City Planning Department's Urban Design Studio Is All About Making L.A. More Liveable

Many would be amazed to learn that there is an urban design studio in L.A. City Hall. What does the City Planning Department's new focus on urban design signify?

First, we have the right mayor at the right time and the right planning director, who has the right focus. Our planning commission is engaged, and City Council members are supportive of urban design.

Second, for the first time in a long time, there are a number of people within the city family who feel that our streets can be great, our neighborhoods can be so much better, our corridors can be beautiful, and that focusing our development around transit is a reality-but all done in a way that takes care of our public realm, from your home's door to the office door.

I think the civic discussion about the central role that urban design plays in this city is coming together at the right time. The discussion focuses on making the city more livable at the neighborhood level as well as making it work in our significant regional areas.

What does "urban design" mean in the context of your office and the city?

Everything is urban design, but our primary focus is everything that has to do with our streets. We have not, in many, many years, worked on our public realm. We've had a one-dimensional approach to our streets. In fact, for all of L.A.'s 6,500 miles of streets, the city has only about nine basic cross-sections for how a street should work. And none of those cross-sections considers the human dimension of that street. So the first area of urban design deals with humanizing the public realm, and we can't take a one-dimensional approach; it really has to be comprehensive.

In the past, LA planning was all about moving cars: How can we move them faster, more efficiently, and if we have a bottleneck, can we widen the street to move them faster and more efficiently? All that was done at the expense of pedestrians, people who were using transportation and transit, the bicyclists, as well as shop owners who were facing narrower forecourts. The city never considered the whole of the street as an outdoor realm.

In fact, the recent debate about making Pico and Olympic one-way streets, I think, is emblematic of that kind of shortsighted thinking. It is a quick and easy solution to a problem, but it doesn't benefit all the neighborhoods and businesses that are along those streets.

Besides streets, what else does urban design include? What other aspects of the public realm are you looking at?

We're looking at many things, but the companion piece, if you will, to the public realm is everything that has to do with the architectural forms of the buildings that face the public realm. The cities that have really good urban design marry private and public realms through good articulation of the building façades. They provide for outdoor activities. They bind the relationship between the street-maybe the street width-and the height of the building. L.A. has streets that are hugely wide, and then the buildings along them are one or two stories. In really great cities, the streets may be wide or boulevard-scale, but the buildings adjacent to them complement the width of the street in a way that builds the sense of an outdoor room.

The other part of the public discussion is a whole array of civic infrastructure. And by that I don't mean the sewers and the storm drains, although they are important for other reasons. I mean consideration of where open space is appropriate, the value of pocket parks, and how, in a city that is going into a second growth spurt with more infill, we need to look for opportunities to provide people who are living in these new Downtown neighborhoods places to be outdoors, and places to walk their dogs.

What is not in the scope of your urban design planning and your office?

Urban design touches just about everything; and rather than focus just on scope, let's talk about emphasis. My focus in that context is to drill down below policy and implement - make urban design manifest with visible results making a positive contributions to everyday life.

We are looking at the mix of land uses, and we are looking at the relationship of the land uses to transportation. But we are not honing in on issues like affordable housing. We also think that any standards, guidelines, or principles that we are developing should apply across the board to all neighborhoods, whether they are in Boyle Heights or Brentwood-that each one of those neighborhoods deserves the same quality of treatment. Finally, visitors to our city should experience a memorable, walkable, easy-to-move-around-in city.

You know the city well and you understand that an attempt to integrate urban planning, design, infrastructure investment, and the city's regulatory bureaucracy will have to confront reality. We have a city architect, for example, who is housed in the Bureau of Engineering but rarely interfaces with the Planning Department, DOT, Building and Safety, DWP, Fire Department, or the Police Department. With that example in mind, who in City Hall buys into these efforts to improve Los Angeles' public spaces?

