened” (including any neighborhood occupied largely by African Americans

Fig. 3.25

C or Red/White (“Somewhat Risky”): “definitely declining,” “within such a low price or rent range as to attract an undesirable element”

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Fig. 3.27

1927

Image captions: [3.25, 3.26] Mill Creek sewer under construction, 1880s. Note how it is constructed: partly dug out of the valley bottom and partly filled over. In the distance, note where the sewer has been completed and buried. The fill is probably cinders, ash, and various types of trash. But look what’s happening: new houses are already being built on top of that fill.

[3.27] The same area in 1927. A curving line shows the sewer with homes built right on top. Given such conditions, it is not surprising that there were many cave-ins over the course of the twentieth century.

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Fig. 3.28 Fig. 3.29

Philadelphia Bulletin, July 18, 1961.

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In 1961, two children were killed and seven people were buried in the wreckage of one cave-in in the Mill Creek neighborhood [3.28]. Ultimately, that cave-in resulted in the intentional demolition of 160 homes, which created a long diagonal band of open land. Cave-ins like this, which occurred along the line of the sewer and within the zone of filled land on the buried floodplain, likely resulted from groundwater flow as well as historic development practices. Even though the former valley bottoms are buried in 20-40+ feet of fill, in certain respects they still function like a floodplain. When rain falls, some storm water runs directly into rivers or sewers, but even in a built-up city, there is open ground, so some of that storm water seeps into the earth and flows underground toward the valleys, resulting in a high water table in the valley bottom [3.29]. In wet weather, groundwater flow may create channels, a phenomenon called piping. If groundwater drops during a prolonged dry period, the channels may collapse, causing subsidence [3.30].

Like Boston, Philadelphia has problems with CSOs, which pollute the city’s rivers.

From 1987 to 1991, I made similar proposals to those I had made in Boston.

Stormwater management holds great promise for combining environmental restoration and community development. There are revenue streams from water and sewer bills. There are means for raising funds such as municipal bonds. There is a federal mandate for water quality, the Clean Water Act. Buried floodplains create problems, but they could be a resource, to prevent floods, to restore regional water quality, and to rebuild communities [3.31]. I hoped that, by working with city agencies right from the beginning, these ideas could have a real impact.

The architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed my proposals in 1992 and urged the Water Department and the City to take up the ideas. By that point, I had turned over the West Philadelphia Landscape Plan reports to the City Planning Commission. I thought I was finished with the project. Then, in 1994, the Planning Commission published the Plan for West Philadelphia, which ignored the issues of the watershed and subsidence in Mill Creek, much less any ideas about stormwater detention, combined sewer overflows, and water quality. With the City’s encouragement, the Nehemiah Foundation built townhouses for first-time homeowners on the buried floodplain of Mill Creek.

So here we are again. Politics and power. What did my education in landscape architecture teach me about politics and power? Nothing. The West Philadelphia Landscape Project has been my political education. I make a proposal, it gets good reviews, and nothing happens. Or things seem to be going well, then BANG, I run smack into a barrier, which reveals a force that had previously been invisible to me.

Then I have to figure out what it is and how to either counter it or work with it.

Anne Whiston Spirn 103

In the early 1990s, I didn’t appreciate how fundamentally political and how resistant to change the Philadelphia Planning Commission was. I viewed the City’s planners as fellow professionals and failed to recognize how constrained they were by forces of politics and power and how oblivious they were to forces of nature. The common perception of cities as antithetical to nature blinds both professionals and residents to ongoing natural processes, like the flow of water underground. Professionals and residents alike were not able to read the landscapes they planned for and lived in.

In 1995, I was writing The Language of Landscape (published in 1998) and decided to develop a program to help people read the landscape with a focus on the Mill Creek, a low-income neighborhood whose population was virtually all African American. To reach the neighborhood’s adults, I launched a curriculum in landscape literacy with a local public school, Sulzberger Middle School, which was located adjacent to vacant land on the buried floodplain.

I began to design experiments to demonstrate how to combine stormwater detention with the reclamation of vacant land and community development.

