I’ve touched on before about greater Los Angeles in my science-fictional alternate timeline, and more I brainstorm it, the more fantastical it gets. Mine is a world where buildings rise a mile high, where automobile and aircraft alike zip at terrific speeds across the landscape…but also one where the views you get from said landscape are far better protected, and one where the very speed at which you can zip across the landscape obviates suburban sprawl. Rather, cities sprawl over far larger areas at outright rural density. Wealthier economies, however, make the urban districts that do exist more impressive and monumental. So what’s the net effect of all this?
Compared to today, you essentially have downtowns of extreme structural density that are surrounded by only a thin fringe of suburban tract home density before emptying out into true countryside (agriculture or even wilderness). Where exactly these downtowns would be sited is an interesting question; true, we have existing city cores, but as Joel Garreau reminded us in “Edge City”, we’ve built a lot of new downtowns in the 20th century, only scaled for automobiles rather than foot traffic. In a world like mine, which is high-tech enough to render tunneling underground roads and parking trivial, you might see superficially traditional urban neighborhoods rather than the “classic” edge city form. There are so, so many possibilities, but what we ought to do is drill down to the fundamentals.
In my universe, as far as Los Angeles is concerned, at the dawn of the 20th century Downtown was already large (people often credit the automobile or air conditioning for the Sun Belt’s expansion, but Los Angeles was already the most populous municipality on the West Coast by the 1920 census). Santa Monica was already there. The “Beach Cities” of South Bay were mostly already developed. And that’s almost about it. The rest of the Los Angeles Basin was vineyards, ranches, farms, and marshland, not to mention an assortment of hillier terrain, riparian woodlands, and the like. Places like the Gaviota Coast and even Paso Robles show us how much of Los Angeles used to look before it was paved over with tract homes.
I envision the “Silicon Valley” of this world emerging out of Caltech instead of Stanford, so Pasadena presumably explodes into a city rivaling Downtown Los Angeles in size, and Hollywood as in the industry is also a far bigger deal, so together with Santa Monica, intrinsically desirable because of coastal lifestyle, you end up with a heavily urbanized corridor, tracking the southern front of the Santa Monica Mountains east of Malibu, and extending into Pasadena into the San Gabriel Mountains. Roughly 25 miles long, and several miles wide, roughly corresponding to what will become the US Route 66 corridor.
Southward of Santa Monica, you already had the “beach cities” functioning as resort towns, and as desirable coastal enclaves with the most pleasant climate and the best views, these places are poised to absolutely explode in growth. The “South Bay” is located on an elevated terrace which over the span of a few miles slopes gently down to the Santa Monica Bay. Easy to build towers on. The Palos Verdes Hills are then right there, with their 270-degree views of the Pacific Ocean, close to town yet secluded…ideal for a paradisaical satellite city to Los Angeles.
Would we see more expansion? Maybe not. Consider that there really aren’t any more desirable areas or major Caltech-style hubs to simply accrete onto Los Angeles’s cityscape. In my world I suppose that ridgetops become desirable sites for development (as was the case in the Hollywood Hills) whereas floodplains are forbidden, rather being encouraged to function as parks or natural areas. This means that Venice, rather than being rehabilitated into a neighborhood, is likely abandoned and allowed to revert to nature. Low-lying areas like the southern reaches of the city of Los Angeles, toward Long Beach? All of a sudden it becomes very questionable if they’d even be developed at all, especially away from the beach areas.
In a world like this Malibu might be surprisingly viable as a site for dense populations, but Pacific Palisades is already an ideal sleepy retreat for moneyed types, and Malibu even more so. It likely remains as an old-money enclave in the middle of the city…which neatly explains in my stories I’ve already written how Ventura and the coast out through Gaviota is covered by high-rise buildings. Heh!
One idea I have been kicking around in my mind, however, is answering the question of where exactly the port access is going to be? For roads and highways and parking we can envision it’s all shunted underground; ditto for rail if we’re being honest. Aircraft? We could easily suppose aircraft land out in the High Desert, well away from town. Or else aircraft land in the water, like the seaplanes of old…only that conflicts with the general requirement that beach views be unobstructed…unless we then suppose that the docks for the seaplanes are out beyond the horizon and access is via submerged tunnels underwater that then mate with the landside facilities underground. Which would only make sense. The same sort of facilities, a floating port and dock well offshore, could also be used by the great oceangoing cargo ships and cruise ships.
