Aaron Payley on Placemaking for New Futures

[Kate Gasparro] What happens when you close off miles of city streets to cars and open them up to people instead? In Los Angeles, that question gave rise to CicLAvia, a now iconic open streets event that has redefined how Angelenos experience public space. This week, I'm joined by Aaron Paley, the co-founder of Community Arts Resources and one of the key visionaries behind CicLAvia.

…You were saying that you wear lots of different hats, so I want you to start there.

[Aaron Paley] When I got out of college and moved back to Los Angeles in 1982, and discovered the intersection of arts, culture, community, and place, and that led to the creation of Community Arts Resources, which I co-founded with Katie Bergen, who's been my partner at CARS since 1989. I've been working with Katie pretty much on a regular basis since 1982. We have decades of experience doing exactly this, thinking about lifting up communities, working with arts and culture as a way to do that, and also looking at the public realm and how we might help.

We feel that if we can make a change or we can create some new models in Los Angeles, they could have an impact on cities that are like Los Angeles. And when you think about cities, more cities look like Los Angeles than they look like New York or Paris or Copenhagen. So we get a lot of models and a lot of examples from those cities, whereas not a lot of cities look like them.

We have a lot of cities all around the world, have a lot of sprawl, and were built the way LA was built in the 20th century in a car-centric manner. And so if we can figure it out here, we think that there are replicable models for the world, which are exciting for us.

You're really talking about the intersection of culture and arts and placemaking, but I know you wear another hat in your role leading CicLAvia.

It's interesting because for us, CicLAvia is the same thing. I mean, it is not something else. But what it taught us, because for us, for me, CicLAvia is a placemaking exercise.

It's about how we activate public space and how we use arts and culture to bring communities together, and how we activate communities. What it taught me was that I was really working within an arts and cultural framework, or even, I dare to say, an arts and cultural ghetto. I was not looking at how the work that we were doing has an impact on transportation, on the built environment or on public health, or on the community using public space.

The projects that you're working on do have impacts in many other places and in many other spheres. That was a really important lesson that I've been really focused on, how to break down these silos that divide all these different practices like affordable housing, green space, public health, arts and culture, and transportation. All these things need to be working together and not in isolation.

Tangibly speak to that for CicLAvia and how it has become a landmark event in Los Angeles, and maybe what sparked the idea and the first steps to make it real, and how it's evolved from there as it's touched on many different parts of the urban experience.

CicLAvia is a really interesting tale to tell. In 2008, I was part of this two-year fellowship, and my thesis was, I would like to activate public space in an even more effective way than I have been doing for the last 28 years. Where could we do that in Los Angeles? I had this light bulb go off at an urban planning conference in Las Vegas, of all places, and I was hearing somebody talk about the belt line at Atlanta and how they were taking this abandoned railroad line that ran in a circle around the city and turning it into a new public space. For me, this big light bulb went off and said, We have this amazing 51 miles of the river, which goes through all these different neighborhoods.

This is back in 2008. It was not effectively being used by Angelenos. So I was thinking of creating a river festival that would activate the river for a certain amount of time and change the way people thought about it and saw it from that temporary activation. I said, well, I'm actually trying to create a long linear festival inside an urban context. Are there any other examples of this? I met with Jason Neville, who was at the time an urban planner working on the river. I told him what I was looking for, and he said, well, you should look at ciclovía in Bogota. He told me about what's happening in Bogota, Colombia. The concept of ciclovía is that you can take any public street or any street and transform it.

That idea was so simple, and it was such a different way of thinking. How could we transform LA? That had just got me really excited. Antonio Villarigosa was elected to a second term, and LA Magazine was going to do a famous issue addressing to the mayor, saying, what should you do next? They just asked all these people, what would you recommend the mayor do next? I wrote that we should be looking at Bogota and taking over streets like Wilshire Boulevard and turning them into ciclovías on a Sunday. I got an email from Adonia Lugo who said, hey, there's a bunch of us working on the exact same thing. We're trying to bring ciclovía to Los Angeles, too. We corresponded and we decided to meet. That's when I say my company, CARS, meets Bikes, and that's what gives birth to CicLAvia.

