City: 2050

What will your city look like in 2050?

Peering into the future is a favorite exercise for planners and designers. From the Chicago 1893 Columbian Exhibition to New York City’s two Worlds Fairs (1939 and 1965) and beyond, the future was optimistic and filled with cool technology and architecture. But not all views of the future were so hopeful. George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (published in 1949) looked 35 years forward and painted a not-so-rosy vision of the future.

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How Urban Design Can Save Lives

Image courtesy Matt Quinn

This post is part of a blog series related to Dialogue 30, "The Livability Issue.”

As Designers and Planners, we base our design concepts on a variety of inputs: site program, client preferences, industry practices, etc. But we still build parts of our cities the same way we have for nearly a century. This failure to consider our evolving needs and adapt to them may be killing us!

Urban Design can help. Here are three ideas – local, neighborhood and citywide.

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LA Forward: Embracing the Future of Mobility

Future visions for aligning mobility and development – LA Forward. Image © Gensler

Ask anyone who lives in, or has visited Los Angeles, and they’ll tell you their least favorite part of our city is the traffic. We agree; it’s one of our city’s great challenges. Los Angeles has recovered from the great recession of 2008 and we see tremendous growth physically and economically. The issue is that recent development has tended to spread jobs and housing across the city, away from transit, limiting our ability to efficiently and easily move around Los Angeles.

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LA Forward: Creating Vibrant Neighborhoods

Confidential mixed-use project. Image © Gensler

Los Angeles is city that has as many neighborhoods as it does languages it speaks. The diversity in the makeup of our neighborhoods is one of our city’s greatest assets. From our quiet residential suburbs with agrarian roots to our bustling urban core with soaring high rises, our city is continually changing. We acknowledge that growth and increased density is not just probable, it is inevitable.

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What Makes My City Livable? Moving LA Forward.

Image © Gensler

As designers and urbanists, we take an optimistic view of the future of cities. Living and working in the City of Los Angeles, we believe in the transformative power of moving forward. We envision Los Angeles as a city comprised of thriving cultures, expansive innovation, vibrant communities and social cohesiveness. Los Angeles can be a model of collaborative evolution, forward-thinking development and a bastion of exploration.

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