You're right, planners have always had the vision for designing the public realm, but everybody else has always had the control. The secret to getting a really great street is knowing the person at the Bureau of Engineering buried in the permit section who is actually checking the plans. It is that level of implementation that has been missing from any prior initiative on urban design. It's the 99 percent perspiration that Thomas Edison talked about, with the one percent inspiration of vision.

I have already initiated outreach to the Bureau of Engineering and other city departments to bring about a new partnership. This will be the perspiration without which results will not occur.

I am participating in a series of meetings with other departments that define the public realm. And we are reaching mutual agreements that will result in more pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and streetscapes-not for just a little stretch of Ventura Boulevard, but for an extensive area of Downtown Los Angeles. Gail Goldberg, as the city's planning director, has a lot of authority, vision and credibility to advance this exciting new collaboration.

We already have had conversations regarding the Downtown streets with the Department of Transportation to discuss all of their concerns with traffic and mobility -and with the Bureau of Engineering to discuss all of their concerns and discern their standards. The Planning Department is saying that now is the time to make a change. And we are finding that there is general agreement and some enthusiasm that the changes we have articulated are appropriate, And they are looking for the Planning Department to lead the way in the city.

The mayor and the planning director are in the process of appointing an Urban Design Committee, which you will be staffing. Elaborate on the mayor's vision for this new blue ribbon committee.

The mayor has consistently emphasized two priorities. One has been elegant density-innovation in architectural form. When he came back from his trip to Seoul, South Korea, he was just ebullient with all these wonderful ideas and asking, "Why can't we do this in L.A.?"

One of the things we've talked about is developing ordinances that remove the barriers that currently exist and allow architects, planners, and urban designers to do signature-type development-development that couldn't arise except with a special ordinance that, instead of building barriers or defining the limitations, takes everything away. And possibly, in that context, a very high-level committee like the one he is talking about could ask, "What are the barriers in our code that need to be swept away-unplanned-so that this kind of creative work can come about?"

The other thing the mayor has talked about is great streets, and that there is no reason why this city couldn't have eight demonstration projects, eight great streets. It could be two blocks of Downtown, two blocks on Central Avenue, Wilshire, two blocks Ventura, two blocks in Pacoima. It could be paired up between the regional centers, where there is a lot of commerce and business and residential, and areas of the city that don't have the same advantages, but, nonetheless, those residents deserve the same kind of inspirational treatment. Between signature architecture and great streets, I think we have some solid proposals and great ideas to move ahead with on this committee.

Is the mayor's notion of elegant density at odds with making Pico and Olympic one-way streets. Are you and the mayor suggesting that "place making" is now a higher priority than increasing mobility?

You cannot give up what you don't have; we don't have vehicular mobility in daily life. We have publicly comment before-that congestion may be the greatest blessing L.A. has ever seen in terms of discovering our local neighborhoods. Making mobility the highest city priority might actually have the unintended side-effect of delaying the groundwork for creating mixed use neighborhoods that by design have a local-village-oriented aesthetic.

If the city turns its attention to encouraging "neighborhood villages" at the expense of mobility, won't the cultural and entertainment institutions Downtown-the Music Center, the opera, the theater, the Dodgers, Staples, etc.-be concerned that their season ticket holders will be unable to attend their events because of the congestion that will grow through neglect?

The argument is a false dichotomy. Our choice is between a temporary inconvenience versus a permanent dysfunction. Downtown is emerging as our density "driver", our new neighborhood energy: this is good for the future of our downtown institutions. The companion to this is to pay attention to the Westside by moving mass transit to it.

But what happens in the intervening 20 years that it takes to build the transit?

I would say a couple of things. First of all, planning is messy. There is no silver bullet for solving our problems. There will be an interim of inconvenience in those times. How do people cope with that inconvenience? They either don't go-which is the complaint of the cultural and sports institutions-or they stagger the times that they go in a way that doesn't conflict with what they perceive is the most difficult time to get where they want to go. In the short run, I would say for ten years it is going to be inconvenient. I don't know if I'd go as far as a 20-year scenario.

