Jon Christensen in City Lab: How to Build a New Park So Its Neighbors Benefit

The Los Angeles River only intermittently resembles an actual river, even though that’s what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers entombed in concrete in the 1930s. Since then, its 51-mile course has been a trickling flood channel, the scene of countless movie car chases, and a punchline about how artificial L.A. can seem.

The results are a mixed bag. “The good news is that stakeholders in about half of the projects we surveyed, including many park advocates and local community organizations, are proposing and actually implementing PRADS,” write Alessandro Rigolon, a professor of city planning at the University of Utah, and Jon Christensen, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “The bad news is that the other half of the projects have not taken concrete actions yet.”