It has no place

The implications of the L.A. Live model for the future of the city are broader than they might appear. It's not simply that AEG has given Los Angeles another outdoor mall, in this case a good deal bigger and flashier than the average one. When we trap the energy of an urban crowd inside this sort of self-contained world, and when we allow developers and their architects to heighten the differences between that world and the streets around it so dramatically, we help keep the rest of our blocks underused and, as pieces of the city, undernourished.

For decades, we have largely built the city with a kind of all-or-nothing zeal, pouring money and architecture into stand-alone projects of increasingly massive scale and failing to coax developers to knit them into their neighborhoods with any real care.

For cities, the benefit of a gargantuan new development is not only the boost it gives to the tax base but also, in urban terms, its spillover effect -- energy and people flowing into the surrounding area. The entirety of the AEG development downtown -- Staples plus L.A. Live -- is designed like an airtight cruise ship, turning not a welcoming face but the architectural equivalent of a massive hull to the neighbors. Its spillover effect may be measured not in gallons but in drops.

The design of the second phase makes a number of feints in the direction of engaged, thoughtful urbanism. It has a broad open walkway between its plaza and Figueroa Street that the architects, somewhat optimistically, call a "paseo." It will have tables spilling out onto the sidewalk on Olympic Boulevard. But these gestures are overwhelmed by the larger urban stance of L.A. Live, which now seems destined to become a hermetic, inward-looking and car-centric development in the classic Southern California tradition.

In its first phase, L.A. Live unveiled a large plaza, covering nearly 2 acres, across Chick Hearn Court from Staples Center and at the foot of the Nokia Theater. The plaza was designed by L.A.'s Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the theater by a Berkeley firm, ELS. Phase two buildings have now enclosed this plaza, essentially completing it as an outdoor room.

I have written before about how the plaza, which sits entirely on property owned by the developer, creates an impressive stage-set version of a public square. The problem is not just that the space is primarily aimed at visitors to L.A. Live's concerts and restaurants rather than local apartment- and condo-dwellers; it is that it actively discourages any of the activities we traditionally associate with the use of collective space in a city: talking, reading, sitting under a tree, even pausing with a friend for a cup of coffee.