I also shifted my attention from planners at the Planning Commission to engineers at the Philadelphia Water Department. And I turned to a new medium, the World Wide Web, as a way to reach a broad audience. The first West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) website launched in early 1996.

It incorporated our digital database, designs for community gardens, and 1991 reports, as well as ongoing work.

From 1996 to 2001, students in my courses at Penn helped create a curriculum on the Mill Creek Watershed, working once a week with an eighthgrade class at Sulzberger. In “Transforming the Urban Landscape,” students designed an outdoor classroom, environmental study area, wetland water garden that would also serve as a stormwater detention basin [3.32]. The site was a vacant lot next to the school. The course challenged landscape architecture students to figure out how to get water from streets, sidewalks, and rooftops to the vacant lot [3.33, 3.34. 3.35, 3.36, 3.37]. How big an area can be drained to this vacant lot and how much water can it be designed to hold? Each student did the grading and detailed engineering drawings for their design. Why did we do this? Because our audience was engineers. We wanted to persuade them that it was feasible to redesign the urban landscape to capture storm water before it went in the sewers. My students created drawings and perspectives so that residents, as well as engineers, could understand the ideas. All the student work was posted to our class website.

Why? To reach that broader public, not only residents of West Philadelphia, 104

Fig. 3.30

Rivers, runoff, and groundwater flow (www.colscol.com)

Buried Floodplains Are a Resource

Fig. 3.31

To Prevent Floods, to Restore Regional Water Quality (Reducing CSOs) and to Rebuild Communities

but also city planners and engineers. In 1996, the speed of the Internet was very slow (14.4Kbps-28.8Kbps!), so we produced a CD-ROM version of the website and distributed hundreds of copies, including to PWD engineers.

Anne Whiston Spirn 105

Fig. 3.32

1996

Stormwater Collection. LR 601 Transforming the Urban Landscape Studio, 1996. Students: Steven Sattler and Eric Husta.

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Fig. 3.33

1996

Stormwater Collection. LR 601 Transforming the Urban Landscape Studio, 1996.

Students: Steven Sattler and Eric Husta.

Fig. 3.34 Fig. 3.35

Stormwater Collection. LR 601 Transforming the Urban Landscape Studio, 1996.

Students: Steven Sattler and Eric Husta.

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Stormwater detention basin, three seasons. LR 601 Transforming the Urban Landscape Studio, 1996. Students: Steven Sattler and Eric Husta.

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Fig. 3.36 Fig. 3.37

Stormwater detention basin. LR 601 Transforming the Urban Landscape Studio, 1996.

Students: Steven Sattler and Eric Husta.

Fig. 3.38

1996 Image caption:

[3.28] Mill Creek neighborhood with Sulzberger Middle School in distance on right.

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My spring course, “Power of Place,” worked with the same middle-school class and taught the history of the neighborhood using primary documents, starting with the early seventeenth century, up to the present. Students read historic maps, a letter from William Penn about his meeting with the Indians, various plans for the redevelopment of Mill Creek and saw how their neighborhood evolved. The Mill Creek sewer flows right alongside the school.

A map from 1872 shows the stream [3.39]; other sources showed the mill and the future site of the school [3.40, 3.41]. This connected directly to the students’ experience, because the school’s cafeteria and gym, which were in the basement, sometimes flooded after heavy rains. Students were fascinated by newspaper reports of cave-ins. They were outraged at the redlining maps.

They were astounded to learn that a famous architect, Louis Kahn, had designed the public housing project across from the school, where many of

1872

110

Fig. 3.39

them lived [3.42, 3.43, 3.44].

Fig. 3.41

Fig. 3.40

Andalusia Mills Hexamer General Surveys

Anne Whiston Spirn 111

Mill Creek Public Housing and Sulzberger Middle School, Philadelphia, 1996.

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Fig. 3.42 Fig. 3.43

Mill Creek Public Housing, Philadelphia, ca. 1962. (Louis Kahn)

Fig. 3.44

Louis Kahn, Mill Creek Redevelopment Area Plan, 1954.