But that does leave one question: what of recreational boaters? Small yachts, cruisers, and the like? Unhelpfully, boat ownership is far more widespread in this universe, and all those watercraft are going to want to park somewhere…and unlike a car, you can’t easily put a sailboat underground and expect it to be a pleasant experience. I have envisaged that these mile-high towers in South Bay could have, in their insides, vertically stacked harbors with elevators and docks, like a parking garage for yachts, but for that to work you’d need a canal connection to the open ocean.
There are actually quite a few possibilities: my personal favorite is taking the El Segundo refinery area and supposing, in an age where oil extraction has given way to nuclear energy sources and thus is no longer needed, that the refinery site is removed, the ground excavated downward, and filled with water, making a new harbor. A lot like Marina del Rey in real life, only without it being at the expense of ecologically crucial wetlands. Picture the square site of the refinery as a harbor filled with boats, with high-rise construction facing the water, balconies to catch the breeze and watch the yachts go in and out. From there, canals could connect via locks, transporting watercraft inland.
Potentially pretty far inland. Somewhere like Rosecrans Avenue as it passes through Manhattan Beach and Hawthorne was only developed late in real life and is a relatively flat area close to the El Segungo refinery-turned-harbor (call it “Puerto Segundo” in this universe). You could select a contour like 70 feet or 100 feet, and build a canal winding its way throughout the landward side of the South Bay cities.
For reference, below is a map of the Los Angeles Basin area showing low-lying areas in blue and higher elevations in red. The yellow tones are around where a 100-foot-contour canal would fit into the picture. Notice there’s a near linear stretch of South Bay, near Torrance, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa Beach, which would in principle be suitable. This area is bigger than it might look at first glance; from the Palos Verdes Hills to the low-lying Ballona wetlands is 10 miles or so. Count in spur canals and the footprint could easily be bigger than Amsterdam. LA is huge.
Graphic courtesy of Topographic Map.
The idea of the South Bay cities having Coruscant-esque mile-high buildings sloping so as to maximize ocean views, with a canal network that dwarfs even Amsterdam or Venice, might seem ambitious but not too out of place for an alternate Los Angeles, but today I begin to ponder an even wilder possibility: connections beyond South Bay.
After all, the terrain is pretty gentle from the Beach Cities until you hit the surrounding mountain ranges, which takes you well beyond even Downtown, let alone closer destinations. Hmm.
In a world where the primary urban axis, aside from South Bay itself, is from Santa Monica to Downtown via Hollywood, the obvious expansion is toward that US 66 axis…which seems surprisingly viable. Keeping the same contour of around 100 feet elevation and avoiding the Ballona wetland area, you would essentially track from El Segundo along the same corridor as today’s San Diego Freeway (Interstate 405) through Inglewood, and then you snake along the west face of the Baldwin Hills, ending up near…Beverly Hills. Now, isn’t that interesting?
In a setting where Los Angeles is a much more marine-oriented city, sailing is common, and yachting is the go-to pastime for Hollywood royalty, a canal connection might look very tempting to Beverly Hills. Already in the early 20th century the place was being developed as an American utopia; even today, visiting the place, it’s obvious that it was supposed to be like the best of Europe, only better. A canal connection nearby would enable a harbor to be developed, whose waterfront would be directly adjacent to Beverly Hills’s downtown, or rather a new harborfront district. The comparison to Monaco would be obvious, and it would be a way for Beverly Hills to have it all, effectively competing with the cities directly on the coast.
Frankly the lack of beachfront, oceanfront, waterfront real estate is perhaps Beverly Hills’s only real deficit as far as being attractive as a place to live is concerned, and this would solve that problem, not to mention functioning as an engine to generate economic activity (again, see Beverly Hills’s existing downtown).
