JOEL KOTKIN
The Los Angeles-based urbanist on the real possibilities and false promises looming on the city's ho
By Perry Crowe
Joel Kotkin is an urbanist - part of a relatively new, and constantly evolving field that studies and recontextualizes the modern city with a sometimes dizzying mix of science and romance. It's defined not by one doctrine but by a landscape mined with surprise and possibility. Aside from his post as visiting lecturer at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Kotkin is a regular contributor to the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and is an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute with an eye for ideas that "transcend the conventional political spectrum."
In May, he wrote a "Dear Antonio" letter to incoming Mayor Villaraigosa in The Jewish Journal where he called upon him not to "bask in the glow of a great ethnic achievement," but to get to work in the tradition of Fiorello LaGuardia, the former mayor of New York City. And Kotkin's newest book, The City: A Global History, discusses the problems confronting a nation grappling with the digital age. To what degree will the living room or study be the new office? Will pajamas and underwear become the nation's new dress code?
CityBeat: In The City, you discuss how large cities are losing their economic and cultural significance as industry and population move to outlying suburbs. Will that leave major cities like Los Angeles with a big hole in the middle?
Joel Kotkin: That depends on what they do. Los Angeles has the advantage of already being what you might call a multi-polar city. It is a large number of suburbs and not one central core upon which everything depends. L.A. is really the prototype of the new kind of city. So, in that way, it has an advantage, a fundamental advantage because it still has a "real" economy. It still has significant manufacturing, it has a well-established export industry with entertainment, and, most importantly, it's got the tradition as a trading center, as a port. So it has attributes of, if you will, a "real" economy which probably puts it in a somewhat better position than most major cities. But you always have the capacity to screw it up.
And how would one go about not screwing it up?
The first thing is that you really need to focus on infrastructure. With the road system, I think you could vastly expand the dedicated bus lanes. I think the light-rail is proving not to really have the ridership. It really is not appropriate to this area. And you could certainly develop the bus system much faster ... . In L.A., mass transit is more of a public service and less of an alternative for most people.
Antonio Villaraigosa mentioned some pretty ambitious plans for public transportation on the campaign trail - expanding the subway system to the ocean with the Exposition Line and the bus-only lanes of the Orange Line in the Valley. What do you think of those plans?
There is just no way there's going to be money to do that. I'm not sure he's thought all the things out ... . The hard thing for any public leader today, particularly in this era, is to understand that you have to make choices. For instance, if you decide you're going to build a light-rail system, understand that you're not going to be able to expand the bus system. Or if you're going to put money into downtown, you're not going to be able to increase housing in [other] neighborhoods.
Beyond public transportation, how else could one strengthen L.A.'s infrastructure?
We need to be, obviously, business-friendly. And take advantage of the cost advantages of things like DWP. Not to extract money to pay for something for the public sector so much as to really focus on making L.A. more competitive. During the energy bust in California a few years back, L.A. [owning] the DWP turned out to be a big advantage. In a lot of ways, we have to go back a little ways towards taking advantage of the fundamental principles of what you might call "sewer socialism." In other words, good public infrastructure, which was really the thing that made the L.A. economy really boom, particularly in the '50s and '60s. And lastly, of course, is education - the largest and most difficult can of worms.
Does the government cause extra damage by cutting education funding?
Certainly funding is not the only issue in the L.A. public schools. Some of it is just the historical difficulty L.A. has, which is absorbing a very large population of non-English-speaking people from, basically, agrarian cultures. That's very difficult. As opposed to if you have immigrants that are coming from an urban culture like, let's say, [South] Korea. It's a lot easier to integrate those people into an urban area like L.A. than it is taking somebody from El Salvador or somebody from rural Mexico and expecting them to be able to fit into a kind of hyper-industrialized, even post-industrial economy like L.A.
What about the idea that L.A. is well-served by its connection to the economic powers of the Pacific Rim - China, Japan, Korea, etc.?
What L.A. has is an economy that has a very strong ethnic component which is both tied to the global economy, but also has people who are willing to, in many cases, sacrifice more than native-born Americans in the building of businesses. You look throughout the L.A. economy and there are large sectors - you know, garment is certainly one - if you go to many retail businesses, there is really the willingness of immigrants to work extraordinarily long hours and save lots of money that make it far more possible for L.A. to be competitive.
In your book, The New Geography, you coined the term "nerdistans." Can you explain?
Nerdistans are the sort of high tech areas that are usually in the outer suburbs. You know, you think of the Conejo Valley ... Orange County. Irvine. These are classic nerdistans.
L.A.'s historic heart of downtown seems to follow what you say about cities being hollowed out by businesses moving into surrounding areas. What do you think of the current plans for revitalizing the area?
There are good buildings left. Some natural things that have occurred in the garment district or Chinatown or Little Tokyo. I like what Tom Gilmore [of Gilmore Associates] has been trying to do with some of the old historic buildings [creating the Old Bank District lofts]. I'm not too enthralled with Eli Broad's idea about creating the Champs-Élysées on Grand Avenue [with his Grand Avenue project], putting a bunch of Gaps there, wanting to put an "L.A. Live" - sort of like putting a Universal CityWalk there ... . There are things we can do with downtown, but I think a lot of the investments we're making are a little silly.
We have these districts [in downtown] which provide a lot of employment specifically for immigrants. And we ought to think about how to grow them or at least preserve them. And when they talk about downtown, they never talk about the garment district or the jewelry district or the toy district. And these are the places that actually have worked and done it without a great deal of subsidy.Published: 07/21/2005
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