It turns out that there is a group of advocates, and they've been meeting for about seven months at that point. LACDC set up an ad hoc committee, of which they were a part, and others joined. I think the success of CicLAvia is that it had a lot of parents, not just one mother or father, but a lot of parents, all of us with very different perspectives. It wasn't just a bike project, it wasn't an arts project, it wasn't just anything, it was everything. That large mix of uses and ideas really makes CicLAvia, and makes CicLAvia the most successful version of open streets in the United States. We have been absolutely embraced by Angeleno's in a way that other open streets events in other cities just don't hold a candle to this in terms of how popular it is.

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It's so important that this model comes from Latin America and not from Paris and not from Copenhagen and not from New York, right? This is a model that was developed in Latin America, in a city that, if you go to Bogota, and I've been three times now, has a lot of parallels with Los Angeles. If you can do it in Bogota, you can do it anywhere. Actually, Bogota loves the way it's taken off in Los Angeles. But Bogota has given this example to the world. I think there are over 100 cities in Latin America alone that do it, like Bogota, every Sunday.

Can you talk about the temporary nature of CicLAvia and how it has helped Angelenos view their urbanscape in a different way, and how they're able to use the urban form, and what the public right-of-way should be like, especially in a car-centric city like Los Angeles? 

First thing is, how does a temporary event like CicLAvia impact Angelenos? I would say that CicLAvia, by its nature and by its evolution, is not fixed in one location. There are now, 15 years later, maybe a dozen routes that are pretty tried and true, that work better or work well, that are easier to implement now because they've been done more than once. And each time they're done, they're slightly tweaked, so they're never quite the same. And the model that we ended up coming up with was that we would bring this idea to different neighborhoods and connect different neighborhoods in different parts of Southern, even different parts of LA County, not just in LA city. So what it does for Angelenos is it allows them to see a place with completely different eyes. If you're used to looking at Wilshire Boulevard with cars, if you see it without cars, and you see it actually, not just without cars, but now people are walking and biking, and then there's a cultural hub set up at a place on Wilshire Boulevard. Now there's a stage and there's things happening in the street. So it's become a site for festivals or a site for community engagement. Your idea about what's possible has changed, because I always say that CicLAvia is a postcard from the future. You're literally getting an idea of what might be possible, an alternative reality. What if a street or streets look like this all the time?

It does give you that taste, and what does it mean to be able to move around the city without a car? It's also a starter drug for that, because Angelenos are so used to moving around the city with their cars, that they don't realize that it's actually not that far from one neighborhood to the next neighborhood, and that on a bicycle, it's actually about the same amount of time. And it rewires your mind as to how LA is.

Actually, the distances between neighborhoods aren't necessarily as big as you think they are. And the city is actually, even though it is big, it's still graspable. There's still a way to make it human. So temporary events can absolutely rewire you.

We often think...there's a tension between temporary activation and long-term investment. Because of your experience working on both of those and your multiple hats that you wear, what does it take to translate the energy of a one-day event or a temporary activation into permanent changes in infrastructure or policy?

Unfortunately, it's a completely different toolbox or toolkit. Like, to do a temporary event and to do long-term civic change are really different. And you need different teams and different constituencies and a different support model.

For example, with CicLAvia happening in 2010 and its success and its embrace, I honestly thought that 15 years later, the streets would look really different. Like really different. I thought that we would have some major car-free arteries already in place, like not just bike lanes, but we would have transformed and I'd say turned Wilshire Boulevard into an east-west corridor with that would be just for public transit and active transportation as opposed to, you know, really nothing much, I don't think much has shifted in the permanent built environment or not as much as I thought. So it is a very different model. You can get permission to do something for a short-term change, like for a day or two, and have buy-in from all these different people, let's say, to turn that street into a car-free street. But those very same people or elected officials or whoever might not at all be on board for turning that into a permanent public space that's car-free all the time.

