May 2011
9 posts
The eternal question - is Los Angeles a city
Sustainable cities collective blogger Geoff Manaugh (who is also a contributor to this new book) discusses the book No More Play - Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond. It’s basically a book by an architecture firm about the context in which their projects exist. The discussion is played out through interviews with artists, bloggers, urban thinkers etc…
There were a lot of these types of books that came out in the 80’s and of course the gloomy Mike Davis books of the 90’s, but this one seems unique because although it’s from the perspective of a builder, Maltzan is not interested in ego driven, navel gazing but in contributing to the dialogue of where the concept of city is going. There are no discussions or pictures of his firm’s projects in the book.
You can read an excerpt here.
“Extreme scales of activity, development and social intensity are evident in the examples of powerful metropolises. The same indicators are present in Los Angeles. We are about to tip over, accelerating at an unrelenting pace. We have reached a point where past vocabularies of the city and of urbanism are no longer adequate, and at this moment, the very word city no longer applies”.
“Los Angeles is a place of constantly overlapping layers, complications and evolutions. As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles”.
via latimes and sustainablecitiescollective,
I took the photo on the 110. Don’t worry, I was a passenger.
more LAX pics
If you happen to travel through Los Angeles this weekend, check out my mural at LAX, Terminal 1 (Southwest, US Air), downstairs in baggage claim.
New Urbanism isms
Goofing around on Tumblr today, I did a tag search for landscape urbanism and came up with a few interesting blogs.
Portland based blog discussing all thing urban (history, mapping, development, poverty etc.)
http://www.underpaidgenius.com/ - lots of pictures, thoughts, links, maps, infographics
And of course (for the cynics) the landscape urbanism bs generator.
Top photo is of Dharavi slum in Mumbai and the bottom image is a NASA satellite image of deforestation in Bolivia.
Oh and if you want to learn more about the new urbanism movement and their rivals the landscape urbanists, there’s a good article here.
