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Los Angeles is a city built upon amnesia and denial. Graded and paved, bought and sold, it bears little likeness to Tovaangar, the home for the first people who, for thousands of years, walked its valleys and chaparral-clad basins and paddled its broad shorelines.
Eventually, they were overtaken, falling silent to the noisy ambitions of foreigners and settlers who set about transforming this vast floodplain with imported water and orchards and homes. Branding their creation paradise, they never questioned their improbable aspirations.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Instead, they mythologized their works, borrowing from the past what was convenient and discarding the rest, so the picture of the Golden State in the early 20th century was romantic enough to persuade more and more Easterners to board the trains that crossed the deserts to arrive in this transformed pueblo.
These new arrivals marveled at the fields of poppies, rode electric street cars to the surf and discovered gold lying just beneath the surface in vast reserves of oil. Prosperity came fast, abetted by advancing technologies that controlled nature, employed thousands and turned the dreams of some into a reality for many — but not all.
Los Angeles grew on a scale beyond its means, a perspective gained only decades after the county population had soared to more than 10 million and demand for housing pushed communities far into a combustible wilderness.
Shimmering in the incandescent light off the Pacific, its existence today seems almost a mirage, a dream from long ago on the verge of waking up to its inherent vulnerabilities. We burn, we shake, we flood, and each time we face our limitations, we promise with gritted teeth to do better.
And now, the mythology — the endless possibilities, the new beginnings that inspired countless entrepreneurs, evangelists and everyday dreamers — seems tired.
Those who evoke the virtue of a bootstrap economy have had to confront its shortcomings in the face of a crushing housing shortage, widening inequality and environmental challenges disproportionately affecting the poorest communities. Hotter, drier, windier, wetter — the extremes are battering us increasingly.
Perhaps, then, we should be more surprised by our perseverance in the face of such vulnerability and division. More churlish souls might attribute such stubborn determination to craven commercial interests, but something more is in play. As much as the region has been defined by sprawl and individualism, it has also fostered community and culture in both new ways and old: Little Bangladesh, Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Frogtown, El Sereno, Watts.
Within these communities exists an informal collectivism, an ebb and flow of residents, of families, of neighbors coming together at farmer’s markets, in city parks and common spaces, in a tacit recognition of shared values. And although we live in hubs that are cities apart, we travel to one another to experience the richness of the city in neighborhoods other than our own.
All of which only makes the tragedies and disappointments of the present more onerous as we address racist politicians, crooked developers, neglected neighborhoods, the arrival of federal immigration agents — and large swaths of the region in ashes: more than 57,000 acres burned, more than 16,000 structures destroyed, livelihoods wiped out, lives lost or displaced.
We will raise memorials to the dead and write volumes about the tragedy. Looking back, after all, is part of the human experience. But the January fires come with an imperative: to think about how we want to live in Los Angeles, despite the recklessness of the past and the persistent denial of the present.
The future gives us an opportunity to reimagine ourselves, to see how the region’s disparate and far-flung communities transform themselves.
The slate isn’t blank. We must be willing to read the lessons of the past, into the rebuilding that lies ahead. The future requires nothing less, or we might as well abandon our claim upon this improbable city.
Some already have, yet others stand ready to imagine a new Los Angeles, to make a promise to new generations, to dream and to work hard to realize that dream, no matter how long it takes.
So let’s set the clock to 2050. What do you hope for this place we call home?
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
