Signs of Playa Vista

Signs of Place Places like Playa Vista are born from the convergence of many valid and timely critiques of our prevailing patterns of settlement nation-wide.

Their hyperdesign is a reaction to the fallout of the post-war development fiesta—America’s ubiquitous landscape of parking lots, burger joints, suburbs leapfrogging carelessly and anonymously into distant hinterlands, the alienating raptures automobile dependence, its ties to a deadly game of global politics, the fundamentally unsustainable charade of cheap abundant energy upon which it relies, and in general, a built environment deemed by many as little more than a psychological wasteland. Cultural critic James Howard Kunstler has referred to it more succinctly as the “Geography of Nowhere”, and Los Angeles has long been its poster child--characterized by precisely these processes of fragmentation, polycentric sprawl, the frenzy of car-culture, a place defined in large part by its own lack of place.

New Urbanism’s remedial counterattack is the rekindling of what many presuppose as the “fundamental qualities of real towns: pedestrian scale, an identifiable center and edge, integrated diversity of use, and defined public space” (Katz 4). Early built experiments in the application of these principles have given rise to “places” (or more precisely, insular resort communities) like Windsor, and Seaside, Florida (many would recognize the latter as the filming location for the Jim Carey film “The Truman Show”).

Although there are aspects of Playa Vista that take exception to these precedents, its planning is entrenched in the same ideologies and principles, and could be understood at the very least to be a distant analogous cousin.

Playa’s original plan came together in 1989, a joint effort that included contributions from New Urbanism’s most outspoken proponents (among them Stefanos Polyzoides, Andres Duany, and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk). At the time of the plan’s completion, it was hailed by some as a beacon of hope, and referred to as “one of the most ambitious efforts yet toward reversing today’s prevalent and destructive pattern of auto-oriented sprawl”. (Katz 179) Furthering its ambitions of difference, Playa Vista claims to offer what L.A. never had to give: an overwhelming sense of exactly where one is.

From above, its internal transit routes, bikeways, and connected networks of public open space are represented in perfect diagrammatic clarity. Its array of cleverly titled, cleverly scaled boulevards are 24-27 feet apart, placed on a north to south axis oriented to maximize views of its surrounding geographical features, and its street titles present residents with a didactic narrative of sea-side pedestrianism—including “Seawalk Drive”, “Seabluff Drive” “Bluffcreek Drive”, and “Discovery Creek”. Early renderings of Playa Vista are teeming with similar hues of bucolic contextualism—boat races in the Ballona creek, blue herons soaring overhead, the rolling bluffs and parades of vibrant pedestrian activity fading out to the expansive southern California coastal skyline. From the earliest stages of its representation, Playa Vista’s fetishization of place has appropriated the convenient particularities of its environs, fused them with a laundry list of traditional planning principles and recast them as a consumable kitsch.