Los Angeles has long captured the imaginations of designers and urbanists for its characteristic embodiment of the twentieth century metropolis. The city’s vast polycentric agglomerations of diverse communities, single-purpose transportation and utility infrastructure—framed against a backdrop of ocean, mountain, and desert landscapes—have inspired an impressive lineage of techno-futurist identities and visionary design engagement. In the near future, with the proliferation of emergent technologies such as ‘level five’ autonomous mobility systems and ‘smart’ connected streets and infrastructure, the city and its surrounding metropolitan fabrics will continue to offer a quintessential testing ground for new urbanistic visions. This was the focus of the fall 2018 joint urban design studio, supported by the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
