City Visioning (archive 9/12/2014)
I have been considering becoming an urban planner, designer or at least a policy advocate. I asked my friend Will Wright, Director of Government and Public Affairs for the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles, to whom I should speak to learn first-hand what being involved with planning looks like. He told me I should attend the final meeting of the AIA|Los Angeles Urban Design Committee for 2014. It was a perfect opportunity for me to meet design professionals and get a closer look at their daily work.
We started out with a city visioning workshop led by James Rojas. Before James started the workshop, I spoke to him and learned that he had lived in downtown Los Angeles before the current renaissance and owned an art gallery on 7th and Spring. It turns out that art is a large part of Mr. Rojas’ approach to city visioning. Starting out individually we grabbed disparate nick nacks from a table (popsicle sticks, lego pieces, pipe cleaners, fake flowers, etc.) and created a favorite childhood memory. My particular favorite memory was more of a collection of memories from a park near my childhood home. I made a creative attempt at recreating the slide, swing set and monkey-bars of my “Ur” park.
It turns out parks were central to many of our memories. As Rojas put it, all of us shared engagement with a space as a favorite memory. Even if we spent hours in front of the television, it is almost never a cherished memory. As most of the people in the room were either architects or planners, this exercise forced them to think and create without using their normal lingo of FAR, setbacks and so forth.
Next we divided ourselves into 4 groups and combined our nick nacks to collectively decide and create what an ideal Los Angeles would look like. Included in my group was Gerhard Mayer, an architect who chaired the Urban Design Committee in 2013. I was instantly drawn to his enthusiasm for what he does and our visioning activity. Our group ended up creating what looked like a bit of a radial city with several metro rail lines connecting to an outer rail ring, with mixed use projects sprinkled throughout and very few cars. Throughout this fantasy Los Angeles was lots of open space where some of us decided we’d meet each other for meals or more serendipitously.
The groups were asked to present their cities. It was quite interesting to see how different all of our cities turned out: one version even had a kind of “zip-line” transit above the city: little suspended cable cars, perhaps not unlike what you would see at Disneyland. Despite some of these differences, a theme was common between all of the groups: a desire for more and better mass transit. There was, however, one person who was not on the mass-transit bandwagon. He felt that Los Angeles is incapable of building the kind of transit New Yorkers are accustomed to partly due to culture, that mass transit should simply become a supplement, but not preeminent.
Being a bit of a neophyte in this realm, I found the “visioning” exercise to be inviting as it brought all of us, despite of our backgrounds, on to a level playing field. It allowed us to think about the city experience spatially and how we interact with it. Mr. Rojas has used this technique around the country with an array of different demographic groups. I asked if this kind of small group approach to planning would be more effective in real planning meetings. One woman said that, while small groups aren’t always parts of these kinds of meetings, she has been to meetings where this technique has been quite effective. Having never been to a planning meeting, these comments were certainly illuminating and I shall have to attend a meeting as soon as possible. Mr. Rojas and others shared experiences of meetings where planners bring their agenda in the form of abstractions and industry lingo which leave most people uninterested in the planning process. I can’t speak to the actual efficacy of Mr. Rojas’ methods, but I was certainly touched by photos of the young, elderly, disenfranchised, mentally handicapped and even architects and planners using a seemingly benign (and maybe somewhat silly) approach to talking about planning that exposed profound similarities between us all.
The second half of the evening was a panel discussion between city planner Patricia Diefenderfer, Varun Akula from the developer Hines, and the architect Neal Payton, a principal at Torti Gallas and Partners. The discussion was moderated by Gerhard Mayer. Hearing three different perspectives on city-building was a revelation. Each member of the panel described the kinds of things that they have to consider when putting forth projects. I was most unfamiliar with the needs of the developer, for whom it seems that getting things built in the greater Los Angeles area is nothing short of Byzantine.
While there were many issues covered in this discussion, the following question and responses to it struck me the most: what would mitigate impediments in the development process? Varun Akula, of Hines, claimed that the lack of predictability in the development process makes development difficult, citing the developers 7-year experience with the Bergamot Transit Village as but one example. Architect Neal Payton claimed that even if the city and processes were totally rational and predictable, “residocracy” would still create problems. While this label seems condescending on its face, it resonated with a recurring theme from the panel, including from city planner Patricia Diefenderfer, who stated that people’s negative perception of growth impedes processes, a perception that she said could be stemmed by more education and what Mr. Akula said was difficulty communicating a project’s goals and purpose.
It is this issue of education and communication as far as the goals of smart urban design and development witch which I am most concerned. I am certainly not an expert, but there are plenty of accessible books and writers singing the praises of smart density, but I am afraid these praises fall only on the ears of the choir. How, then, can we better inform the “residocracy,” or, to put it more gently, how can we better inform our parents, siblings, partners and friends?
