Moderator: Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles
Tom Gilmore, Gilmore Associates, Los Angeles
Eric Owen Moss, FAIA, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles
Jan Perry, City Council of Los Angeles–Ninth District, Los Angeles
Stefanos Polyzoides, Moule & Polyzoides, Architects and Urbanists, Pasadena

      New Orleans will remake itself, so will the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but according to what criteria? According to an entirely different urban pro forma, downtown Los Angeles is also re-imagining itself and, if we internationalize the discussion, it’s clear that from Mexico City to St. Petersburg, Russia, and Guangzhou, China, that an often rancorous debate on the remaking of cities is ongoing. At the intersection of tradition, innovation, evolving conceptions of politics, and sociology, conceptions of use, reuse, and urban purpose are a quintessentially American argument.

Learning objectives:

• Examine the role of traditional ideas in cities and less traditional ideas that have yet to be explored
• Identify the city as an idea, what we know and what there is to know, and examine the relationship of people, scale of buildings, and role of transportation
• Appraise how the existing models need to be modified and whether we need to develop new ones