IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

Southern California’s diffuse cities are undergoing a transformation. Over the past few decades, immigrants, primarily from Asia and Latin America, have reshaped the culture, purpose, and spatial fabric of parts of the iconic postwar sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin. The region is historically known for its arid garden-like setting whose private lawns construct social control and frame individual residential identity; a pattern sustained through functionally segregated zoning and conventions of a vast, yet reductive, real estate industry. In recent decades, with the arrival of new immigrant residents, revised urban narratives have begun to form in this diffuse environment. Increasingly composed of hybrid cultural space, the exurbs of LA now hold diverse cultural functions and meaning. Such a reworking of postwar sprawl speaks to the positive potential of new social and spatial complexity for the archetypal scattered city. With photos, analytic drawings, and speculative design experiments, this article explores this grassroots form of urbanization. These help to outline the positive potential for a new, inclusive, and diverse future for the low-density Euro- American built environment and its larger exurban metropolitan city. Finally, the complex functional and diverse cultural patterns emerging in these aging post-war suburbs challenge our traditional understanding of “urban” and “urban-ness.” Rather than habitually focusing on physical compactness to define these two terms, the increased density of social interaction in these existing prewar communities suggests a less formal and more culturally driven interpretation of urbanity. Accepting such a shift in the meaning of “the city” is more qualitative and accurate in ways that can include, and better inform, contemporary diffuse collective urbanization, not just in Southern California, but across the world.