What if L.A.'s so-called flaws were underappreciated assets rather than liabilities?

Los Angeles Times

a day ago

In the wake of January's horrific fires, detractors of Los Angeles — an urban reality often seen as a toxic mixture of unsustainable resource planning and structurally poor governance systems — are having a field day.
Their criticism is not new: For most of the 20th century — and certainly for the last five decades or so — Los Angeles has been seen by many urbanists as less city and more cautionary tale — a smoggy expanse of subdivisions and spaghetti junctions, where ambition came with a two-hour commute.
Planners shuddered, while architects looked away, even as they accepted handsome commissions to build some of L.A.'s — if not the world's — most iconic buildings.
In 1961, Jane Jacobs, the famed urban theorist and community activist, referred to 'the ballet of the good city sidewalk' in her landmark 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' If Manhattan was her 'ballet of the sidewalk,' L.A. was a suburban parking lot with delusions of grandeur.
'Los Angeles is a city of pleasure and peril; we've always known this,' Zeina Koreitem, founding partner of Downtown L.A. architecture studio Milliøns, said following the fires. 'We consume our environment instead of living with it.'
And yet, like so many Hollywood plot twists, maybe we misunderstood the protagonist.
What if L.A.'s so-called flaws — its low density, car culture and decentralized sprawl — weren't liabilities in a changing world, but underappreciated assets? Not because they were the right urban solutions all along, but because the systems beneath them are shifting?
Urban form has always followed transportation infrastructure. Roman roads influenced the creation of grid-based military cities. Railways shaped satellite towns. Subways gave rise to vertical density.
Today, the emergence of autonomous mobility solutions like robot taxis as well as distributed energy — decentralized, small-scale energy generation located near where energy is actually consumed — is redrawing those relationships once again — and the L.A. model just may be a big beneficiary in the long run.
Dismissed as the nemesis of sustainable urbanism, L.A. can, in fact, be well-positioned for the next chapter. Technologies like rooftop photovoltaics, vehicle-to-grid systems and AI-optimized resource flows do not depend on compactness. They benefit from space, sunlight and flexibility — qualities that Los Angeles has in abundance across its 1,600 square miles of urbanized area.
That vast, polycentric mass — long derided by urban experts residing in denser cities — can also be an asset in the years ahead as autonomous mobility becomes ubiquitous. Elastic, demand-driven autonomous services — which will inevitably also extend to Los Angeles airspace — can and will complement an increasingly built-out Metro light rail system and increased bus rapid transit routes, helping open up economic opportunities to those in once disadvantaged, isolated neighborhoods.
Instead of forcing the city into a European mold, perhaps the question is how the city's existing DNA might evolve. Could its low-rise form become a testing ground for neighborhood-scale energy networks? Could it become a solar-powered metropolis built on microgrids, where each district produces and manages its own resources?
There is already a shift underway. L.A.'s wide boulevards and streets are being reimagined for a new mix of mobility modes: e-bikes, delivery bots, shared shuttles, autonomous vehicles. A city that was once an ode to the freeway is fast becoming a globally recognized source of innovations in multimodal transport. This is what CoMotion LA has been looking at for the last eight years: bringing together public and private stakeholders to imagine a city of seamlessly connecting mobility options.
Young Angelenos increasingly prioritize neighborhoods where walking, biking and public transit are viable. Following a COVID-induced hiatus, downtown's renaissance, with banks converted into lofts and vibrant public spaces, is showing — once again — a new appetite for urban living.
Los Angeles is even emerging as a global pioneer in rethinking the curb — often treated as an afterthought — looking at ways those stretches of sidewalk can serve new functions: a charging node, a logistics port, a civic gathering point.
Meanwhile, the scattershot green spaces across Los Angeles offer another opportunity. Rather than a singular large park like New York's Central Park or Boston Common, the city could develop an ecological mesh, a 'sponge city' capable of managing stormwater and heat while fostering public life. Because sustainability is not only about emissions or energy. It is also means access, health and shared space.
This isn't about longing for midcentury Los Angeles, or about replicating Copenhagen. It's about testing new possibilities — much like what we're exploring this year at the Biennale Architettura in Venice. There, participants from diverse disciplines are investigating how we can adapt to a changing planet. We begin with the understanding that climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is a present condition. Our response must be adaptive, experimental and iterative: a continuous process of design evolution, shaped by trial and error, much like nature itself.
But the United States and the world do not need a single model of urban sustainability — they need many. New York might go vertical and social. Barcelona is building out superblocks for pedestrians. Rotterdam is going resilient and water-wise. And Los Angeles? It could — and we believe, it will — become a solar-powered, biodiversity-rich metropolis that helps us rethink what urban sustainability really means.
The sustainable city of the future should not look the same everywhere. It should build on the best of what each place already is and push that to its most imaginative conclusion. 'No city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture,' said Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian who wrote about Los Angeles a half-century ago. 'Nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.'
Los Angeles may have been the warning of the 20th century. But it could become the blueprint of the 21st.
John Rossant is chief executive of CoMotion and international impresario of the multimodal transportation world.
Carlo Ratti is the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and the curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025.