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Spaces for People

Urban Design: On the Streets Where We Live

By Rick Meghiddo on May 15, 2013 inArchitecture

3

A-La Mesa
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Stradaccie (pronounced stra-da-che) means “ugly streets” in Italian. It is the plural of stradaccia, a pejorative of the Italian word strada, street.

The street is the primary urban space for people. It acts upon us 24/7 throughout our lives. It not only synthesizes what we are as a culture, but it also contributes in shaping what we are as individuals.

There are some nice streets in LA and there are also many stradaccie: crude, disjointed, cacophonous boulevards and avenues. They stimulate our eyes with multiple shapes and colors but are unlikely to give us a sense of wholeness. The problem is not an aesthetic one – ultimately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The problem is that the future of the American city may depend on the way our arteries continue to develop and be redesigned.

A-240-6x10-Streets 3_130428_0635

Why is this important? Because, for both ecological and economic reasons, urban design and density must increase. There is a widespread view among architects and planners that the best place for it to happen is along urban corridors, particularly those having or being capable of holding public transportation. The advantage of this approach is that most residential neighborhoods may continue to exist at the present densities while being at walking distance from urban corridors. It is a way of “having the cake and eating it.”

Increasing density along urban corridors implies “mixed-use,” which generally is understood as “residential and commercial,” one on top of the other. Yet there are many other functions of public need and interest that can be located along urban corridors: libraries, schools and institutional buildings, to name a few.

This video is a token observation of some LA’s streets, at times beautiful, at times stradaccie. The camera starts at Lincoln Boulevard in Inglewood, and moves through Ocean Park’s Main Street, Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, San Vicente Boulevard in both Santa Monica and Brentwood, Westwood at Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard between Westwood and Bel Air, Beverly Hill’s Rodeo Drive, West Hollywood’s Sunset Plaza, Hollywood Boulevard’s iconic Walk of Fame, Downtown L.A.’s Broadway and Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and Koreatown along Western Avenue.

The idea is to look at some of LA’s streets not as tourists but rather as observers of the multiple messages they carry. Learning from these, we may continue to re-invent and design an urban future in which the focus shall be on spaces for people.

Architecture historian Spiro Kostov wrote in The City Shaped: “Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settings from which daily rituals – the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged – derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place.”

There are many stradaccie, and not only in U.S. cities: Paris, Rome, London, Buenos Aires carry their good share of them. Like babies which demand our attention by crying, billboards, graffiti and flashing neon cry “we are here and we’re not going anywhere; hold us in your arms and love us.” It’s time to bring their voices into the drafting boards.

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TagsLos Angelesstreetsurban design

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About the author

Rick Meghiddo

Rick Meghiddo

Website

Rick Meghiddo Rick Meghiddo is an architect and filmmaker. Through ArchiDocu - see www.ArchiDocu.com - he brings his "architect eye" to help architects to convey their concepts and vision, institutions to convey their social and environmental goals, and educators to express the meaning and value of architecture, design and art.

  • maurice amiel

    Between 6:05 and 6:11 you have captured what a city for and by its people is and should be like … not a surprise that is accompanied by spanish music and covers activity patterns issued from Latin cultural contexts … Please note the intelligence of the second floor façade situated a way from the street one, creating a vertical spatial and social articulation of public and private areas which is at the heart of ordering one's experience of the city for people, and which would become the key environmental structuring element of mixed and dense land uses of the future .
    well done and pertinent

    • rick meghiddo

      Thank you. I appreciate the observations.

  • Keren Goldberg

    The streets of L.A. – what a great documentary that would make as a reflection of a place with one of the greatest divesity of people on the planet. There is so much beauty still to be captured with flavor and flare.

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