Learning to read the landscape of their local neighborhood transformed the children’s learning. They took historical maps outside and tracked places through time. They were surprised to learn that a big block of vacant land with 30-foot ash trees and ailanthus trees was once six separate city blocks and to discover that, underneath the trees, was a fire hydrant. If you dug down, you would find a sidewalk. It was urban archeology. We asked the students to make proposals. They presented their ideas to a staff member from the West Philadelphia Empowerment Zone. “What are you doing about redlining?” they asked her. “Why haven’t you started a community bank?” She was impressed.

WPLP staff ran a four-week summer program on the Mill creek watershed in 1997 and 1998. The children wore T-shirts, “Ask Me about the Mill Creek.”

People would ask them, “So tell me about Mill Creek.” And they did. The children spent part of the day at Aspen Farms Community Garden (a block away from the school) where they constructed an outdoor classroom. They also learned HTML coding and created their own website (as part of the WPLP website) about what they learned in the summer program. In 1998, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge asked the Sulzberger students to present their website as part of his annual Budget Speech to the Pennsylvania Legislature as a way to highlight one of his administration’s programs, “Link to Learn.” Two kids presented via satellite and got a long standing ovation from both sides of the aisle.

By 2000, I was convinced that community development, environmental restoration, and educational reform must go hand in hand. Originally, I went into the school to make adults more aware of the role the creek played and still plays in the life of that neighborhood. But I learned several things in the course of doing this work. First, how smart these kids were. There were brilliant kids in this run-of-the-mill classroom of all African American students (and teachers) in one of the lowest-ranked public middle schools in the city of Philadelphia in terms of standardized test scores. Imagine, there were geniuses in this class. All the students were like sponges in terms of learning about how their neighborhood had become what it is. Before they learned to read their landscape, the kids thought that their neighborhood had always been the way it was, and they believed that it could never change. Ironically, learning the history of their neighborhood gave them sense of a future. At the beginning of the class, one out of thirty-six kids said they planned to go to college. At the end of the eight-week program, all but one said they planned to go to college. I’m not so naive to think that they all made it. But the fact that, in this short time, they came to see their future differently and to see Anne Whiston Spirn 113

themselves as having the power to make change was extraordinary. Before then, I had never considered youth as an important resource in terms of changing urban neighborhoods. Now I would begin with youth. I would start with the schools.

Mill Creek was a fractured neighborhood, socially. One thing that residents seemed to agree on was what they referred to as “Our Children,” meaning all the children of the neighborhood, even if they didn’t have children. When adults learned that I was working with the school, it opened up all kinds of doors to me, as a planner/designer and researcher that had never been opened before. It led, for example, to an invitation to join the Environment Committee of the Mill Creek Coalition. And that led to a pilot research project taking a transect across the buried flood plain and going into basements to find out where water damage was occurring. My hypothesis was that we would find the most damage in the lowest parts of the valley bottom.

The President of the Mill Creek Coalition said, “Well, that’s all very nice to do that area. But my block is also in the floodplain.”

And I said “No, it’s not on the buried floodplain.”

And she said, “Yes, it is.”

Again I said, “No, it’s not.”

And again she said “It is. We have bad flooding problems”.

I said, “OK, great. We will do your block too.”

I thought to myself, we will use this as a control block, one that’s outside the buried flood plain. Guess where we found the most water damage. It was on her block, and it was due to problems of roof drainage and site drainage. This opened up a whole new area of research and understanding of the dynamics that were contributing to the deterioration of buildings in this neighborhood.

It’s not just water damage on the buried floodplain that’s a problem. The problems are much more extensive.

It was more difficult to get through to engineers in the Philadelphia Water Department than it was to reach Mill Creek residents. In 1995 I hired a regional planning graduate student with ten years’ experience as a civil engineer to go to the Water Department and talk “engineering” with the engineers, to find out the formulas that they used to calculate stormwater runoff, and then to run calculations for the runoff in the blocks around Sulzberger Middle School.

Despite her professional experience, she had a terrible time breaking into the Water Department. The engineers weren’t interested in talking about 114

alternative approaches to stormwater management. In 1996, I was invited to give a presentation at a conference on the Schuylkill River, which is where the Mill Creek sewer overflows. The head of the Water Department’s CSO program was on the panel with me. He made a presentation about all the underground grey infrastructure that the Water Department was planning.

