This is a diary about transportation, and about city form, and, in an odd way, about entomology. A while ago, in the comments attached to a diary about high speed rail in California, one of our Kossacks explained that the problem with the route (the train will stop at Union Station in downtown LA) is that, if you travel by air, you can fly into Burbank, or LAX, or Ontario, or into Santa Ana, or Long Beach, all (unlike Union Station) convenient for the business traveler. The problem?
Again California is challenged by not having proper urban development.
A consideration of "proper urban development" and the second largest urban area in the country after the jump.
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I'm reminded of what the laws of thermodynamics supposedly have to say about this critter:
Of course the bumblebee can fly -- its wings are more like helicopter blades ("reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades,") than like the wings of a fixed-wing aircraft -- but the urban myth goes on. In Paul Krugman's columns, in fact:
First of all, Europe’s single currency is a deeply flawed construction. And Mr. Draghi (the president of the European Central Bank), to his credit, actually acknowledged that. “The euro is like a bumblebee,” he declared. “This is a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but instead it does. So the euro was a bumblebee that flew very well for several years.” But now it has stopped flying. What can be done? The answer, he suggested, is “to graduate to a real bee.”
Never mind the dubious biology, we get the point. In the long run, the euro will be workable only if the European Union becomes much more like a unified country.
Dubious biology. Dubious geography too. The commenter said "California" when he or she meant, specifically, greater Los Angeles. Geography won't let the train go to San Francisco either, unless there's a high-speed spur from San Jose. You'll have to do what people do now, de-train at Oakland or Emeryville (or Richmond) and take a bus (or BART) across (or under) the Bay Bridge.
But then, nothing has ever been wrong with urban development in the Bay Area. It's just how it is! There were ferries across the bay when the Gold Rush was in full swing, and the ferries were in place to start up after the 1989 earthquake shut down the Bay Bridge for a year. The cities, as well, look like cities back east: downtowns and suburbs and even a college town or two.
Not Los Angeles, a city that grew up in a series of land booms. There's a LONG discourse (academic word, means something like what we mean when we say "thread" here, and apologies to those of you whose intelligence I just insulted) about how Los Angeles didn't grow from the center like "normal cities" did. There are all kinds of theories about how the city grew: where the oil fields were, where the aerospace companies had their operations (as in Burbank Airport and Long Beach Airport), where the Red Cars went (this one is actually called the Roger Rabbit theory). These all operate from the assumption that Los Angeles doesn't have a "real" downtown. If that's true, what's this?
(Incidentally, those days when there's full sun and snow on the Sierra Madres are called "the days they take the picture". You can see why, I think.)
Most of the freeways go downtown too: the 10 (Santa Monica Freeway), the 101 (Hollywood Freeway), the 5 (Golden State Freeway), the 110 (Harbor Freeway), the Pasadena Freeway, the 60 (Pomona Freeway). The bus lines do as well, and any bus with a number under 100 starts or ends downtown.
Maybe it's the alignment. Some people just can't get used to the idea that in order to have a proper dinner party in Los Angeles you might have to drive over 100 miles for all the ingredients. How is that really different from the effort you have to go through in, say, Manhattan?
There's a terrific book on all this: Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971, several reprintings with new forwards).
Banham, a British architectural critic who was trying to knock the traditional approach to architectural history off his moorings, considered Los Angeles to be the response that would do that. After discussing the four ecologies (Surfurbia, or all the beach cities; Foothills, or where the rich people live from Monrovia to Pacific Palisades; The Plains of Id, or the central flatlands, and Autopia, the freeway system) and dismissing downtown as being a recent construction (nobody's perfect), he writes (in some limited circles, famously)
In so far as Los Angeles performs the functions of a great city, in terns of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life and corporate personality . . . [his ellipses] to the extent that Los Angeles has these qualities, then to the same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sybil Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong. . . . [mine] Los Angeles emphatically suggests that there is no simple correlation between urban form and social form.
Improper urban form. Do what you do at any of the airports when you get to Union Station. RENT A CAR. Then get on the 101 or the 10 and go wherever you're going. It's just that easy.
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TOP PHOTOS
October 13, 2012
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt™ below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!
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