Los Angeles – Jan 11, 2025
My city is on fire.
Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds. Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.
Rosten’s project carries on in the spirit of never-been Los Angeles, a city that exists in the deferred dreams and the haze, a palimpsest on the island on the land. What Water Wants follows in the footsteps of the 1930 Olmsted and Bartholomew plan for an “emerald necklace,” a regional system linking the foothills to the beaches with “pleasureway parks.” The Olmsted brothers’ plan would have conserved water, protected the river wildlife, and let the parkways serve as the absorptive wetlands they were meant to be. Working in tandem with a system of hazard zoning, the revolutionary plan would have created a “dramatically enlarged commons,” air and light and green, instead of the endless stretch of private subdivisions and the “selfish, profit-driven presentism” that we got...