Then I made my presentation about green infrastructure on vacant land as a way to reduce CSOs and rebuild community. Afterwards, as I was walking out the door, this fellow came running after me calling out, “Professor Spirn, Professor Spirn.” He caught up with me and said, “My boss is head of Water for Region III Environmental Protection Agency. We just heard your presentation, and he wants to know, if he calls a meeting of city and regional agencies, whether you will come make your presentation to them.”

And I did. As people were drifting into the conference room at EPA for the meeting, the head of Water for Region III said to me, “Look who just came in the door.” Who? “The City’s attorney. When the EPA calls a meeting, the City brings its attorney.” At the end of that meeting, he proposed a series of further meetings and urged the water engineers to explore my ideas. So that was the beginning of my conversations with the Water Department.

Sometimes it takes power from above to provoke change. The Clean Water Act gives EPA the power to sue cities and hold their feet to the fire. If I had been better educated in politics and power, I would have gone immediately to the EPA. Why wait for some guys from the EPA to hear, by chance, my presentation at a conference?

At that same time, students in my fall 1996 studio, “Transforming the Urban Landscape,” were producing designs, and their work was all presented on the class website. There were twenty four students who saw twenty four different ways of addressing the challenge of how to get water from roofs, streets, and sidewalks to this vacant lot, what the water volume would be, and how the place would function and what it would look like. I made sure that the PWD engineers had the URL and, at the end of the semester, gave them the CDROM with all the students’ work.

In summer 1999, the head of the CSO program at the Water Department called me up and said, “We have an expert in town from Boulder, Colorado, an engineer who’s done work on green infrastructure. We want you to take us on a tour of Mill Creek and show us what you’ve been talking about.” So we took a tour of the buried floodplain, historical maps in hand, they saw the vacant land in the topographic low spots, and we talked. After this tour, Anne Whiston Spirn 115

we went out and had a beer, and an hour later we had an agreement that the water department would do a demonstration project in the Mill Creek neighborhood.

When I left Penn for MIT in 2000, I thought everything was going fine. But, then, in 2002, the Water Department abandoned the demonstration green infrastructure project in Mill Creek. They built an underground storage tank instead. That same year, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over the Philadelphia School District and hired Edison Schools Inc. to manage Sulzberger Middle School. Edison dismantled the school’s innovative programs, and key teachers resigned, ending our work there. That was devastating. Putting places like Mill Creek on the map and keeping them there is not easy. There is great resistance to seeing African American children in low-income neighborhoods, like Mill Creek, as highly intelligent, capable, and knowledgeable.

It turned out that the setback to the idea of using green infrastructure to reduce CSOs was only temporary. In 2009, the City of Philadelphia announced Green City, Clean Waters, a plan to reduce CSOs using green infrastructure.

It calls for reducing impervious surfaces in the city by 30% by 2020 in order to capture the first inch of rain to fall in a storm. In 2010, I organized a class at MIT to test the feasibility of the proposal in densely settled neighborhoods of the Mill Creek watershed [3.45]. Students posted their work on the class website and presented their proposals to Water Department staff [3.46].

In 2015, I co-taught my “Ecological Urbanism” class in 2015 with the Chief of Staff of the Philadelphia Water Department. The topic that semester was Philadelphia Green Schools, which brought together issues of water, education, landscape literacy, and community development.

A constellation of factors aligned to make Green City, Clean Waters feasible in 2009. First, there was the EPA’S threat to sue Philadelphia for polluting rivers with combined sewer overflows. Second, there was a strong mayor whose goal was to make Philadelphia the greenest city in the US. Third, there were key staff members in the Water Department who saw this approach as opening a path to power. By then, engineers no longer saw green infrastructure as radical. The prior seeding of proposals and demonstration projects by the West Philadelphia Landscape Project also played an important role. Now, however, the constellation of factors that aligned in 2009 to make Green City, Clean Waters feasible have changed. In 2018, other factors make the program vulnerable. President Trump threatens to eviscerate the EPA, and 116

West Philadelphia Landscape Project

2010

MIT class discusses proposals with Philadelphia Water Department Chief of Staff, Mami Hara, 2011

Fig. 3.46

Fig. 3.45

MIT: Water, Landscape, and Urban Design

Image captions: MIT Students making a presentation to the Philadelphia Water Department Chief of Staff in 2011 Anne Whiston Spirn 117

a new mayor, whose priorities are poverty and education, not environment, fired the former water commissioner and replaced him with someone who is skeptical about green infrastructure. So the story is not over.

