Square milieu

The new Pershing Square aims to heal ethnic and economic rifts in this battered city of angels by creating an open bowl of light and colour in the heart of Downtown

Los Angeles has had the kind of battering that might have daunted the spirit of many a large city, but the tumultuous onslaught of disasters to which it has been subjected (including riots, fires, floods, landslides and earthquakes) seems to have released a great urban energy and optimism.

A will to forge and claim a new urban identity for Los Angeles is emerging. As if to prove this point, the transformed Pershing Square, the traditional civic space of Downtown Los Angeles, was opened with enthusiastic celebrations on February 6, only 20 days after the devastating earthquake that measured 8.6 on the Richter scale. Cynics might regard the rehabilitation of Pershing Square as just another round in the struggle for supremacy that powerful business interests have played out between Downtown, Westside and the burgeoning sub-centres since the 1940s -- the time when Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile became Downtown's first serious competition. But the history of Pershing Square, the aims of the City's Downtown Strategic Plan and the design of the square itself testify to aspirations of more depth and integrity than those revealed in the corporate slickness of other recent Downtown developments.

California Plaza on neighbouring Bunker Hill is a well detailed and constructed series of landscaped spaces, amphitheatres, performance plazas and performing fountains, which intertwine cleverly around four sleek new high-rise buildings and lsozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art in a huge two-block development. Though it creates a superb array of spaces, it nevertheless manages to say 'keep out' to all but middle-class professionals and business people.

In contrast to the 'could be anywhere' international glossiness of California Plaza, Pershing Square has brought back to Downtown some of the pure Los Angeles spirit and imagination for which the city is renowned. It has a vitality and exuberance that should appeal to all manner of people and an openness that will invite them in.

Pershing Square lies between Fifth and Sixth Streets and Olive and Hill Streets, on the eastern edge of the Financial District, in what has been described as a bleak no man's land between Corporate Downtown LA and the Latino District.

Unlike the original Pershing Square, the new one is boldly urban and architectural. It is close in inspiration to the European model, particularly the complex new hard-surfaced urban spaces that Barcelona has used as a catalyst for regeneration. In the way that the Barcelona spaces were designed to draw fragmented parts of neighbourhoods together, Pershing Square has a significant role to play in the healing of Los Angeles -- bringing together the Latino and the Anglo, the rich and the poor, and breaking through the physical and psychological barriers that separate them.

This might seem an impossible expectation for a mere five acres of urban space, but if all the initiatives of the recently published Downtown Strategic Plan are carried out, Pershing Square will not have to achieve this gargantuan task completely alone. The 20-year plan proposes to recreate Downtown as the heart of the county and it cites public open space as the main determinant of the quality of public life. Pershing Square is one of the four principal civic spaces that will 'serve as a focus to their surrounding areas' and will be 'linked together by landscaped and pedestrian-friendly avenidas'. A 'catalytic' project will construct the first phase of the 25-mile civic space framework in which Olive and Hill Streets become landscaped avenidas connecting the Civic Mall with Pershing Square.

The plan contains strategies to create a more integrated and cohesive community by bringing neighbourhood life to Bunker Hill, regenerating the old Broadway Theatre District (without losing the lively Latino population) and physically connecting the higher land of corporate Bunker Hill and the lower multi-ethnic areas with new buildings, pedestrian routes and places and the reinstatement of the old Angels' Flight Funicular.

The recently opened Metro, which radiates from Downtown to outlying suburban areas, the plans for its expansion and the integrated Downtown Transportation Plan all affirm the intent to recreate Downtown as the centre of Los Angeles. If all the proposed actions of the Strategic Plan are carried out, Los Angeles may begin to lose its world-wide reputation as a 'city of suburbs in search of a centre'.

Pershing Square started life as a cow pasture in the 1860s, evolved into a picketfenced garden in the 1880s and became a typical showpiece of Beaux Arts park design in the early 1900s. Between the beginning of the century and 1940, before the automobile became the dominant mode of transport and mobility, LA's fundamental credo, Pershing Square was the symbolic centre of the Downtown region, and Downtown was the heart of LA.