It's important for urban designers to pose choices for solving a particular problem. Doing nothing is not an option. Doing nothing means, to me, formulating another grand vision of something, and then it just sits around for 20 years. That thinking is like the 17-year cicada cycle: a lot of activity happens, then things go dormant for two decades, then a lot of activity happens.

That is of no benefit to the cultural institutions, the business institutions, to the residents of the city, or to anyone else who has a stake in the successful growth of the city. I would rather have a debate over that strategy and its implementation than do nothing in the face of these challenges.

Where in practice are the public decisions that actually effect neighborhoods, land use and growth patterns, and most relevant, urban design made? Is urban design really the province of only the Planning Department?

Just about every department you can think of has an influence on design. The result is a building that's defined by the Fire Department, Department of Water and Power, the Bureau of Engineering, Street Standards, Storm Water, the streetlight guys, Building and Safety, and urban forestry. Probably the only department that doesn't define the building envelope is Sanitation, because most of their work is done underground.

These buildings and these layouts are all designed by these other agencies. Here's what happens: The DWP insists the developers must put a transformer on the ground floor of a building, and DWP needs access to get to it. So we get a curb cut of significant proportion in a sidewalk that is meant to be a pedestrian area -all to accommodate a transformer behind a metal roll-up door. That damages the pedestrian-orientation of the street.

The fire guys say, "You cannot have anything higher than 28 feet unless you give me a 28-foot wide area to fight fire from." Then the storm drain guys go in-after entitlement, after public hearing, after we've looked at the pretty plans and everybody agrees that it's a great design and fits perfectly with the neighborhood-and require the developer to either gravity-flow the storm water to a on-site retention system or put in a pump to remove the storm water. So what happens? The elevation of the site has to lift up like a tilted table, and you end up with ten-foot-high retaining walls along one side. How neighborhood-friendly is that if you are on the other side if that wall?

The most cooperative of all these agencies so far has been the Bureau of Engineering. Their attitude is, "Do your planning, tell us what you want, and we'll make sure it gets implemented."

What the City Planning director and I are advocating in the Urban Design Studio is to get all of this early in pre development, at the beginning, before people file-let's talk about these things so that at the end of the day none of us is backed into a corner saying, "We've just got to accept this because the department demanded that it be done" or the developer says "It is too late in the process for me to change my plans."

One of the other long-term critiques is that the Planning Department has typically focused on one project or one transaction at a time, and not on the street, the neighborhood, the community, or the city. What are the impediments in the city to a more holistic urban planning process?

The vision for the Planning Department is to do real planning. When we do new community plans they need to mean something-something that can be relied upon and that includes clear and consistent rules. This puts the challenge to all of our planners, and our office too, to come up with urban design guidelines that are embodied in the community plans with a clear path for implementation, so not only the community and developers will know what they can get. That discussion takes place not on a project-by-project basis but rather within the communities themselves.

Over time, many civic-minded groups have tried to influence their communities by commissioning plans and studies and lobbying and testifying in support of such planning, only to learn years later that if it's not formally in the community plan, it's not a lawful plan. Elaborate on the importance of the city's community plans and these ad hoc planning efforts.

All private entitlement in the city must be consistent with the community plan. That's the state law. Since L.A. is so big, we have 35 individual community plans that serve as the constitutions for local growth and development. But those plans are vague. They traditionally have not taken positions about the value of a neighborhood and have not articulated the characteristics that lead to that value. When someone asks for an individual project, they have to have a finding of conformance.

When I led some of these ad hoc plans, like the Los Angeles Design Action Team, 17 years ago, they were not a formal part of the city's planning system. However, in a project like City North LA/DAPT, many of the visions – the L.A. River, the mixed use, new Chinatown identity, and development at transit stops-are occurring today.

The LA/DAPT gave voice to the L.A. River, which found its way into the general plan framework; and today, the Rio Master Plan is a reality. So while the those plans had no force of law, they presented a vision. Part of our vision for the new community plans is that they will have the level of detail that makes every new project built in that community not only add value to the site, but value added to the community around it.