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ChinesePasadena, not Manhattan
[tags]los angeles, urban planning, bill fulton, joel kotkin[/tags]
Pasadena’s beautiful City Hall is one of many beautiful buildings in a city that arguably is the one to be emulated by urban planning. Find more images in Flickr’s Pasadena photo pool.
Credit: Lush.i.ous via Flickr (Creative Commons license)
It only took a week for Bill Fulton to rebut Joel Kotkin in the same pages of the Los Angeles Times that L.A. is not “Manhattanizing,” but more, umm … “Pasadenaizing.” Kotkin chided Los Angeles for, gasp, too much density and it spawned a small dust storm of a meme.
Fulton, who maintains a blog on the California Policy & Development Report web site, is president of Ventura-based Solimar Research Group, a senior scholar at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and most famously, author of such books as “The Reluctant Metropolis” and “California: Land and Legacy”. In this week’s op-ed, Fulton points out that L.A. has multiple centers stemming from a planning vision in the 1970s to disperse small high-density commercial centers throughout the city. And density clustering like barnacales on a ship outside of the city’s general plan had to do with developers subsidizing City Council races in exchange for building “outside of the box.” Even other municipalities are growing up with low-rise buildings and walkable communities, with Pasadena serving as the prototype.
In the past week, here’s how the Fulton vs. Kotkin meme evolved:
- Kotkin: Why the rush to Manhattanize L.A.? (linked above)
- Fulton: It’s time to de-Kotkinize the planning debate
- Curbed LA was burning up with this feud
- Joel Kotkin: What you’re for, I’m against
- Joel Kotkin defenders UNITE!
- Friday morning linkage on August 24, 2007 plugging to our site’s two cents.
- Fulton in the L.A. Times: “We’re Pasadena-izing” (linked above)
- LAist: How LA became, well, LA — A Partial Planning History
Discussion
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Both make good points, although I think a lot of crap is dumped on Kotkin just because he’s Kotkin. Kotkin thinks every city builds rail because of penis envy, which isn’t necessarily the case. Pasadena-style development is the desire, but Pasadena also has a community which is extremely civically engaged and has bought into the plan. The city is small enough to be responsive to its constituents. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen with the City of LA. LA shouldn’t be broken up into four pieces, like was originally proposed in 2002 (SFV, Hollywood, San Pedro, and “the rest”); it should have been broken up into about 40 pieces. Failing that, a borough system (with about 10-15 boroughs) would have been more responsive, and a giant step towards community accountability, but instead we got the Neighborhood Councils, which are nice but nowhere near effective.
Amazing how Fulton’s position on a City Council is glossed over in all these discussions. No armchair theorist, Fulton is actively experimenting on the population of San Buenaventura. He’s even recruited the former mayor of Pasadena as their planning czar. The process has been as interesting as it has been painful to watch. Next up is a city subsidized high density artist enclave that deliberately has less than half the available parking than normal.
What Fulton says about Pasadena’s development is generally true. He missed a couple of things though: 1) Pasadenans are having a hard time getting out of their cars, even to get around within the city limits. As a result, traffic can be pretty stinky. 2) Who can afford to move into Pasadena? If you’re making anything less than $25 per hour, forget it.
If Manhattanization means that we’ll get good pizza and bagels, bring it on!