Field container as a regional strategy for revitalizing the Los Angeles River

This thesis is the study of the Los Angeles River as a multi-layered field with urban condensers that revitalize the river, connect and revitalize the municipal districts bordering the river, and restructure the region to support a denser fabric. The project establishes the nature of public space in the city as a highly contested sphere of multiple interests and constituencies and utilizes the river as a platform to engage these tensions. The Los Angeles River epitomizes the artificiality and ingenious of Los Angeles as a city which molded its environment to suit its will, inhabiting a dry, arid desert and structuring one of the largest metropolises in the world. The merging of these two instances, the particular geography of Southern California and man's desire and ingenuity to overcome this nature by man's engineering is the story of how Los Angeles became a global city from an agricultural village. With a population approaching four-million inhabitants, the city is examined after the Southern California development phenomena of "dense sprawl" and is used as a model to examine the future potential of the river, currently a mono-functioning, concretized flood control channel, to become a multi-functioning infrastructure mediating a density of program and flows at the regional, metropolitan and local scales.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Ghole, Saba (Saba Ashfaq)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alexander D'Hooghe.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39304

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39304