One of the things prominently on display at this year's California Chapter, American Planning Association conference was the evolution of the City of Los Angeles from a gargantuan suburb into a true "big city."

New mixed-use and adaptive reuse projects are located all around the conference site in Hollywood, often within easy walking distance of a Red Line subway station. Conference attendees who ventured onto the Red Line encountered a bustling public transit system no matter the time of day.

A breakout session on Tuesday explained the city's adaptive reuse ordinance and related programs.  But what the session highlighted was the re-birth of downtown Los Angeles as a desirable place to live for more than 10,000 people.

It could almost be a story from a Charles Dickens novel: Nearly 800 lower-income households find themselves evicted from an apartment complex in the Venice district of Los Angeles by developers who reportedly want to build luxury housing. The City Council opposes the deal but is defeated in court. After various attempts at mediation, the developers beckon sheriff's deputies to lock out hundreds of renters from their apartments, only to call off the authorities at the last minute. >>read more

It was a case of hopeless infatuation in 2001, when the City of Los Angeles finally landed a developer who was rich and optimistically cock-eyed enough to build that long-dreamed-of-but-never-consummated project, the convention center hotel. >>read more

You learn in school that planning is about vision, but in the real world planning usually boils down to numbers � numbers about what's going to happen in the future. But you can never really know what's going to happen in the future. The best you can do is guess.

California is the land of wide-open spaces. And everybody moves here from the East Coast to get away from those big, crowded cities. Right? Not anymore. In some ways, California is just as crowded as � or maybe even more crowded than � the East Coast. And it's only going to become more so during the decades ahead.

Demand for industrial space in Los Angeles County remains high, but development is not keeping pace. Instead, large-scale industrial projects are going to the Inland Empire, where empty land is plentiful and most local governments have open arms. The trend is distressing to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation and some other business boosters, who note that Los Angeles County manufacturing employment has declined in recent years. The manufacturing segment now accounts for only about 13% of...

In its own way, Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles is as strange and fantastical as the imaginary towns in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. One of the Italian novelist's inventions is Armilla, a city that consists of nothing but a forest of water pipes, where beautiful women shower. Another is Morlana, which has a gorgeous fa�ade of alabaster gates and coral columns, which hides a pile of trash. Yet another city is a sphere made up of twisted roads designed to prevent a woman from escaping....