The contour in question is also suggestive of West Hollywood being serviceable on the same system; both Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are on relatively gentle terrain, where the ground slopes downward in a gentle valley between hillier sections. In terms of pure geographics, it’s an ideal place for an interface between the hilly neighborhoods above and the marine world below. Helpfully, the neighborhood this harbor would have to be in, which maps label as “Pico-Robertson” and “Mid-City”, was not developed until a bit later than Beverly Hills was. There is some space for an alternate history here…
Also of interest is what happens with Culver City; the place was founded relatively early in the 20th century, and although it’s not quite the doomed swampland Venice was, it’s not ideal as a site for a city by my timeline’s standards. It’s low-lying, flood-prone… Also worth noting is that Culver City was a major motion-picture center from the beginning; rather than houses, suburbs, and apartments, you had the likes of movie-studio lots and light industry. Which makes it just the sort of brownfield site that later lends itself to spectacular redevelopment (Century City of course is the classic example in Los Angeles history in real life).
Of interest to me is that most of Culver City is low-lying and in the Ballona sphere of influence, but not all of it; much higher and hillier terrain is very close at hand, and is right where our canal would be snaking through. Of course these are the Baldwin Hills, which even today are well known for having commanding panoramic views of Greater Los Angeles…and are relatively lightly developed even today. Why is this? A big piece of the puzzle was the fact the Inglewood Oil Field is literally right on top of the place; since the discovery of oil there in 1924, over 400 million barrels have been pumped out, and it remains to this day the largest urban oil field in the United States (extraction continues through the present day!).
In my world, however, the oil fields have long been either tapped out or are superfluous, so it’s yet another brownfield site. The western face of the Baldwin Hills has commanding views, pleasant sea breeze, is right next to the Ballona wetlands (the westside’s version of Central Park, frankly, in this universe), and has the canal snaking through right on its slopes. A narrow linear corridor full of super-tall buildings wedged in between the peak heights of what’s now the oil field above and the canal below (right above the floodplain-cum-storm-surge-zone, about 100 feet in elevation) would seem to be the natural outcome here.
I personally think the very form, suggested by the physical geography, is fascinating enough, but it becomes really interesting when you consider that to the north and west you see the urban corridors (the US 66 corridor and the South Bay skyline), whereas to the southeast you’d see rolling rural terrain stretching out to the horizon, full of vineyards, ranches, marshes, open woodlands, and well-spaced-out residences. If the core of Greater Los Angeles is L-shaped in this universe, Culver City/Baldwin Hills sits right at the vertex.
Boats sailing in from the canals on each side, kayaks paddling up from the marsh below, bikes pedaling in from every which way, hikers coming down from above, and horse riders coming in from around the hills would all tend to intersect right there. In my mind’s eye I picture some linear corridor of super-tall skyscrapers, perhaps even (as my sci-fi timeline is wont to do) stretching a mile high, connected not only by the canal and streets below, but by elevated skytrains extending between the buildings. Very sci-fi.
Slightly less sci-fi but perhaps more juicy is the fact in real life Baldwin Hills developed as a predominately black neighborhood; for reference, the famously black and wealthy neighborhood of Ladera Heights is on the same massif as all this (meanwhile, Culver City is described as a “sundown town”, as in anybody not white had to get out of town before sundown…they weren’t allowed to live there). Afrofuturism suggests itself as a vibe here, as shocking as it might seem for an iconic new-build city right in the middle of Los Angeles in the 20th century. Guaranteed? No. Especially not in a “realistic” context. But as fuel for speculative fiction? How can one resist…
Frankly the entire scenario has a utopian tinge to it, but if you ask me we could use some more utopias. Visually and geographically the entire idea is fascinating anyway, particularly because, as someone who has been based in Los Angeles for a long time myself, it’s very different from the city as it actually exists, yet it’s both unique and doesn’t really contradict anything about the city’s identity or structure. Los Angeles is still itself, just…much more so, to the point it becomes alien and yet inspirational at the same time. I just love it, and although I haven’t felt up to writing a full-length story in a long time, when I do…I think this is a theme I might come back to. It’s just too much fun…