Urban Mythology: A New Theory for Urban Planning
Imagine you’ve never been to Los Angeles. You just booked a trip, and you can’t wait. Let’s say you’re from the Northwest, so you’re particularly excited about the warm climate and tropical scenery. But when you arrive, you’re immediately thrown off. You go to Venice Beach. You go to Silver Lake. You walk down Hollywood Boulevard. This whole time, you haven’t seen a single palm tree. What’s going on?
It turns out, the day before you arrived, LA County finished a major project to tear out every last palm tree and replaced them with plants and trees that are local to the region—Western Sycamore, California Black Walnut, Fremont Cottonwood, desert willow, California Buckeye.
Palm trees might be iconic, you’re told by locals, but they’re garbage for shade, which is badly needed in the urban desert.
They might be right, but you feel cheated. You feel as if you haven’t experienced the real LA. Back home, you watch a movie based in LA—the old LA with all the palm tree-lined streets. “That’s the real LA,” you think. “Too bad I’ll never be able to see it.”
Fortunately, this is only a thought experience. LA still has its palm trees. Thank God.
Last year, I interviewed Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines, about fixing California’s housing crisis. During the interview, I asked him whether he thought city planners and developers should work to further a city’s mythology. In other words, is LA still LA if it does something other than serve as an entertainment hub with packed highways, quirky strip malls, and palm tree-lined streets?
I was hoping Gray would feed my fantasy that humans should work to utopianize our cities—to actualize their mythical identities, to make them their platonic ideal.
At first, he didn’t even understand the question. “What do you mean by that—the ‘mythology’ of LA?” he asked. I rambled on a bit more about how I partly moved to California because I was drawn to the mythology of the place—the Los Angeles and San Francisco you encounter in books and movies.
Gray thought for a moment and responded:
“I think planners having ‘visions’ is a little overrated. Every individual has a vision for their life. I think the job of the planner is to set a general framework for urban growth where everyone can effectuate their own vision. So, LA is a very car-oriented city. If you tried to go all in on making LA super pedestrian, it’s never going to happen. But if a lot of people in LA want to be able to commute by bike or as pedestrians, let’s start installing that infrastructure in a way that’s workable and sort of gradually move us toward more options for people.
“As the planner Alain Bertaud has said, I really think that city planners, and really all city officials, should see themselves as custodians. We had this 20th century paradigm where planners had the big visions and were remaking society. That was kind of the Robert Moses paradigm. And then we’ve swung in the opposite direction, where if you even want to install a bike lane on a street now you have to have this big community meeting and you have to build consensus for everything.”
This section of our conversation didn’t make it into the published interview, linked above. Gray’s points are well-taken. They’re points I should have expected, since he’s a serious urban planner, not merely a dreamy-eyed urban enthusiast like myself. Still, his response didn’t really get to the heart of my question. For a while after the interview, I assumed maybe my question was less interesting than I thought.
But then, last week, Gray tweeted this:
“Is there a US city with a larger gap between expectations and reality than San Jose?”
“Aha!” I thought. “So, he does know what I’m talking about!” Having an “expectation” of what a city will be like requires knowing the city’s mythology in the culture—otherwise, how would you know what to expect?
San Jose should be more futuristic. The fact that it’s not doesn’t make sense on any level. It’s the heart of Silicon Valley, yet it’s a bland, sprawling town with virtually no skyline. It should be California’s Manhattan! How many people arrive in San Jose (and Silicon Valley generally) only to feel like the hypothetical person who shows up in LA to find no palm trees? Probably everyone!
Urban planners, developers, and proponents of strict zoning laws are to blame for ruining San Jose’s mythology. What should we do about this? Say to hell with the mythology of Silicon Valley? I don’t think so. I say we borrow from the wisdom of the mythology and build to actualize the true San Jose—“true” in terms of how people envision Silicon Valley to look.
Gray’s tweet reenergized my enthusiasm for this topic. I don’t entirely know what to do with this enthusiasm, but I do have some thoughts.
A New Paradigm: Mythological Urbanism
Some of the best/most memorable urban places on this planet were developed based strictly on mythology. For example, San Francisco’s Chinatown was created by a bunch of white dudes who (acting in the interests of the local Chinese community who didn’t want to be displaced) built a neighborhood based purely on what they thought a Chinese neighborhood should look like. And of course there are the palm trees of Los Angeles, which were brought in specifically to create the image of a tropical paradise to entice people to move.
These things work! San Francisco’s Chinatown became a model for other cities to help bring the Chinese community together and to stop displacement from happening. And LA is still globally known as a tropical paradise in large part because of all the palm trees that appear in Hollywood movies.
My modest proposal is to develop a new urban planning model whereby planners design cities to conform to the mythology portrayed in popular culture and in the popular imagination. This uniquely empowers artists, whose books, movies, and songs feed the global imagination about what a place is like. This also uniquely empowers people who don’t live in a city, because planners channel their expectations, hoping to meet (rather than disappoint) those expectations. This approach will generally promote historic preservation, but it won’t be historic preservation simply for the sake of preservation. It’s about preserving based on a new criteria of whether the historic building (or scenic feature like LA’s palm trees) conforms to the mythology of the place.
No doubt this model could be abused by “big vision” planners like Robert Moses, as Gray noted. But in the model’s purest form it wouldn’t lead to this outcome, since the mythology of a place is bigger than the vision of a single planner. It lives outside any one person. It belongs to all of us.
I’m particularly interested in how this model might be applied to the creation of new cities, especially futurist, utopian cities such as Telosa or Saudi Arabia’s proposed mirrored-walls city The Line. These cities start from a blank canvas—except not really. They start from the human imagination, which is populated by images from books, movies, dreams, and real-life memories.
The blank canvas of the futurist city is a mythology all of its own.
