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.