That's a very different calculus for them, and a very different calculus for everyone. The advantage of doing something like CicLAvia in places like Bogotá, in Los Angeles, is that it is a lower investment and does turn streets into public spaces that can be great recreational spaces and great places for kids to grow up on a regular basis without as much of an investment. How would you create a new park by getting new land that you don't have and then going through this major process of community engagement and then stakeholder buy-in and then elected officials' support, and community support, and just making all that happen? It turns into a 10- or 20-year process. So in many ways, creating temporary change for a place like LA is often the only way to see change happen more in our lifetime, right?

How are you, through your work, centering community voices as you're working through, whether that's temporary activations or longer-term investments, such that the legacy of a place isn't lost with change?

The legacy of place is very important to me, and it was something that I started to think about as a kid growing up in LA. I was witnessing the erasure of place all the time around me. And it was kind of a normal thing to drive down a street in the 60s, and you would be used to seeing that old house there. And then one day it's gone, right?

There's a parking lot there, so that erasure of history eventually led to the LA Conservancy as one of the most powerful historic conservancy organizations in the country, because there really was a lot of erasure going on, right? Another part of that erasure wasn't just physical, but it was societal, meaning that we forgot who the people were who lived here before. So it's very important for a place like Los Angeles that we put history back into LA. There's this common myth about LA that LA is a place without history. This house has so much history, and it's so rich. And we have spent two and a half centuries not paying attention to it and trying to ignore our own history and put it under the rug or hide it in the closet. The most important thing about LA right now is its history. Why are certain neighborhoods the way they are? All you have to do is go back and look at the way zoning was created or the de facto zoning through mortgages and bank lending that changed where people could live, and how they could live, and who did that affect? And how did that take wealth or rob wealth from these people for generations and award wealth to these people for generations? All of those things are built into the history in ways that we need to be mindful of. So, now it's about working with community groups that are in these neighborhoods all over the city, which have woken up to this. This is not something I alone have woken up to. People all over LA have woken up to this.

And some people never forgot it. There are people who were descended from Tongva or from Californios, people who were here before the American conquest in 1846, who have these long memories of how things were. What's different is that we are making that a mainstream narrative and not a forgotten one, or not one that just belongs to this marginalized community without power. So it's very much a case that you have communities that don't have power, that are marginalized. They keep these things alive, and everybody else forgets.

There's been this tension and push and pull, I would say, around the need to expedite infrastructure, housing projects, all throughout California, and expediting the permitting associated with these types of projects, and in some cases, maybe restricting the amount of time that stakeholders have to speak on those projects...I'm curious what your thoughts are as people look towards expediency in implementation of projects and making sure that we have adequate stakeholder engagement to ensure there's equity and the legacy and history of a place isn't forgotten. 

I hope there's a way to do it in a just way that delivers these things in a timely fashion, because you can make these really coherent arguments for both sides. And I think it's complicated because I can see when we talk about long-term change versus short-term transformation, how different it is. I have so many friends who love my work and love CicLAvia and other projects that I do with Community Arts Resources or with Los Angeles Tomorrow. And they love that idea of how the weekend makes it a very different place. But they very much don't want it to change all the time. They are not interested in a road diet. They're not interested in a car-free street. They're not interested in how their neighborhood might be transformed by this. Our system is broken in terms of making decisions. And our system is broken in terms of looking at balancing different constituencies and different needs and trying to figure out how to move forward. I think that what we need to do is come up with very imaginative solutions that are very Los Angeles. Francis Anderton, Christopher Hawthorne, and others have been talking about the multifamily legacy of Los Angeles, the multifamily housing that we used to have, and how creatively it was done.

Instead of getting these really great examples of what this could look like, we get developers using all the tools at their disposal to create a project that pencils out, which means we're looking at very high density, maybe doesn't look at all like the neighborhood, maybe it's done economically so that it's not as pretty as people would like it to be or is not as aesthetically moving. We end up with these solutions that then people react to. It's like, I don't want that eight-story behemoth in my neighborhood. It’s terrible there, and it's going to be terrible here, as opposed to us coming up with a more LA solution.

