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In the wake of the horrifying fires in January, Los Angeles detractors are on the brink of field day, a city’s reality often seen as a toxic mixture of unsustainable resource planning and structurally poor governance systems.
Los Angeles knows how to survive the crisis. Angelenos is taking advantage of its resilience and strives to build a city for everyone.
Their criticism is nothing new. Most of the 20th century – and for the past 50 years or so, Los Angeles has been seen by many urbanists as a story of fewer cities and more attention.
The planner trembles, and the architect looks away.
In 1961, renowned urban theorist and community activist Jane Jacobs was called “The Ballet of the Good City Sidewalks” in her 1961 landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” If Manhattan was her “sidewalk ballet,” LA was a suburban car park with epic delusions.
“Los Angeles is a city of joy and danger, and we’ve always known this,” said Zeina Koreitem, founding partner at downtown at LA architecture studio Milliøns, following the fire. “We don’t live with it, we consume the environment.”
Still, like so many Hollywood plot twists, we may have misunderstood the main character.
The so-called flaws of LA – what happens when its low density, automotive culture, decentralized sprawl sprawl has undervalued assets, not liabilities in a changing world? Not because they were always the right urban solutions, but because the systems beneath them are changing?
The shape of the city is always following transportation infrastructure. Rome roads influenced the creation of grid-based military cities. A satellite town in the shape of a railway. The subway caused vertical density.
Today, the advent of autonomous mobility solutions such as robot taxis and distributed energy (distributed small-scale energy generation near where energy is actually consumed) is once again redrawing their relationship.
Dismissed as a nemesis of sustainable urbanism, LA can in fact be well positioned for the next chapter. Technologies like rooftop solar power, vehicles to grid systems, and AI-optimized resource flows don’t depend on compactness. They benefit from space, sunlight and flexibility. The quality Los Angeles has abundant in its 1,600 square miles of urbanized area.
Its vast, multicenter mass, long riddled by urban experts living in dense cities, could become an asset for years to come, due to the ubiquitous autonomous mobility. Resilient, demand-driven autonomous services, which will inevitably extend to Los Angeles airspace, can complement the increasingly built metro light rail systems and rapid transport routes of buses, helping to open economic opportunities for people in previously underprivileged and isolated neighborhoods.
Instead of forcing cities into European types, perhaps the question is how the city’s existing DNA evolves. Could a lower-rise form be a test site for neighborhood-scale energy networks? Could it be a solar-powered metropolis built on microgrids where each district produces and manages its own resources?
There are already shifts in progress. LA’s wide range of boulevards and streets are being rethinked for new mixes of new mixes such as e-bikes, delivery bots, shared shuttles, and self-driving cars. Once an ode to the highway, the city has become a globally recognized source of innovation in multimodal transport. This is something Commotion LA has been looking for over the past eight years. Imagine a city that brings together public and private stakeholders to seamlessly connect mobility options.
Young Angelenos is increasingly prioritizing areas where walking, cycling and public transport are viable. Following the Covid-induced hiatus, the downtown Renaissance, whose banks have been converted into lofts and lively public spaces, is showing off a new appetite for urban life.
In October 2024, we went to a house in a dead end in Calabasas. Dismissed as a nemesis of sustainable urbanism, LA can actually be well placed in the next chapter.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles is often treated as an afterthought as a global pioneer in rethinking curbs – it’s fascinating to see how sidewalk stretches can offer new features: charging nodes, logistics ports, and civic meeting points.
Meanwhile, Sptershot’s green space across Los Angeles offers another opportunity. Rather than a singularly large park like Central Park and Boston Common in New York, the city is able to develop ecological meshes, a “sponge city” that allows you to manage rainwater and heat while nurturing public life. Sustainability is not just about emissions and energy. It also means access, health and shared space.
This is not about a longing for mid-century Los Angeles or a replica of Copenhagen. It’s about testing new possibilities, just like what we’re exploring this year at Biennale Architectura in Venice. So, participants from a variety of fields are investigating how they can adapt to changing planets. We start with the understanding that climate change is no longer a distant threat. That’s the current state. Our responses must be adaptive, experimental, and repetitive. It is a continuous process of design evolution, shaped by trial and error, just like nature itself.
However, the US and the world do not need a single model of urban sustainability. They need a lot. New York may become vertical and social. Barcelona is building a pedestrian-friendly superblock. Rotterdam is resilient and overwater. And Los Angeles? It could become a large, solar biodiversity-rich metropolis that will help you rethink what urban sustainability really means.
Sustainable cities of the future should not look the same everywhere. It should be built on the best of what each place is already and pushed it to the most imaginative conclusion. “No city was produced by such an extraordinary mix of geography, climate, economics, demographics, mechanics and culture,” said Rayner Banham, a British architectural historian who wrote about Los Angeles half a century ago. “And there’s no chance that more similar mixtures will occur again.”
Los Angeles may have been a warning of the 20th century. But that could be the blueprint for the 21st.
John Rosant is the CEO of Como Oti and international Imprezario in the world of multimodal transport.
Carlo Ratti is Director of MIT’s Sensable City Lab and curator of Biennale Architettura 2025.
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