Rail L.A.'s "LA Beyond Cars" Exhibit from 89.3 KPCC on Vimeo.
We don't usually announce contests here at Streetsblog, but this one seemed too good to pass up.
Rail L.A., the people that brought you the L.A. Beyond Cars exhibit in Downtown L.A. last summer, are looking for your ideas on how to make it easier to get around Los Angeles. It sounds like a pretty cool project, so I encourage you to send them some ideas.
The Prototypical American City, Los Angeles, is at a crossroads. It has grown from distant communities of missionaries and rancheros to a diverse yet separated community of suburbs, and now to an unhappily-joined community of industries and sprawl. The growth of Los Angeles as a de-centralized city has created a playground for the automobile - where no less than a six lane freeway will do, massive parking lots litter the built environment, and traffic strikes fear into anyone looking to traverse the city. It has rendered a city incapable of movement, a place where the freeway no longer allows freedom, but instead has resulted in a life informed by sigalert and strangled by traffic.
In response to the current state of the city, we are looking for a few sentences of imaginative and exotic ideas of what to do with a city beyond cars. How would you improve your environments? Perhaps with localized agriculture? A Linear Shopping Mall? Centralized Housing to encourage walking to work? 25 Selected ideas will be given to a team of artist, designers and architects, and result in a publication + exhibition of before/after collages envisioning a new pedestrian based Los Angeles. Go to www.railla.org/inmycity to share your idea or multiple ideas, and help us vision a new LA beyond cars.
To find out more about railLA and our scheduled events, go to www.railla.org.
