This
proposal asserts that infrastructural investment should lead to a reformulation
and simplification of the entire transit system, rather than discrete
interventions. Termed by some “a managed fantasy”, Los Angeles is a
mirage. It is defined and sustained by it’s aging infrastructural legacy:
freeways, channelized water networks, power grids, and sewage. These networks
have grown horizontally, in response to and in anticipation of human land use.
They underpin a vast landscape of sprawling enclaves served by an incessant
frenzy of individualized transportation. Yet after decades of relative climatic
and geological stability, cheap reliable energy input, and resources imported
from distant sources, the fate of this experiment is increasingly uncertain. The
gathering forces of resource scarcity, global warming, sea level rise, economic
destabilization will all serve to radically alter its future modes of transport
and development patterns. In the face of these challenges, Los Angeles is
placed in a unique moment of opportunity—with a chance to assert its resiliency
by radically altering its modes of infrastructural, not as a measure of
remedial planning, but as a matter of survival. It must inoculate, desalinate, articulate, and
abandon.
Predicated
on three symbiotic constructs, Flow, Focus, and Fuzz, this exhibit outlines a
possible scenario for Los Angeles over the course of the 21st century. Taken
together, they comprise a mutually supportive metabolism that responds to and
embraces regional pressures as a catalyst for new land uses, new economies, new
forms of transportation, and new modes of urbanism. Recognizing the vital role
that mobility, water, and sewage will play Los Angeles' future, it must begin
investment in a core armature of new bundled infrastructures which will allow
the city to survive impending peak water/peak oil. The city must reorganize along the matrices
of transportation, water and sewarshed networks, and grow infrastructural
tentacles out into the world to ship and receive. . Let the streets fall apart!
Lets mine them for valuable minerals and petrochemicals...