Who’s San Diego?

I’ve read it before, spoken about it previously, and written it down numerous times; “We don’t want to become like Los Angeles.”
I’m referring to the notion and vision that many San Diego residents have when thinking about our built environment.

Unfortunately, we are already like Los Angeles in many ways. Ironically, the same residents that want to resist that vision of vehicular congestion, pollution, and suburban sprawl, are the very ones that create the reality of San Diego’s future; myself included I presume.

San Diego is not L.A. right now, we are the L.A. of a few years ago. It is encouraging that San Diego is moving towards investment in more public transportation and pushing for a slight increase in neighborhood density, however, our progress is evident in what we have built and more important, how we have built it.

Beyond traffic congestion, San Diego and Los Angeles have many common traits. We are both cities nestled between the coast and inland mountains. We share similar environmental and ecological conditions. The cities have critical business centers and tourist attractions.

Our differences are based on scale and various nuances which contribute to our unique qualities. If we were to merge into a mega region like Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan, the transition between Los Angeles and San Diego would be seamless.

The question is: if San Diego does not want to become Los Angeles, what do we want to become? If the answer to that question is: we want to remain the same, then we are at a detriment. A vision of a future that doesn’t include realistic evolution isn’t really a vision at all. A vision of a future that is the same as today entails a resistance to the nature of life itself. I see this as a level of complacency where we have lost control of our ability to render the future. Rather than seeking big plans where we incorporate the realistic evolutions of population and the built environment, our society seeks to desperately protect what is already here. I could be incorrect in this assumption, but rendering the future cannot happen with data and two dimensional illustrations. We need models and three dimensional depictions of the possibilities.

Visualizing and planning a bright future for all people takes great effort and energy. Executing that plan flawlessly takes passion, commitment, and strength. Maybe we lack the type of strong leadership that can sustain human evolution rather than stagnate it. Some politicians wield the command to lead their constituents and create the positive future they really want, others, not so much.

I have not seen one in Los Angeles, but many great cities like New York, Chicago, and Shanghai, have gigantic models of their cities. San Diego has a downtown model, and I suggest that we need one for each community.

So San Diego, what do you want to become? It seems that we know clearly what we don’t want, yet not so clear what we do want. That is one negative aspect of community collaboration; too many convoluted ideas which range in extremes and complacencies.

The city speak about the critical need for public transport, but lacks a clear vision at multiple vantage points to implement those desires. We want more public transit that will inspire new ridership, but we only demand it in the surface. Is that what San Diego is?

An example, there is a new plan for the Sports Arena but I don’t see any evidence that light rail transit is integral in the project. Developers don’t think about it because it is not required. Architects do not design for it because most of them simply fulfill the requirements established by their clients; the developers that are not required to provide corridors for future rail expansion which would inevitably serve their projects in an astronomical fashion.

I Digress Again!!! See how easy it is to derail even a single stream of thought by the individual, me. That is a clear illustration of how complicated this matter is. The built environment is affected by everything we do and it affects the results of every decision that we make regardless of the category. Human services, health, education, mobility, infrastructure, defense, and politics, are all related and influential to each other.

With that, what are we becoming San Diego? If we are forced to visualize our communities in a microcosm, let’s imagine a how a population increase will evolve in your location. Use a half mile radius and say we need to incorporate one thousand additional households: what does that look like?

“We don’t want to become Los Angeles!” Fair enough. Let’s become San Diego. What does our future look like? Does it look like a sprawling Los Angeles? Does it look like a dense New York City? Does it look like a compact San Francisco? Does it look like a suburban Orange County?

Each version has positive and negative attributes. What do ours look like? Maybe our planning is flawed, maybe it is the process. Are we planning solely for a future vision which everything working properly, or are we planning for an imperfect future along with potential solutions?