If you are at all involved with urban planning in Los Angeles you were probably either in the audience or on the panel at last night's "The Future of the Los Angeles City Planning Department (and the City of Los Angeles)" event, sponsored by AIA, APA-L.A., ULI, and Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design. I suppose a third option is that you were stuck in traffic and couldn't make it.   

Today marks the launch of the "Los Angeles Cleantech Corridor & Green District Competition," an event sponsored by the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect's Newspaper. This call-for-entries seeks submissions focusing on clean technology infrastructure improvements in the Cleantech Corridor, an industrial area just east of Downtown Los Angeles that straddles the Los Angeles River. This cluster-based strategy – spearheaded by Mayor Villaraigosa and the Community Redevelopment Agency – has experienced an impressive wave of attention over the summer, propelling it to the national stage and broadening support for LA's case as the home of clean technologies.

Mere conclusions and assumptions do not amount to substantial evidence to support a finding of physical blight, an appellate court has ruled in upholding a challenge by the County of Los Angeles against the City of Glendora. 

More than a decade ago, when I was writing my book The Reluctant Metropolis, I became so fascinated by the political changes in the so-called Hub Cities of southeast Los Angeles County that I wrote a chapter about them. Over time I came to love these towns – Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Bell, Cudahy, Maywood – because they had a proud working-class history and an all-American optimism that had been renewed when their population  shifted from mostly white to mostly Latino. There was both a modesty and a pride in these towns that seemed to me to represent all that was wonderful about the American spirit.

At a press conference at City Hall this morning Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa introduced Michael LoGrande, his nominee to success Gail Goldberg as the city's planning director. At some moments the rhetoric of the mayor and fellow speakers -- including LoGrande, City Council Member Ed Reyes, and Planning Commissioner Bill Roschen, and affordable housing activist Jackie DuPont Walker -- sounded as if they were building the world's next great city.

Other times, their emphasis on customer service made the city sound more like a Nordstrom store than the writhing metropolis that it is. 

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is reportedly set to announce his selection of Michael LoGrande as the city's next planning director. A 13-year veteran of the department, LoGrande currently serves as its chief zoning administrator. He replaces Gail Goldberg, who had served as planning director for four years before announcing her retirement three weeks ago. 

LoGrande's path to the directorship contrasts with that of Goldberg, who arrived in 2005 to a department far different from the one she is leaving.

Some thoughts on the LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne's rather brutal drubbing of the recently completed Robert F. Kennedy Education Center (three schools encompassing K-12) on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel near downtown Los Angeles.

When the San Fernando Valley portion of the City of Los Angeles attempted to form its own city in 2002, one of five names nominated for what would have been the nation's sixth-largest city was "Camelot." This for a region most famous for being the vapid home of Valley girls.  

Although Measure F (CP&DR Insight Vol. 16 No. 10 Oct 2001) failed on both sides of the hills that separate the Valley from the rest of Los Angeles, nearly a decade later a far less grandiose, but perhaps more pragmatic, solution has emerged to give a unified voice to the Valley and some of its neighboring cities. 

Back in 2005, after Con Howe stepped down from his longtime role as Los Angeles's planning director, my phone kept ringing off the hook with calls from people trying to help new Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa find a new planning director. Some wanted to know who I thought would be good; others wanted to bounce candidates off of me to see what I thought.

After about the eighth call, I realized something important. There was only one person on everybody's list. Astonishing, given the typical biography of a big-city planning director at the time, she was 62-year-old woman from San Diego who hadn't even been a professional planner until the late 1980s. And so it was almost preordained that Villaraigosa was going to pick Gail Goldberg as his planning director.

Read Bill Fulton's appreciation of Gail Goldberg's time in Los Angeles here.

After four-and-a-half years at the helm of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Gail Goldberg has announced her retirement. In a letter [pdf] to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Goldberg, who arrived in Los Angeles after serving as planning director for the City of San Diego, cited major initiatives that she had championed at the department but wrote that ultimately she has "been long ready for retirement and new adventures."