Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Mia Lehrer + Associates and the City of Los Angeles Planning
Department, Los Angeles Downtown River Revitalisation, 2006
The City of Los Angeles Planning Department undertook a two-year-long
consultative process to build on local pressure groups’ plans to revitalise the
entire length of the LA River within the city’s boundaries, utilising funds
earmarked by the state. Three large new state parks are proposed along the
river around the downtown on old railway yards, including the re-creation of
lost wetlands. The downtown riverbed will be stepped to make an inhabitable
landscape during the dry season, with large ducts hidden in the section to
carry spring flood run-off. The commercial redevelopment of the surrounding
land as office and residential blocks will help fund the project.
suburban networks. Although American cities appear chaotic
in contrast to their Canadian counterparts, their suburban
format is based on an underlying, self-organising system of
giant enclaves of recombinant landscape patches. Global
corporations have learnt how to manipulate these patches as
attractors to direct the paths of pedestrians or drivers, using
spectacular forms of landscaping for marketing purposes.
Walt Disney demonstrated the power of this approach in the
Anaheim Disneyland enclave in 1954, with its themed main
street entry armature and variously styled landscape enclaves
(Tomorrow Land, Frontier Land, and so on), attracting 12
million people annually. At Disney World, begun in 1967,
Disney demonstrated that the same spectacular landscaping
and marketing strategy could be applied at a global scale, this
time set within the specially created, tax-exempt, 10,118-
hectare (25,000-acre) Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida. 3
From the outset, Disney World was masterplanned as a
multicellular collection of thematic, attractor patches. The first
Magic Kingdom patch (1971) included a replica of the Anaheim
Disneyland. The second included Disney’s Experimental
Planned Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT, 1982), where the
global, multicellular thematic was driven home by the
arrangement of various representative streets and landscapes
(from, for example, Japan, France and England) around a
central lake. A Bucky Fuller dome housing the ATT Pavilion,
then a global communications giant, towered over the lake,
seen from and observing all points. EPCOT provided a model of
the global Network City and the role of landscape in masking
its machinery. The simulacrum became a huge, global success,
and is now the largest single employer in the US with 58,000
‘cast members’ hosting 42 million ‘guests’. Disney’s
Celebration (1996), a 2,024-hectare (5,000-acre) suburban new
town designed by Cooper, Robertson & Partners and Robert AM
Stern, piggybacked on this success. 4
It is necessary to briefly note here the proliferation of
enormous, masterplanned and landscaped corporate newtown
assemblages like Celebration since the 1990s. There is
Cooper, Robertson & Partners’ ecologically sensitive project
for the St Joe Towns & Resorts company’s vast Florida
landholdings (2005–06), and Eckbo, Dean, Austin Williams
(EDAW) made new-town plans for the 1,900-hectare (4,700-
acre) Stapleton Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado (2001). Ken
Smith’s team’s winning entry for the similar-sized El Toro Air
Force Base in Irvine, California, included the creation of the
Orange County Great Park (2006) as a vast ‘Central Park’ for
the surrounding new town. Many of these projects, like
Celebration, include bicycle paths and lanes for golf carts as
alternative means of transport. Peachtree, outside Atlanta, has
9,000 registered golf carts for street use.
An early example of these giant assemblages is the 404-
hectare (1,000-acre) Playa Vista (1989) new town initially
planned by ‘New Urbanist’ pioneers Duany and Platter-Zyberk
for Maguire Thomas Partners on Howard Hughes’ private
airport beside the Los Angeles River. However, the project has
run into complex methane problems, as Hughes used city
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