Going Down to the Place of Three Shadows: Journeys to and from Downtown Los Angeles’ Public Spaces

Urbanities, Vol. 2 · No 2 · November 2012 © 2012 Urbanities Going Down to the Place of Three Shadows: Journeys to and from Downtown Los Angeles’ Public Spaces Nathalie Boucher (INRS – Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, Montréal) [email protected] This paper aims to offer a reflection on the micro-dynamics of public spaces and their place in the movements of the city. It is inspired by the experience of David, a sociable homeless man whom I met while doing fieldwork on Downtown Los Angeles’ public spaces. David was spending his days under the quiet and peaceful shade offered by the trees in Angels Knoll. By the end of the summer in 2010, he had been thrown out of the park. Because of his limited mobility and the place where he sleeps, he was condemned to spend his days in Pershing Square, a place he disliked and had managed to avoid thus far. This journey from one place to another underlines, unsurprisingly, the fact that public spaces, their users and the activities they host are not alike. Considering their heterogeneity and the relative implementation of city rules, the parks are also supervised and controlled in various ways. This variety enables people to choose the place where they want to go, or at least to have some preferences. I understand this act of choosing one place over another as a social statement. Furthermore, David’s journey underlines the multiple mobilities used to go to a park and their role when it comes to presence in public space. Being able to reach the park you want to go to, then, is a question of ability; ability in terms of movements and choices, which some authors refer to as motility. I then conclude that the public space issue - especially in the case of Los Angeles, the city of cars - is not only related to a greater supply of public spaces, but also to the improvement of the motility of every citizen, including David. Keywords: mobility, motility, public spaces, homeless, diversity, planning, Los Angeles Starting Line Los Angeles is sometimes known as the City of cars or even Smogtown (Jacobs 2008). It is a metropolis that ‘[…] never existed as a large walking city’ (Bottles 1987). Since the turn of the 20th century, the automobile and automobile infrastructure, urban sprawl, the development of suburbs, and the decentralization of the center have grown and expanded together. As a result, in 1970, one third of the city was covered with streets, parking lots and highways (Davis, 1999: 80). Forty years later, two-thirds of urban space in all of Southern California is devoted to transportation (Los Angeles Almanac 2010). Concrete and road signs have been emphasized at the expense of public space. Indeed, throughout its history, Los Angeles has never made a priority of spaces where real flesh and blood contacts happen. In 1928, parks covered 0.6% of the metropolis’ territory, which is less than in the medium-sized American city, according to a report by the Citizens' Committee on Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches published in 1930 (Davis 1999: 62, 65). In 2010, parklands covered 5% of the territory (Mia Lehrer & Associates 2010). That amounts to 3.4 acres of park per 1,000 residents; the average nationwide is 6 to 10 acres. Put 45 Urbanities, Vol. 2 · No 2 · November 2012 © 2012 Urbanities differently, only 33% of Angelinos live within a quarter-mile of a park. This figure is 97% for Boston and 91% for New York (Watanabe 2008). This deplorable situation can be explained by the City’s tendency to transfer power to the private sector, especially in times of economic crisis, and, as noted, its emphasis on the automobile. Additional explanations may lie in the fact that in New York and Boston, the reformist movement at the turn of the 20th century saw in parks and public facilities a way to improve the living conditions of the poorer population trapped in sunless apartment buildings. In Los Angeles, the same movement had encouraged the building of single-family houses with a garage and a lawn. There is apparently no need for a public park when you have a private yard. Over the last few decades, implementation of neoliberal urban management strategies affected the public spaces in a particular way; promoting the idea of urban parks and squares as sites where only higher social and economic classes (or at least, their behaviors and activities) should be visible. This notion, developed during the 18th century, was combined with modern technologies of surveillance (Low 2006). The result, reinforced since September 11, 2001, has been the intensification of the division of social groups in public spaces, as well as increased control over them. As a result, real public spaces are rare in Los Angeles. Those that exist are characteristically