I was intrigued by the fact that transit contributed to sprawl in Los Angeles from around 1880 to the 1920s, and that by the WWII period and afterwards transit had already established a political and built environment for roads and highways to dominate. Looking at historic maps of Los Angeles, one can see the sprawling range of the city's past transit system. I had always considered transit as a method to combat sprawl in places, which is the current paradigm of thinking. I had not significantly considered before that early planners had initially perceived transit as a method to induce sprawl and alleviate congestion. I think a fundamental issue at the time, among many, was a sense of binary thinking. Transit could only induce sprawl or alleviate congestion, it could not accomplish an equilibrium between the both. This sense of binary thinking is still an issue today, but planners now I believe are becoming much more aware of the gradient between binaries, such as the gradient between sprawl and density. I wonder how different Los Angeles and the surrounding built environment would look if instead past planners had the opposite intentions and outcomes for implementing transit: to increase density (while alleviating congestion) and reduce future sprawl. It is interesting to think that Los Angeles is still considered a really dense city of over 7,000 people per square mile in 1990 terms. Is this densification over time due to the paradigm shift in the thinking of planners, from a concern to decrease congestion to a goal to increase density? I think it is.
By Asif Haque
Edited by Manuel Suarez Pallas
Source:
Martin Wachs (1984) Autos, Transit, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s, Journal of the American Planning Association, 50:3, 297-310, DOI:10.1080/01944368408976597
Class presentation on history
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ReplyDeleteHello Asif - I must have learned this before, given that I have done some of these readings, but I did not remember the details. So, I was also surprised to read that highway building and personal vehicles did not initiate the sprawl Los Angeles is known for. Of course, that is what people wanted then, as we read. Some people (those well-off) moved to California to escape the dense urban form, or wanted a life that somewhat resembled the farmland they grew up in. This resulted in the sprawl we know today, accompanied by transit infrastructure, as you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteHi Asif, you make some really good points about the reading. How planners would use transit as a method to induce sprawl in Los Angeles. I also wonder how Los Angeles would have looked if the plans were to increase density. Would the city be more like Chicago or New York? would the city have less traffic? How would the neighboring places like Santa Monica, Long Beach, Anaheim would've been affected?
ReplyDeleteHi, Manuel, I appreciate your insightful comment. You raise a great point about how if past planners instead sought to increase density rather than induce sprawl, the effects probably would not be contained in just Los Angeles. I think other neighboring places, like the cities you mentioned, would be similarly affected such that they also would have shifted toward using transit as a method to increase density while alleviating congestion. I think perhaps the built environment of Los Angeles County would have followed this precedent. The place as a whole then could have been more competitive today with Chicago and New York, as a transit-accessible area. Of course, I still think car-reliance would have prevailed in the peripheries of the area, such as in suburbs and rural places far from downtown and downtown-adjacent activities. But still, I think we would have seen a downtown and surrounding area that is more transit-oriented and transit-adjacent.
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