At the November meeting of SCAG’s newly-formed Steering Committee* on Regional Congestion Pricing, transportation firm HNTB outlined its preliminary research for a crowd of planners, businesspeople, and community advocates, mainly summarizing existing practices in other cities around the globe. Against the resistance of some local politicians and even its own Board members, SCAG recently committed $4 million to a feasibility study on congestion pricing in preparation for its 2012 update of the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP).

With Southern California slated to convert existing carpool lanes to HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes on stretches of the 210 10 and 110 as soon as next year, the committee gathered to debate whether the application of road pricing strategies should be broadened across the region to manage anticipated increases in VMT.

HNTB was mostly preaching to the choir as it outlined the positive benefits – economic and environmental – that have been reaped from the implementation of congestion pricing policies elsewhere. Representatives from the trucking/goods movement industries were a tad more skeptical, but most everyone agreed that the success of congestion pricing in Southern California will ride on the rollout of the concept to the public, particularly how the revenues from any user-based fees are subsequently allocated.

One of the most interesting findings from HNTB’s research was that, even in other cities less enamored of the automobile than Los Angeles, public support for congestion pricing increased after implementation, but still barely passed the 50% mark. The graph below tracks the opinion of Stockholm residents before and after the city started charging cars to enter its central district. The poll further distinguishes between residents in the inner-city (ie. within the congestion pricing zone) and the outer region/periphery.

% of Stockholm residents in favor of congestion pricing, before and after implementation, by location (Source: Stephen Glaister, Imperial College, UK, via HNTB)

Two caveats: 1) Public support may have increased further since Spring 2006, as residents have presumably adjusted to the policy and perhaps shifted their places of work/residence accordingly. 2) Southern California is not Stockholm. It is a famously polynucleated region without a dominant urban core. But the longstanding disparity between job-rich coastal counties and the more affordable but primarily housing-driven Inland Empire could pose similar challenges to Southern California policymakers in garnering broad majority support here. Indeed, there are still so many variables that it is hard to gauge who the probable winners and losers would be (more on that in a future post). But congestion pricing may be part of the long-term solution to our traffic woes.

*Of which I am a member, representing UC Irvine’s Center for Urban Infrastructure.

Other New Urbanisms, a symposium held this past weekend at Sci-Arc in downtown Los Angeles, showcased one of the more interesting and perhaps utopic schemes to emerge from the recent  ”New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for LA” design competition.

The Fletcher Studio, which won second place, proposed urban agricultural villages that would convert freeway embankments into terraced hillsides. Affiliated bungalow housing would be built alongside. These developments would be a new source of “green” jobs, employing farmers on a rotating, seasonal basis. Fletcher calculated that along LA’s 527 miles of freeway, there are approximately 960 acres of largely unused land that could be reclaimed as a productive landscape.

Freeway embankments: reclaimed space for urban agriculture?

Panelists responding to Fletcher’s presentation debated whether Caltrans, the state agency with regulatory authority over freeway-adjacent land, would ever “yield a square inch” of its terrain (both literal and figurative). Landscape architect Mia Lehrer, also a participant in the symposium, highlighted the importance of working within entrenched bureaucracies to make change happen. Not every project is going to be “sexy” or transformative on a regional scale, Lehrer stated, but if it has the potential to improve environmental or community health outcomes, design professionals should not shy away from the political challenges of implementation.

Judging from the pessimistic mood of the panel, it is clear that designers are suffering from an acute sense of disempowerment in the current economic environment, with its renewed focus on pragmatic, “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, at the expense of more radical, paradigm-shifting proposals. On the other hand, the glass can be seen as half full: current approaches to issues of growth and mobility in Southern California have failed, so there may be a growing receptivity to systemic change. A small dose of unconventional thinking may be necessary to get the city unstuck, as it were.

Shopping centers in Southern California have become a pretty fascinating bellwether of contemporary trends in architecture and urbanism. Developer Rick Caruso’s The Grove, for instance, made a splash when it opened in 2000 by modeling itself after a traditional European village with a purely ornamental trolley line, in many ways echoing the New Urbanist call for transit-oriented, walkable places. The Americana at Brand in Glendale, also by Caruso, added to this concept a mixed-use component (rental apartments) and a more generous public realm. Granted, these shopping centers paid lip service to New Urbanist ideas, more than implementing them in earnest.

In this context, the recently renovated Westfield Culver City off the 405 represents its own leap into the future of architecture. Inside, vaulted ceilings and slices of skylight create an airy, vertical sense of space, a cathedral-like effect. The interior is more or less gutted, with walkways around the perimeter. Diagonal ramps straddle and crisscross this spatial void at non-perpendicular, irregular angles. The ground plane feels tenuous. From virtually any given point in the mall, the consumer enjoys panoramic, unobstructed views of the retail frontage on multiple levels. Paradoxically, however, it is nearly impossible to identify the shortest way from Point A to Point B, if you actually see somewhere you want to go. The developer of Westfield Century City wanted to “blur the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces,” and by this measure succeeded, but the effect is disorienting.

What does this mall say about trends in American urbanism? Well, the Westfield Culver City actually seems much closer to the grands magasins, the great department stores of early 20th-century Paris than the nostalgic village concept so successfully exploited at The Grove.

With its generous use of glass and open-air quality, the architecture is undeniably complicit in a sense of voyeurism. There is nothing new about places of commerce serving as a showcase for social spectacle and celebrity. Indeed, the Parisian upper classes would frequently go to these luxe Art Deco retail palaces to see and be seen. During my visit, the TV phenomenon “So You Think You Can Dance” was hosting auditions on the main plaza, amid a 360º ring of onlookers.

Overall, this design concept is thoughtful and contextually appropriate. Westfield Culver City is located not only at the intersection of the 405 and 90 freeways, but of ethnically diverse communities who might otherwise find few opportunities or excuses to patronize the same places. Because the architecture makes voyeurism acceptable, it in turn allows people to gawk at cultural differences and feel comfortable doing so.

In its quest to be modern and cutting-edge, however, the mall overlooks features that might make the experience more user-friendly. The parking system is disorganized. None of the innovative traffic management strategies used at other Westfield locations, such as the red/green lights installed above parking spaces to signal occupancy/vacancy, are imported here. Directional signage is inconsistent at entrances and exits.

Despite high hopes, especially for a Target both nearby and easily accessible via freeway, the new Westfield Culver City mall misses the bullseye in terms of convenience.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to see a fascinating photography exhibit at LACMA, New Topographics, the re-creation of a 1975 exhibit originally held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. Misunderstood and critically underappreciated at the time, it documents seemingly banal subjects such as tract homes in nondescript suburbs, commercial strips, parking lots, and other “everyday” objects of the postwar built environment. The work of these photographers is no less captivating today, even as the terrain it covers is more familiar to the viewing public.

Suburbs often lend themselves to various moralizing statements (about a spiritual void in American culture or about our unsustainable consumption of land and resources, for instance), but these photographs generally avoid value-laden judgments on the inhabitants of these arguably “ugly” buildings and aesthetically-minimalist landscapes. Nor do they read, more than thirty years later, as an anthropological time capsule, a window into shifting modes of architecture and living. Instead, intentionally or not, much of the work feels redemptive of the uniquely American visual vernacular that are today’s first-generation suburbs. Robert Adams, whose photographic series The New West receives prominent placement in the LACMA exhibit, would probably disagree strongly with my interpretation, as he makes his own contempt for suburbia well-known in the accompanying text to his book. But such is the nature of art–its visual meaning sometimes escapes the author’s control and becomes something quite opposite of the original intention.  The show is definitely worth seeing before it closes in January 2010.