The scenes we see when strolling around the periphery of River Park, a master-planned development in Oxnard, tell us a lot about the history of Ventura County.

Legend records that the dying Julius Caesar looks up to find his friend Brutus among his assassins. "Et tu, Brute?" (And you too, Brutus?) is his pathetic and much-quoted response. This tragic scene from the stage has nothing to do with land use politics in Santa Monica, of course - except for the smell of opportunism and something approaching betrayal of Santa Monica residents by their own city government. >>read more

Is this any place to build a resort? The Chemehuevi Indian Tribe Reservation in San Bernardino County is a vast field of parched, brown earth where temperatures can reach 120 degrees in the summer. To the southwest is the impressive desert landscape of the Whipple Mountains, a fine place to observe raptorial birds and wind-carved canyons, perhaps, but not a major tourist draw.

In an imagined conversion, two security spies consider the design of Dos Lagos, a new project in the City of Corona.

Nearly every project falls a little short of its initial promise, and nearly every project loses some of its visionary luster in the translation from idea to fact. Even with limited expectations, however, Playa Vista comes as an unpleasant jolt. The 1,085-acre housing development immediately south of Santa Monica is the most striking example I know of the discrepancy between a plan and on-the-ground reality. >>read more

There is a hole in downtown Livermore where a downtown should be. Knowing this and seeing a rare opportunity to create a new downtown out of whole cloth, the city opted for a pleasant, small-town downtown with nice old buildings intermixed with some new ones, residential neighborhoods within walking distance, some retail, new pocket parks, and professional offices, all under the shady canopy of newly planted street trees. Basically, what Livermore wants is what nearly every California city has opted for. >>read more

The philosopher Heraclitus once remarked that a wise man and a fool may look at the same tree and see different things. The observation also pertains to a reasonable person and a developer. A reasonable person, for example, would look at the Union-Pacific rail yard in downtown Sacramento and see 240 acres of dirt laced with a century of poisonous industrial byproducts. A developer looks at the same thing and sees a pedestrian-oriented urban district.

Landscapes, like human bodies, have histories, and sometimes those histories can leave scars. The difference between a human body and a city is that a city has a longer life. The demise of the regional mall, at least the old malls from the 1950s and '60s, will leave behind scars. These injuries will be hard to heal because they are enormous.

Rivermark has been praised as a progressive project for providing some New Urbanist-inspired architecture, affordable housing and open space. However, Rivermark is an uneasy amalgam of urban and suburban.

An outwardly conventional apartment complex in Orange County does not clamor for attention in the same way as an architectural milestone like Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. But it might be that the suburban apartments, easily overlooked, will have a greater long-term impact on average Californians than L.A.'s spectacular new icon.