poorly maintained and equipped, or privately owned and over controlled, and thus lacking of a real social diversity in their users (Flusty 1994;Davis 1992 [1990]). Many have criticized the unwelcoming design and the lack of public amenities that make public spaces uncomfortable for many of their potential users (Cosulich-Schwartz 2009, Loukaitou-Sideris 1998, Malone s.d, Page, 2009, Scott 2009). Los Angeles urban planning policies, or lack thereof, in terms of public spaces have been harshly criticized, especially by members of the Los Angeles School. This group was formed in the 1990s and is composed of geographers, historians and urban planners working on the City of Angels. Together with many others who share the same opposition to the strangulation of public spaces in the neo-liberalized world, the Los Angeles School challenges their lack of public space, their closure to social diversity, and their general orientation towards consumption. In Los Angeles more than elsewhere, along with Disneyland and Hollywood, the reconstruction of 46 Urbanities, Vol. 2 · No 2 · November 2012 © 2012 Urbanities Bunker Hill and the dominance of private interests, public spaces are considered by many to be dead. Despite the diagnosis of the death of Los Angeles’ public spaces and criticism of the cities’ negligence in maintaining its unique and essential urban places, this diagnosis was scarcely researched and documented. Therefore, in 2008-2009, I engaged in an ethnographic study to evaluate the social and cultural vitality of five downtown public spaces, observing presence, activities and interactions. The parks I studied were Plaza Olvera, Pershing Square, the Watercourt at California Plaza, Grand Hope Park, and Vista Hermosa Natural Park, each of which fell within a five miles radius of Downtown. I sought to observe whether there was a variety of users in the parks, and whether they interacted with each other. Other research questions were ‘How did security mechanisms and rules, as well as the orientation toward consumption, affect their attendance and the exchanges that took place?’ I found that each space is used by a (limited) variety of people that engage in a small range of activities while informal contacts, based on the respect of shared norms, nourished numerous representations and contestations of public spaces. In other words, each space presented a unique combination of limited heterogeneity and dynamic social life. This paper1 aims to offer a reflection at the convergence of mobility and public space in Los Angeles. Mobility is at the heart of relationships to the urban environment. As Rémy puts it: ‘The city relies on the capacity of movement and of encounters in places of convergence that are spatially scattered. The city is a kinetic space because mobility is constituent to living in a city’ (my translation of Rémy 2001: 27). The uniqueness of each public space should reflect different patterns of movements to reach them in terms of distances and means of transportation. In light of the emphasis on automobiles in the City of Cars, are people keener to drive to go to a specific park, rather than walk to their neighbourhood park? 1 This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2011. I thank Adonia Lugo for putting together the Redefining the Urban Space panel, as well as Julie-Anne Boudreau and Zach Furness for their comments on this paper. The fieldwork supporting this reflection was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fondation Desjardins, the Canada Research Chair in the City and Issues of Insecurity, and the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre Urbanisation, Culture et Société. 47 Urbanities, Vol. 2 · No 2 · November 2012 © 2012 Urbanities To explore the mobility around public spaces in Los Angeles, I introduce the case of David, a sociable homeless man whom I met while doing fieldwork in Downtown Los Angeles’ public spaces. I will first present Los Angeles in terms of travel and public space, on the basis of my observations in five of the public spaces of Downtown L.A. in 2008 and 2009, and then I will introduce the term motility, which will be illustrated by David’s motility. My main objective here is to underline the importance of motility for the vitality of Los Angeles public spaces. Users and Their Origins Given that this paper focuses on mobility and park access, I will briefly present some data about the users I interviewed and their commute to the parks where I spoke with them. My main methodology was observation, but I did conduct brief semi-structured interviews with 10 people in each park. Among other things, I asked the interviewees how far they travelled to reach the park where we were, and how they got there. I considered the park as being the main goal of their journey.

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