2
Why LA should move towards Vertical Green Spaces Jenjira Holmes
One of the major developments in urban design over
LA, which was redesigned for much more intensive use. The
the last two decades is the emergence of Landscape Urbanism.
third method is a relatively new idea in the urban context where
Charles Waldheim proclaims that “Landscape Urbanism
public green spaces are implemented into the city via private-
describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in
residential projects. The residential projects are bringing green
which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building
parks into the city rather exploiting the green space. An example
block of contemporary urbanism.” It is now becoming globally
for this third method is focused on LOH Architects’ Formosa
recognized that sustainable urbanism must look to the context
1140 project, where the project emphasizes on the shared open
of the landscape, rather than buildings alone for solutions exist
green space for the residents and the community at large. These
in urban cities.1 Shanghai and Los Angeles both suffer from
three methods are categorized into one class, known as “the
lack of green space, both cities are currently striving to increase
horizontal green space”. The “horizontal green space” approach
green spaces. Shanghai has responded to the challenges of its
is a completely different approach from Shanghai’s vertical green
uneven historical patterns of urban development, high residential
pockets. The “horizontal green space” approach has to do with
densities and lacks of access to parks by integrating vertical
Los Angeles’s obsession with a dreamy single-family residential,
green spaces within the city. On the other hand, Los Angeles
or also known as “R1”. LA’s R1 has extended far beyond the
incorporated three, yet similar ways in which parks are being
original district, into the sprawl of subdivisions, causing extreme
built in the city of dense single-family residential. The first method is to build completely new parks into the city. Examples of this method include the Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision and the construction of Hollywood Central Park near the 101 Freeway. The second method is somewhat similar to the first method, but the second method focuses on the way in which Los Angeles is increasing its green space by the redevelopment of the existing parks. Instead of looking for new plot of land to build new parks comparable to the first method, park projects are redesigned to provide supplementary green spaces. The examples for the second method will be focused on the redesign of the Grand Park
Fig 1 LA Skyline. Website, http://millionairesconcierge.com/wpcontent
3
transportation networks for walking and biking, green and gray infrastructure for water management and recreational uses, to enhance public health, strengthen the communities’ flexibility to climate change, protect and restore wildlife habitat, celebrate regional culture and foster a green economy in order to create more jobs. These goals may seem like a big stretch for a traditionally car-dependent, freeway-bound Los Angeles, but project leaders claimed that it is also possible for this project to 3
take place. Fig 2 Fig. 4. Plan of Hollywood Freeway Central Park, overlapping Google street image. Website, http://millenniumhollywood.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/05/FHCP-map-page-001-791x1024.jpg (accessed December 8, 2014).
commute times and congestion. The R1 has come to stand for suburban development and it shapes how the parks and green spaces are being built into the city.2 Due to scarcity of resources and intense urbanization, it is now time for LA to look at Shanghai’s vertical green spaces as an inspiration for its new urban development. This paper will explore these three different types of green spaces in Los Angeles, factors reinforcing these and how and why LA is in need for vertical gardens.
The first method is to build completely new parks
into the city. Emerald Necklace project, led by a non-profit organization called Amigos de los Rios is an example of this first method. The Emerald Necklace project was inspired by the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan, a proposed, but a never fully realized project that incorporated large-scale interconnected network of parks extending around the city. In 2005, a nonprofit organization, Amigos de los Rios, brought back the original Plan and updated it to suit the contemporary city by outlining the development of a 17-mile loop of parks and greenways connecting ten cities and nearly 500,000 residents along the RĂo Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers. This plan establishes a comprehensive and tactical guide in creating a network of parks and public open spaces connected by river greenways and trails. This plan hopes to create active 4
Another example is Hollywood Cap Park. Hollywood
Cap Park, commonly known as Hollywood Freeway Central Park, is potentially a 44-acre park covering US-101 with a wide band of green space that stretches from Bronson Avenue to 4
Santa Monica Boulevard. The idea of creating a cap park over the US-101 actually has been around for at least 25 years and the city has finally made an agreement with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to make this dream comes true. This is a cheaper alternative to buying new land because real estate prices keep rising. We have arrived at a time in Los Angeles where it is actually cheaper to construct a cap over the Hollywood Freeway in order to build a park rather than buying an existing land. Accessibility to the park is not a problem because the area is well served by transit facilities, with both sides of the park served by several Metro Line rail stations and Metro bus lines. The main goal of this park is to create a street-level public park, a recreational space in the city that lacks adequate parks and open spaces, as well as bringing two separate areas of Hollywood back together again. The city hopes that this will reverse the current effect of the 101 Freeway trench, which has artificially divided the surrounding communities for more than 60 years. It is also believed that the creation of the park will help reduce local freeway noise. This park will be the symbol of a renewed commitment to repair the damaged neighborhoods that were shaped by the freeway-building era.
