Golden Living the Californian Way

After having visited all but one of the metropolitan areas of California, it is hard to picture the long term future of urban development, urban planning and urban living the Californian way.

Urban Sprawl the LA Way

The Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area with 18 million inhabitants spread over five counties covering over 100,000 km2 (total area) is maybe not an urban area with the highest qualify of life in the US or the western world. Its waste geographical size is maybe its worst quality, with people, workplaces and social infrastructure spread tens or hundred miles apart, making daily journeys for the majority of people challenging. The chaotic zoning with factories and distribution centres within the core of the urban area is also somewhat an oddity. Unnecessarily large residential building plots make local journeys unnecessarily long, for both the young, adults and the old.

Turning downtown Los Angeles into a prosperous high density mixed use urban area may or may not be possible. After a quarter century of redeveloping downtown, there is still a long way to go. The western half is mostly prosperous with new office, hotels and cultural buildings and a handful of residential buildings. The eastern, southern and northern parts of downtown are however partly derelict, partly car parks, in between 5 to 50 storey buildings. The idea of bringing Manhattan or downtown Chicago to LA is maybe flawed, as LA probably requires an unique solution to its downtown future.

Park furniture Downtown LA Style departing a little from the usual wood, black or green... but then again this is LA after all.

Whether more people would enjoy dense urban living in the downtown of LA if more public parks and squares were delivered is up to anyone's guess, but when over a third of households in LA are single households, maybe a new approach is needed. If only a third of the single households where to live in denser communities, that is 1.5 million people in 1.5 million apartments in the Greater LA Area. But then again, maybe apartment living is not the Southern California way of living.

SF Style Semi-Dense Urban Living
The Greater San Francisco Bay Area with 8 million inhabitants is different from Los Angeles in that it has a denser urban core of 0.8 million inhabitants on 600 km2, even though the suburbs spread out into 12 counties covering about 20,000 km2 (total area). Because of the higher densities in the urban core (in addition to some urban nodes), providing public transport (and public facilities) are less of a challenge, as many journeys centre on the urban cores.

However, whether the Bay Area proves that it is possible to build semi-dense suburbs over a large area and at the same time retain a larger urban core is a little hard to conclude, as at one point, the semi-dense suburbs may overtake the core in status and significance.

Bike stands San Diego Style comes in bright colours and in hundreds of different designs, here a more obvious one, in the shape of ... bikes.

Urban Living Returning to Downtown San Diego
Where LA has partly failed, San Diego has to a larger extent succeeded by bringing quality housing back to its downtown, combined with new private and public parks and squares. San Diego is also fortunate in that downtown is small and that California is booming. And in San Diego, a segregated tram system spreads from downtown into the suburbs, along (soon) three radiant lines and along a suburban loop.

Public Transit, Cycling and Increasing Densities
Extending the underground metro into the suburbs of Los Angeles was maybe a little foolish. The San Francisco and San Diego solution with segregated trams or the Chicago solution with an overground inner city metro would maybe have been a better solution. Most of Los Angeles is after all not very dense, and far less dense than the inner city of Chicago, Berlin or Paris, all three with partly overground inner city metro systems. Similarly, vast distances do not promote cycling as an alternative mode of transport in low dense metropolitan areas.

However, as LA has already invested in a 100+ station metro system, increasing densities around these stations is maybe long overdue. If only 25 apartments are built at each station on average a year, that will result in a million apartments over a 40 year period, or a tenth of the total housing requirements of California during the same period.

Urban Living San Diego Style, with narrow 'front garden' and entrance directly from main street into ground floor apartment.  

Competitiveness and Urban Size the Californian Way
Clearly economic competitiveness is as important as quality of life in a metropolitan area, and it is of little doubt that California is competitive. The competitiveness of particularly the Bay Area is partly historic, based on technology and electronics initially for military use. And according to industrial cluster theory, the more qualified professionals and the more companies within the same industry, the more innovative and competitive an urban area may become.

However, it may be that urban sprawl in LA is beyond the point where competitiveness is increasing. There are after all only a handful metropolitan areas as large as LA and SF in the western world; Tokyo, New York, Osaka, Greater London, Ile-de-France, Chicago and Rhein-Rühr among them. But there are many more large and medium size cities in the western world that are world competitive within a single or a few industries, and their sizes are nothing like the two larger metropolitan areas of California. However, as long as the US tends to be more competitive than Europe, who am I to tell.