LA's Planning Vacuum

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has already written about his "blah" feelings toward the proposed downtown NFL stadium designs, but today he writes that the whole stadium plan is emblematic of a broken Los Angeles planning process: "Once again, when it comes to the future of downtown, the city finds itself playing catch-up, responding to an ambitious private plan rather than putting intelligent, far-reaching planning rules in place that developers are then obliged to follow. For decades, of course, Los Angeles has shaped its architectural future in just this manner, with an absence of strong and coherent planning creating a vacuum into which powerful individuals — developers, moguls, patrons and even architects — have rushed. Even if the land in question is public, the initiative is usually private." [LAT, previously]