Of course it is (or was) a cornfield. But not for the sake of a cornfield or some agricultural experiment in the middle of a city. There is LA: Imagine a city that doesn’t really exist in a common sense, and there is downtown, an area deserted until probably not even a decade ago and now in the course of revitalization. Disney Concert Hall is just the tip of the iceberg. Anyway, the cornfield is located at the edge of this area. So if your goal is to raise public interest on emerging discussions, what are you doing? You create something you can use as a event platform with high recognisability raising certain attention. That’s the cornfield. Something that can’t be here because it doesn’t really make any sense but it is. An abandoned property in a rather industrial zone. So now the harvest is done and the property being turned over to the city for further development. For that a panel discussion was organized about the future of LA generally and downtown with the cornfield as part of it specifically. As usual when there is a discussion about urbanity of LA, it’s mostly about the statement that LA is not a city, the question what is it then and why, and what urban planning processes can develop it to a city. Luckily the cornfield is located adjacent to the LA river. And as I learned yesterday there are obviously ideas and projects focusing on the potential to use the LA river as an urban structure. I wasn’t really aware of it so far. I know the LA river as a big concrete structure to handle storm water. Something similar to the freeways. It’s here for infrastructural reasons, it has some character and fascination mainly because of the scale that isolates it in some ways, intersecting, dividing the city on the way through the urban fabric. And therefore it’s portrayed in various movies and clips. So even it’s not obvious on a first look, there is also water involved which makes it attractive as a recreational landscape, connecting rather than dividing. I don’t really believe in this direction, it’s too much of a detour with some ideal view of something that is simply not here. I think that’s why I am struggling with this urban planning discussion made in LA. The collective urban idea of LA is the individual building. On the occasion of another panel discussion an architect expressed it from an architectural point of view as the ‘look-how-great-I-am’ building designs. He criticized that this kind of architecture doesn’t address social and political problems. That’s what LA is. Is there another reason why still freeways are dominating the infrastructure and the car is the main and as it seems only means of transportation? Again, yesterday, there was a lot of reference to real cities, bustling public live, density, an urban morphology expressing it, a centre, focus, a platform of urban live maybe, pedestrian zones, mix of a variety of use and function, public and private. References to New York of course, Manhattan especially, San Francisco, the neighbor, or European cities, Paris, the Champs Elysee, Ramblas of Barcelona. I understand that the average person can easy refer to a city through conventional images like these. But regarding LA I miss the vision, the plan for this city which is obviously something very different. Maybe that’s too abstract thinking, very intellectual and detached from public sense. But I believe that the only strategy for LA is to accept that it is actually another city than all other cities and you need to use the basis of what is actually here. That’s probably why I was interested in the LA river projects to some degrees: It’s something already in place with potential. There was the urban planner of Glendale on the panel. He presented some projects around the area of LA county: All representing these implemented overdesigned ‘downtowns’. probably what people want to see. But it was very depressing, shopping malls in reality as already widely known from everywhere. And there was a professor of geography on the panel talking about the public consciousness and how it is related to the history of specific locations, as the cornfield. I thought that was refreshing and inspiring. That should be some starting point. We should have an intermission to think about where we actually are. Los Angeles is a city different than any other city I know. Why would you only even try to transform it to a city in a conventional sense? It will lead to a patchwork of projects and ideas taking the heart of the city. Instead of what I know: Los Angeles represents an environment of the undefined, unknown, something we can’t really imagine (yet). That’s exactly what attracts people to come here. I think it’s an opportunity to learn to understand and envision a city outside the perimeters set by the city in a conventional sense (what is that anyway?).