L.A. Residential — LA 2030 and Blade Runner

A week ago — in 2010, when I first wrote this! — Newsweek published “L.A. Residential,” an essay showcasing the work of three prominent architectural firms tasked with envisioning a Los Angeles of 2030. The three firms were asked to consider how the built environment would influence the way in which Los Angelenos would live, work, commute and play 20 years into the future. The architects dealt with many of the same factors considered by Ridley Scott decades ago with his apocalyptic film Blade Runner. In 1982, Scott prophetically envisioned the Los Angeles of the Future to be over-dependant on technology, over-populated and controlled by corporate powers.

The difference, though, between Scott’s vision and the reality faced by the three architectural firms is that the architects were asked to design an urban environment around the feel-good theme of community building. Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles had no need for community building and instead projected a top-heavy society of the future in which city residents who resisted the dominant corporate culture fled to off-world colonies.

Each architectural firm used aesthetics to create a solution to the question of how the built environment could create community within the social and economic challenges of the future based on where we are today. However none of their solutions truly “built community” in…