So what do all these stories add up to? Our time is up, so I will leave it to you to reflect on that. I also invite you to listen to the stories of other people who have been involved with the West Philadelphia Landscape Project over the last 30 years, as told in their own words. These are in the form of multimedia videos, each a few minutes long. There is one on the buried river. In another, the Philadelphia Water Commissioner tells the story of Green City Clean Waters. In “Coming Full Circle,” three former WPLP research assistants reflect on how the project influenced their careers. In “A Way to Fix Things,” a community activist talks about her life, neighborhood, and partnership with WPLP. In “Fatima’s Story,” a former Sulzberger student, now in her 30s, tells how learning HTML in the Mill Creek Project saved her life. In “When Learning Is Real,” three teachers at Sulzberger Middle School reflect on how the Mill Creek project changed their whole vision of education. You can see all these stories and more at www.wplp.net/stories.

[APPLAUSE] [QUESTION] Thanks for a great lecture. My question is, you described a tipping point that happened in Philadelphia where before green infrastructure wasn’t valued.

And then it started to become more common and more accepted. Do you think Boston has reached that point? And if it hasn’t, how can we as landscape architects and urban designers take on these questions?

[SPIRN] All the metropolitan water agencies in the US (and many from abroad) have been watching Green City, Clean Waters since 2009. The Philadelphia Water Department hosted a conference a couple of years ago that was attended by commissioners from water agencies of major cities around the country.

Boston’s Metropolitan Water Resources Authority is now well aware, so the ground is well prepared.

What can you do here in the GSD? I believe that academics, those of us who make our living teaching and doing research, have a responsibility to gear some of our teaching and research to exploring ideas that are not yet popular or even thought to be feasible. This is particularly true for those of us 118

who are teaching professionals who are going to design and plan cities. The “Transforming the Urban Landscape” studio at Penn contributed to gaining acceptance for a new approach to reducing combined sewer overflows.

The work that the students generated was very compelling. And from the students’ perspective, they got to take their knowledge and to think about how it could be applied to doing things differently.

John Kingdon’s book, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, describes the essential role of what he calls policy entrepreneurs to “soften,” the context for innovation. I was seeding ideas for so many years, keeping them in the public eye. In 1985, there was a full page and a half spread in The Boston Globe. And in 1992, the Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic reviewed the project.

Within two years after we launched the WPLP website, more than a million visitors from 90 countries had come to the website. In the late 1990s, it was getting visits from 45 countries every month.

Do not discount how influential an individual or small group can be in getting people, both the general public and those in power, to consider ideas that might be regarded as radical. The more often unconventional ideas are seen and talked about, the more they acceptable they may become. Those in design schools like MIT or Harvard or Penn should do work geared towards softening the context for innovation, making it seem less risky. I’m not talking about just making drawings of visionary schemes. I’m talking about taking those visions and thinking about how they would work and by what means they might be implemented. How they might become real. I kept showing the examples of Denver and Boston’s Riverway and Fens to persuade people that this approach was not risky. It’s been done. People need to keep seeing such examples again and again and again. You have to keep putting it out there.

The idea of city and nature as separate is so ingrained in most people that it is hard for them to get their heads around an approach that considers the city as part of the natural world. So you have to just keep saying the same thing over and over again. Someone may hear you once and it doesn’t take. And then they hear you again in five years, and it does.

[APPLAUSE]

Anne Whiston Spirn 119

Editors: Susan Nigra Snyder George E. Thomas Carrie Gammell Contributors: Alan Hess Rhett Larson Anne Whiston Spirn Special Thanks: John J. Aslanian 120

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This publication was funded by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Office of Student Services and the Master in Design Studies program in Critical Conservation.

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designed by Javier Ors Ausín MDes Critical Conservation ‘17

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