the sheer amount of parking still being required and built in downtown illustrates just how much further la's transit system needs to grow for any real, substantive kind of urbanism to take hold in our city. most of these projects are being built for people who
drive to work in suburbs, etc - downtown is increasingly becoming a dense bedroom community. much of this growth is going to be limited by mobility.
we are celebrating a surface-value downtown renaissance (and a surface-value downtown) the real change isn't happening until a large proportion of this city begins travelling by mass transit within a concentrated area like all the other well urbanized cities throughout the world - not until we start seeing purple, vermont, silver, yellow, expo, and various other links open. all the great urban centers of the world, chicago's lakefront, tokyo's 23 wards, manhattan, londons city, central paris, all evolved out of at least a century's worth of existing dense rail infrastructure, organically, and the relatively uninterrupted commercial, residential, and entertainment growth that evolved out of and depended on it. these centers retained their status as the indispensible centers of their metros - i'd argue also because they remained great financial centers - great centers of equities trading ensured that a large educated white-collar financial and corporate presence populated these centers.
LA, first of all, has nothing close to this level of
functional centralization within an equivalent 20-40 sq miles; within an area which can be adequately served by a dense rail infrastructure, and second of all, will probably never build a rail network of such a level of density given the semi-commuter rail network being pursued out to bumblefuck montclair etcetera, and thirdly, if tides miraculously change enabling a dense construction spree, it would take probably five decades of "de-sprawlification" (on the order of hundreds of millions sf of office space moving back to this hypothetical center, thousands of car-oriented structures being replaced by ped-oriented ones, etc), and a tremendous education of LA's relatively braindead populace, for LA to begin to tout "world class urbanism" to speak of, at least on the order of paris or london or tokyo.
that said....
highrises are tall and shiny and expensive and city-like!!! I'm eternally happy our 4 sq miles of shiny highrises is finally getting more shiny neighbors!! If we can't actually
be a real city, at least we can look like one in the postcards!!! LAMG, citywatch, bjornson, if you're listening, post more pictures and comments! who needs pointy-headed discussions about subways, urban design, and other far-fetched ideas when the real problem is as simple as appearance!? Where's the pretty pictures LAMG?!
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