‘Bullitt’, ‘Drive’ and walking the LA River
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Photojournalism, Urbanism, Los Angeles, Infrastructure, Walking

It’s a shame that this unique, highly pleasurable experience is so difficult to access. As I noted before, walking in Los Angeles — specifically, where you are not really supposed to walk — is one of the most appealing urban encounters I’ve had (and yes, I’m aware that it may be appealing to walk here because it is difficult to walk here.) Although Reyner Banham famously said he learnt to drive in Los Angeles so he could “read it in the original”, and while I too have learnt much from being driven around LA, there are other ways to read this place, equally “original”, if you like. This is sublime.

There have only been a few gaps in the fence along the route, so I decide to walk back. In that peculiar way of things, it seems like no time to get back simply because I know where I’m going this time.

Again, I see dark silhouettes in the deep shadows under the bridges. I cannot imagine what that life must be like.

As I approach the road, I have a quick look through the fence, so as not to startle anyone. I slip through the gap and step out onto what passes for a pavement around here, as cars zip by. I turn my back on the river and walk away.

The river quickly slips out of sight again. I walk back towards Lincoln/Cypress station. I had walked a very small section of the river, but it was one of the more memorable urban walks of my life.

It’s possible to see the river as a sorry state of affairs. The waterway that made the city, to some extent, and whose water was the subject of so much controversy, corruption and capital, has been effectively neutered. You might see that it has been brutally manhandled such that a mighty regional-scale ecosystem has dwindled to a concrete-encased dribble.

Yet this is a romantic view. The river is still a mighty regional-scale ecosystem; but it is now a hybrid system, reinforcing itself with human inputs and outputs. It has become something else. The question of whether it is “sustainable” is moot; it just is, and so it is sustainable. The river is no longer a “natural” system in a pre-human sense (by which we mean at least 8000 years ago) but it will always be there. It now has different performance, and our perceptions of what “natural” is need to be radically recalibrated.

Los Angeles was enabled by the river, at least in part, and now Los Angeles in turn enables the river. The idea that the way forward for this environment is to somehow attempt to recapture some kind of natural, pre-human state should recognise that the river is comprised of effluence and affluence as much as anything else.

In fact, the river exists as a constant flow only because of these human interventions. Fletcher’s essay states that the river was actually dry in summer, and then flooding in winter; only in forcing the river down the channel, and enhancing it with run-off and cleaned-up sewage, does it achieve this “steady state”. Fletcher says, “In the sense that the river has more continually running water than it has had in its post-colonial history, it is by many definitions more a *river* today than it ever was.”

Equally, contemporary thinking about ecosystems — such as the second part of Adam Curtis’s “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” — suggests that nature is not some harmonious, steady-state system, with zero waste and maximum design efficiency. Fletcher also describes this updated thinking:

“Stability in nature is an illusion; moreover, non-natural factors such as urbanization, global warming, and the heat-island effect all have to be included in the ecological equation. Thus the native versus exotic debate is oversimplified; the landscape assemblages should not be mistaken as the cause of environmental degradation, when they are actually an ecologically appropriate result.” (Fletcher, in The Infrastructural City, Varnelis (ed.), 2008)

The river has cultural value as much as environmental, as indicated by the numerous movies and other artefacts that have used it as scenery. At this present time, it is in an in-between state, a form of linear liminal zone. It is both accessible and inaccessible; movies like Drive suggest that it is some kind of gilt-edged urban park, the ideal place for a young family to play on a Saturday afternoon, albeit a getaway driver’s young family.

The movies indicate that it is one of the most spectacular settings in a city made from celluloid, and yet it is also sometimes mundane, banal, largely forgotten. At its clearest, I will never forget watching the paradox of people cleaning their clothes in water that a few kilometres up-stream was sewage. It is hybrid. It is not something we can clean up. In an interesting adjacency, it occurs to me that “revitalising” or “recovering” the river might be as flawed as the idea of “the recovery” that Benjamin Bratton had taken down at Postopolis LA a few days earlier.

Walking the river as it is now is essential to understanding these kind of urban systems, essential to thinking about how to take hybrid environments forward, rather than work against the grain of history by looking backwards.

Rivers tend not to go backwards, after all. And resilient cities also adapt, finding new ways to flow, just as rivers do.