I think this is a very loaded question that requires more research than people are usually willing to do.

I think designing a city of the future from scratch is a useless exercise given that any attempt to incorporate a new city means a likely legal battle over resources with neighboring cities. I have oft dreamt of the possibility of the miles of unincorporated territory around Los Angeles eventually becoming their own cities, but then I dread the idea of anyone fighting Los Angeles over its water supply.

So rather than creating my own city of the future, I’d like to just bring up things that I would declare ‘important’ and how Los Angeles stacks up against those things.

It’s funny to get this question on a day where I re-opened my e-book of ‘City of Quartz’ by Mike Davis, a pretty comprehensive look at LA’s history as a spiritual descendant of ‘An Island on the Land’ by Carey McWilliams (the book that contained details that eventually inspired the movie ‘Chinatown’). City of Quartz was written in 1990 and discusses the state of Los Angeles at the time and what brought it to that point. In the early pages of the book they talk about the famed La Llano colony on the outskirts of Los Angeles and this is what they say about how the city would be constructed:

“Although influenced by contemporary City Beautiful and Garden City ideologies, Austin’s drawings and models, as architectural historian Dolores Hayden has emphasized, were ‘distinctively feminist and California’. Like Llano kid Gregory Ain’s more modest 1940s plans for cooperative housing, Austin attempted to translate the specific cultural values and popular enthusiasms of Southern California into a planned and egalitarian social landscape. In the model that she presented to colonists on May Day 1916, Llano was depicted as a garden city of ten thousand people housed in graceful Craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to liberate women from drudgery. The civic center, as befitted a ‘city of light, was composed of ‘eight rectangular halls, like factories, with sides almost wholly of glass, leading to a glass-domed assembly hall’. She crowned this aesthetic of individual choice within a fabric of social solidarity with a quintessentially Southern California gesture: giving every household an automobile and constructing a ring road around the city that would double ‘as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides.”

City of Quartz, Mike Davis

Now, I don’t think that’s how I would construct my city of the future, but I think some of the elements are interesting.

Communality

as a whole would come back in my city of the future. The world has increasingly made itself a lonelier place to be, and I think we need to reward people for going out of their comfort zones and being in public spaces in a safe and fun way. Los Angeles struggles with both sides of this. The freeway capital of the country has long relied on cars as the de facto mode of transportation. But before the automotive lobby had their way with the city in the 1940s, Los Angeles actually had a very robust public transport system. They’ve made some headway, with more stops being added to the LA Metro this year and more lines being added in anticipation of the Olympics in 2028, but it still falls staggeringly below what’s required. Not only that, the Metro stops that are available are cesspools of grime and violent crime which deter even the most optimistic from riding.

A safer, cleaner, more accessible, and more frequent Metro system would increase walkability, reduce our dependence on cars, and create more time spent together rather than the solitary hours that we spend apart in our cars on our long commutes.

Of course, that’s a very utopian sentence, and there’s no one thing that will create that kind of harmony within our rail system. BUt we’re assuming all of that is possible in this ‘city of the future’ so fuck you, I can say it.

Housing

would be a right, not a privilege. Communal housing as described in the above excerpt (and honestly pursued by Los Angeles as a city before the explosion of suburbia driven by white flight put the emphasis on single family homes) would be a big part of the city. There’s a lot of influence still felt in Spanish style family housing in parts of Los Angeles, much of which have been converted into separate apartments.

Los Angeles has a little-known (at least to me) law in place protecting ‘residential hotels’ – the last resorts of low income housing that operate more like, you guessed it, hotels than apartments. Those are now in danger of losing out completely to capitalistic needs, but I think they’re necessary to provide balance in housing and should be promoted as such. I could have used this as a resource when I was down on my luck in my early LA years and I had zero knowledge of it.

It’s also become quite clear that part of LA’s housing ‘boom’ over the past decade or so when it comes to rental properties amounts to some sort of money laundering. Multiple LA City Councilmembers have been arrested on corruption related charges that directly deal with approving housing construction projects. It seemed like you couldn’t go a day without seeing a new ‘luxury apartment’ construction site going up. Who is renting all these luxury apartments?? If you only build luxury apartments, you carve out the middle class of renters and either move them to the suburbs or drop them into the lower class. We need to build housing more strategically, and utilize adaptive re-use and convert buildings originally zoned for different purposes to residential buildings.

People do not realize how much solving the housing problem in Los Angeles will solve many more problems downstream.

Technology

would heighten every day of our lives, but not take it over. It does feel sexy to say that the ‘city of the future’ should be driven by technology and turned into some cool sci-fi ‘utopia’ but the longer I’ve lived the less faith I have in that happening. It may be because of the strikes happening right now, but I don’t have the utmost confidence in ultra-powerful technology being independent of powerful people who’d prefer to stay powerful. Honestly, I’d love to see a city run on technology that’s of the current day and age, not some antiquated system that they never have the budget to update.

And finally (because I need to wrap this up and look like I’m busy at work)

Concrete

would be overhauled. This is definitely speaking as someone who’s lived in LA for 8 years, but the reliance on concrete is so absurd. So many highways. So many lanes! Building more lanes to reduce traffic is like expanding your pet rabbits cage to give them more room. They’re just going to fill it up! The saying is ‘if you build it, they will come’ not ‘if you build it, they will use critical thinking to utilize it properly and not oversaturate it’. Also, there are technological advancements being made that enable concrete to work for people and not just be a heat trap that adversely affects environments. Concrete that generates electricity when driven on, for example, would be one of the many things that a ‘city of the future’ should incorporate city-wide when it comes to its relationship with our roads. There are entire highways in Los Angeles that were built to separate people rather than bringing people together. Neighborhoods like Boyle Heights can attest to the destructive power of concrete. We should tear these up and replace them with green space and public transit.

Okay sorry. This was a very serious one. I wish I could provide sources but again I’m at work and have to look productive. Los Angeles has some fascinating history that I’m only scratching the surface of, but it provides a tremendous blueprint to do some awe-inspiring things. I think we just need to restore our ambition as a city and think less about gridlock and more about possibilities.