...I would say there might be three large snapshots in the public view: fire recovery from January, protests that are happening in the public space, and forward-looking at these large events that will call LA home in the next few years, being the Olympics and the World Cup...As someone who thinks about the public realm, how do each of these snapshots translate placemaking for the local community, and how places can be a powerful tool for change or reflection on history in those areas?

I think you are very correct in pointing out these three areas as key to where LA is now and where LA is going. So we had these major fires January 7th and onward, and we are just beginning to grapple with what that means to rebuild and restructure. The protests and the militarization of our public space by ICE and by the federal government are really something that we have to grapple with because they are not going away.

We have already signed, under the Biden administration last year, we already signed the contract that security for the 2028 games is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. So the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security are in charge of the game's security, and so we need to come to terms with all of this. So in my mind, placemaking and telling local stories and telling the real authentic LA stories that there are through place and through arts, culture, interventions in place is not only necessary, but it's an act of resistance as well, and it's going to be more and more important moving forward, and it's important for the fires because we need to as much as possible do what we can to allow Altadena to retain its sense of Altadena, to allow the Palisades to retain their sense of the Palisades, and that history and those legacies that they represent, which are very different for each community, but very rooted in each of those places. We also need to allow for histories to be told and narratives and stories to be told that have been marginalized in those places. We also need a way to make those places more friendly to the people who live them. I mean, rebuilding them exactly as they were isn't necessarily the solution in my mind.

I think that we need to be looking at that and say, what could we do better? How could we create public spaces in these neighborhoods that aren't there now? How can we create ways for people to come together in those neighborhoods on a daily basis that they didn't have before? All of those things are important in the rebuilding from the fires, and they're also all of those issues are the same issues that need to be thought of when we think about the large-scale events, which is like we need to create new public spaces and lift up our neighborhoods and our communities throughout all of LA County. We need to, as Southern California or as Los Angeles County, we actually need to grapple with some systems change. That's not just about making a tweak to the street or to this law, but I think that the way the city charter is set up, the way the county is set up, it's very difficult to get things done.

We need to grapple with that and come up with a way to fix our sidewalks, for example, as a very small example of a very big problem. If we can't figure out how to fix our sidewalks, and the problem with thinking about fixing our sidewalks is that we think about them as just the sidewalks. Why aren't we thinking about the fact that the sidewalks are part of the street? Why is it that when you look at the street in the city of Los Angeles, you've got 14 agencies that have jurisdiction over it, and why does that make it so complicated? And we don't have a system right now that's working. I think that we need to start thinking in a more interdependent, more complicated way than we have before. And I'm not sure what that's going to take, but I would like to see that change before I pass the torch on to the next generation.

This siloed approach, which we see in a lot of places with all these agencies that have jurisdiction over the same piece of roadway, is kind of in opposition to what you're saying happened with CicLAvia, where you had experts in all these different spaces come together to create something that was bigger than the sum of its parts.

You also need what we had, which was we had an elected official who stuck his neck out for the project. So, Antonio Villarigosa, who was the mayor at the time, really said, I want this to happen. He really pushed for it to happen in a way that allowed it to happen. It would not have happened the way it happened, in the speed it happened, or even in the form it happened without that unvarnished, undiluted support. He was behind us 100%. It means something completely different to go into a meeting when you have the mayor with you.

Not literally there, but to go in to talk to the Department of Transportation, and you know the mayor is backing you, and the Department of Transportation is saying, this is a terrible idea, but the mayor is bending, is telling us that we have to cooperate with you. And so, you have this leverage that one needs. So, this top-down, I mean, we need leadership. It's very important, and leadership is critical to getting big things done. We also need a bottom-up approach where, as CicLAvia did, you know, we really brought communities together, and an interesting mix of coalitions together to advocate for the project at the same time. So, that tough-down bottom-up approach is really important, and change is only going to come if both of those things are happening at the same time.

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