The second method is to redevelop and redesign
variation of privacy screens and open voids for the balcony
existing parks to increase the green space. The Grand Park
inside the building’s skin allows for the public realm of the park to
LA, a $56 million renovation project that creates a rectangular,
intrude into the private volume of the building. The building takes
12-acre park, that stretches from the top of Bunker Hill to the
what would be the internalized open space of the courtyard and
base of the City Hall, is an example of this second method. This
moves it to the exterior of the building to create a park. As a result
park provides Downtown LA with its first major green space,
of shifting the common open space to the exterior and pushing
as well as a new cultural hub for the city. Features of the park
the building to one side, units are organized linearly allowing for
includes a renovated fountain, children’s splash pool area, stage
‘park frontage’ and cross-ventilation for every unit. This project
and even plantings of drought-resistant plants from around the
presents a challenging but influential opportunity in regards to the
world. Rivera, the park’s director stated that Grand Park’s biggest
creation and inclusion of an urban park in a private development.
asset is its flexibility. Events such as concerts, film screenings
The great thing about this project is that its park is accessible to
and farmers markets will be coordinated through a partnership
the public at large, not solely residents with granted permission.
6
with the Music Center, which also manages the adjacent Disney
In the past, many public open spaces that were part of privately 5
Concert Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Ahmanson Theater.
owned office, retail or mixed-use development did not allow equal
accessibility and could not be used by all population segments
The last method is to implement public green space
into private residential projects, to increase the overall parks
in the same manner and with the same freedom as traditional
of the city. An example for this third method is LOH Architects’
public open spaces. Formosa 1140 marks a turning point for
Formosa 1140 project. Formosa 1140, located in the heart of
privatization in the contemporary setting.
West Hollywood, is an eleven unit housing project emphasizes
on the shared open space for the residents and the community.
concept— horizontal green space. All of the projects mentioned
LOHA’s design for Formosa 1140 addresses the condition of lack
are used as tools to bring people and communities in together,
of urban public space by manipulating one part of its privately-
but Los Angeles is a Built-Out, Park-Poor City. As the City of
owned building site into a publicly-managed pocket park. The
Los Angeles continues to grow, it is faced with the challenge of
7
These three methods are categorized into one main
providing safe, healthy places that residents can identify with. The city will face the challenge of trying to provide adequate open space for a continually growing population. Competition for land increases, making it hard to acquire parcels of land for parks. Rapid urbanization, combined with a spatial planning policy of densification forced more people to face the prospect of living in residential environments with fewer green resources. This greatly affect low socioeconomic groups without resources to move to greener areas outside the cities, leading to environmental injustice such as inaccessibility to green spaces.8 As New York Fig 3 Elevation of Formosa 1140.Website, http://phaidonatlas.com/sites/default/files/styles/c_standard_ thumb_sq/public/resized/user/2671/loh
Times opinion writer and economist Paul Krugman put it in May
5
of 2008: “In the face of rising oil prices, which have left many
around the world, green roofs, living walls, urban farms, and
Americans stranded in suburbia— utterly dependent on their
pocket parks are emerging in skyscrapers. With more than 75
cars, yet having a hard time affording gas—it’s starting to look
percent of the world’s population expecting to live in urban areas
as if Berlin [a city of four- or five-story apartment buildings with
by 2050, something needed to be done to accommodate this
easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping] had
change. New residential, commercial and office spaces within
the better idea”. The most damning factors are environmental
major cities will be needed to accommodate millions of people,
9
11
ones: we’re running out of water, land, and oil. Explosive urban
leading cities to invest in innovative, integrated and sustainable
growths and massive use of the available resources will lead to
solutions to cope with the rapid growth of urbanization. In recent
environment exploitation and consequent disasters, especially
years, urban planners and architects around the world have been
around urban areas. Urban sprawl fragments land cover, reducing
developing ideas and creating different solutions to approach
ecosystem functions and increasing the probability of natural
the challenge of high-density urbanization, and the concept of
and man-made hazards. Because of land and resource scarcity,
the vertical city has become a very popular one in many cities
Los Angeles needs to seek innovative alternatives to create
such as Shanghai. However, the work that went into sustainable
green space for the people in order to maintain and promote
architecture are poor in quality. Sustainable design is not always
better health and community, as well as encouraging sustainable
seen as representing design innovation. Many sustainable
architecture.10 We should look into vertical green spaces.
