Peter V. Ueberroth, head of Mayor Tom Bradley's panel to rebuild Los Angeles, should carefully consider one important question that has received scant attention: How should South Central Los Angeles be rebuilt?
The rioting that followed the Rodney King verdict destroyed or seriously damaged more than 5,000 buildings. These could be put back as they were: predominantly one-story commercial buildings backing onto large parking lots, situated on long, dreary blocks bounded by extremely wide, high-speed roads.Shopping strips over here, houses over there; it's the kind of planning that is the hallmark of most American cities, the kind of planning that only a traffic engineer could love.
City planning centered on the automobile is itself a part of the problem. When getting around means driving around, cities spread out and physical distances become social distances. In few cities are different income groups as isolated as in Los Angeles.
Walking in a city is much more than a question of reducing gas emissions or staying fit. Empty streets are dangerous streets. Moreover, when it's no longer convenient or pleasant to walk, one of the chief occasions for civilized mingling between neighbors and strangers has been lost.
When car life replaces street life, human interaction is reduced to a primitive level: isolated drivers honking at each other, competing for parking spaces, racing for the next light.
What, then, should be done? It's no coincidence that most of the destruction took place in the commercial strips fronting the broad avenues. These mini-malls form a kind of no man's land, places to drive by, not walk through.
The exclusionary urban zoning that bans residential uses from commercial streets should be modified to produce a blend of shops, offices and apartments - to encourage walking.
Walking is practical, however, only when the density of buildings allows these different uses to be close together. Modifying zoning and regulations to permit apartments and offices to be built over shops, for example, and allowing housing lots to be smaller, increases overall density and reduces sprawl.
So does changing building regulations to allow garage apartments. Introducing short streets at mid-block also encourages people to walk rather than drive.
The mingling of different functions presupposes abandoning one of the worst inventions of well-meaning urban reformers: the public housing project. Warehousing the poor in quarantined districts of identical two-story apartment buildings, as is done in Los Angeles, is as destructive to the city as it is to the occupants.
If public housing must be built, it should only be as individual buildings, not as large-scale projects. Smaller-scale construction would also lend itself to the use of neighborhood contractors. If tenant ownership is to be encouraged, housing should consist of small rowhouses or bungalow courts, not large apartment blocks.
Another planning convention that needs re-evaluation is the separation of industry from housing. When new factories are built in South Central Los Angeles, they should not be isolated in industrial parks but located within neighborhoods.
More than 30 years ago, Jane Jacobs suggested many of these changes in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." This landmark book was a reaction to the planning orthodoxy of the 1950s, when inner cities were devastated by urban renewal and highway construction. Unfortunately, the same policies prevailed when cities were rebuilt following the urban riots of 1965. We must do better this time.
(Witold Rybczynski, author of the forthcoming "Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture," teaches architecture at McGill University.)