Symposium: LA-ND – the future of land value in LA

Anyone who has seen the movie Chinatown knows the story of how LA is a city of engineered land. Every plot of earth has been moved and shaped, turning fields, slopes and canyons into subdivisions, infrastructure, and popular destinations. Think the LA River, Mulholland’s reservoirs, Hollywood Bowl, Griffith Observatory, UCLA, Bunker Hill, the 101, 405, 5, Dodger Stadium, the Getty, and hillside enclaves from Pacific Palisades to Pasadena. But as the effects of climate change intensify, these engineered lands are at greatest risk of peril. They are literally where real estate economics and climate unpredictability have begun to collide. At the LA-ND symposium Saturday, at UCLA’s IDEAS campus, UCLA faculty Jeffrey Inaba, Gillian Shaffer and David Jimenez Iniesta will discuss the history and future of land and urban strategies  with Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles; Francesca Ammon, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at UPenn; and Débora Mesa, Architect and Principal of Ensamble Studio (Madrid and Boston).