architecture are limited in terms of its scale due to rapid
urbanization and limited resources. We need to find alternative
“Vertical garden” is an attempt in creating additional
green spaces in densely populated urban areas. In many places
12
design approaches that would allow us to create large scale
Fig 4 Plan of Grand Park LA, Downtown, overlapping Google Earth satellite image. Website, http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs. dir/1/files/2012/07/los-angeles-grand-park-5.jpg
6
sustainable urban projects without destroying the Earth.13
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1
In order to move towards the vertical green space
approach, we must kill R1. Indeed the re-coding of contemporary urbanism requires a new mode of flexibility capable of supporting architectural experimentation as well as to reconstitute the outmoded premises of R1, such as the preservation of functional segregation, the maintenance of low density urbanism and the 14
deliberate advocacy for social homogeneity.
Some might argue that Los Angeles is not Chicago
or New York, we do not need to be like those two cities, but considering the issue of resource scarcity such as land and water, it would be beneficial to consider this alternative method. There is a common perception that LA was always destined for the nontraditional, low-density urbanism style. because the vision for the multi-nuclei city actually predated the construction of the freeway system. Nonetheless, many of LA’s early planners actually pictured LA growing into a series of connected, semibucolic, peripheral garden cities. On the other hand, due to major identity crisis in the 20s, many business leaders wanted LA to grow vertically into a dense and compact mono-centric city.15 Garden cities and vertical cities seem to have been separated destinies for LA, but perhaps the time has come to combine the two together. Vertical green spaces is something that Los Angeles has long been yearning for.
Wall, Ed, and Tim Waterman. Basics Landscape Architecture: Urban Design. Lausanne: AVA Academia, 2010. 18. 2 Cuff, Dana, and Dahl Per-Johan. “Rx for R1: Sustaining the Neighborhood”. 306090. Vol. 13. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 26. 3 Goodyear, Sarah. “Ambitious L.A. Parks Plan Will Require Coordination of 88 Cities.” Next City. August 18, 2014. Accessed December 7, 2014. http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/los-angelesemerald-necklace-plan-la-basin. 4 CRA/LA, Compass Blueprint, and Southern California Association of Governments. Creating Hollywood Freeway Central Park: Compass Blueprint Demonstration Project: Summary Report, November 2008. Los Angeles, 2008. 2. Allen, Sam. “Grand Park Downtown Opens with a Flourish — and Hopes of Growing.” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2012. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/ jul/27/local/la-me-grand-park-20120727. 6 “Formosa 1140 / Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects” 07 Mar 2009. ArchDaily. Accessed 06 Dec 2014. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=16194> 7 Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia. “Privatisation of Public Open Space: The Los Angeles Experience.” The Town Planning Review 64, no. 2 (1993): 139. 8 Maas, Jolanda, Robert Verheij, Peter Groenewegen, Sjerp De Vries, and Peter Spreeuwenberg. “Green Space, Urbanity, And Health: How Strong Is The Relation?” Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 60, no. 7 (2006): 587. 9 Cuff, Dana, and Dahl Per-Johan. “Rx for R1: Sustaining the Neighborhood”. 306090. Vol. 13. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 27. 10 Wall, Ed, and Tim Waterman. Basics Landscape Architecture: Urban Design. Lausanne: AVA Academia, 2010. 52. 11 United Nations Population Division. “An Overview of Urbanization, Internal Migration, Population Distribution and Development in the World.” 2008, 6. 12 Mostafavi, Mohsen, and Gareth Doherty. Ecological Urbanism. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2010. 12. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Cuff, Dana, and Dahl Per-Johan. “Rx for R1: Sustaining the Neighborhood”. 306090. Vol. 13. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 30. 15 Troy, Austin. The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 106. 5
7