PROPX // INVENTING THE NEXT LA

PropX is an experiment to test new strategies for transforming the city through two distinct means: agile planning and constructive collaboration. The goal of PropX is to demonstrate that taken together, agile planning and constructive collaboration provide new approaches to intractable urban problems like affordable housing, homelessness, traffic, and sustainability. Agile planning stands in contrast to the utopian thinking and master plan so heavily relied upon in the past, which have produced poor policies and projects in real places like Los Angeles. Instead, we must model new policy–PropX–to be responsive to existing conditions, flexible enough to change with the times, and mindful of an emergent urban order. Such a task requires the expertise of planners, architects, developers, community stakeholders, and policy makers who collaborate constructively, building ideas together in a multidisciplinary fashion from the outset. Only when we recognize that the city itself ignores professional boundaries, can we creatively collaborate on innovative solutions. We take Los Angeles as our laboratory, for as our region lurches forward in population and commercial growth, it is essential that we have policies and project models that work to produce the kind of places we all want to see–beautiful, functional, and sustainable.
>> download proposals [PDF]
>> purchase a copy of PropX: Lessons Learned [$10]