No More Play

The megalopolis of Los Angeles provokes a book-length treatment that surveys it through a multiplicity of voices.

No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond
Michael Maltzan, edited by Jessica Varner, photographs by Iwan Baan. Hatje Cantz, 2011. (240 Pages, $ 50)

Michael Maltzan believes that Los Angeles has hit a pivotal moment in its growth. In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, he asserts that the city, which has always tried to expand outward, has reached its geographic borders and must now turn inward to face itself, growing more dense and interconnected. This increased density leads Maltzan to believe that new urban conditions are forming within Los Angeles that do not match the region's history and suggest new models of how the city functions. To survey this condition, Maltzan has assembled a group of contributors ranging from visual artists, architects, and theorists including Catherine Opie, Sarah Whiting, Charles Waldheim, Matthew Coolidge, Geoff Manaugh, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, James Flanigan, Charles Jencks and Qingyun Ma charging them with the task to explain LA on its own terms and to present it as a unique urban environment; a city wondering how to move on after the fulfillment of its own manifest destiny.

Chapter break from <i>No More Play</i>. — Chapter break from *No More Play*.

The resulting text reads more like an informal group conversation than a standard urbanism text. Each of the contributions takes place one-on-one with Maltzan and are loosely guided around a series of general themes: identity, infrastructure, landscape, resources, density, experience, polity, economy, community and institution. The participants were encouraged to reach outside of their expertise and to make personal judgments and opinions on the city in an effort to identify the qualities that continue to give LA its uniqueness, a characteristic that is vital to the region's individualistic mentality.

Interior spread from <i>No More Play</i>, photograph by Iwan Baan. — Interior spread from *No More Play*, photograph by Iwan Baan.

All of the contributors agree that the challenges Los Angeles is about to face are unique. Most metropolitan areas are formed around a utopian love of dynamic intensity where the thrill of mass proximity leads to a focus on collective interior space as typified by Rem Koolhaas in his retroactive manifesto, Delirious New York. Most suburban enclaves act as a well-planned and districted relief to this condition, creating a foil for this kind of intensity and a continuation of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City ideal. But Los Angeles does neither. No More Play presents a west-coast alternative where suburban privacy and collective isolation are constantly pitted against each other in a disjointed landscape with no apparent structuring grid. Instead, the city organizes itself around implied regional bubbles that undergo constant zoning changes and rude adjacencies, offering no guaranteed distance and no promise of a happy ending.

If, as Maltzan's title asserts, there can be no more play it is because the criteria that previously kept a separation between 'serious' urban discussions and more playful 'speculative' ones cannot be maintained.

Interior spread from <i>No More Play</i>. — Interior spread from *No More Play*.

LA relies on its image of perpetually being at the edge of a crisis. It endlessly re-invents the still familiar aggressive and catastrophic LA—tropes: highways, race riots, the drying up of vital resources and the threat of falling real estate values. These constant threats to health and well being act as a foil to city's otherwise provincial domesticity, permeating the mood of the city and provide it with a motivation to move forward and grow with a love of chaos that most other cities struggle to avoid.

No More Play joins a long list of books that try to dissect the LA condition, but is unique among them because it relies almost exclusively on its contributor's personal opinions. In a culture that strives to be post-critical and ahistorical, anyone can become an automatic authority. And although the contributors of this book are well-known and respected experts in their own fields, the informal nature of the conversations suggest that there is a timely value to blogs and tumblrs and that the opinions they present create are equally important to major studies and analysis, even if they defy criticism.

If, as Maltzan's title asserts, there can be no more play it is because the criteria that previously kept a separation between "serious" urban discussions and more playful "speculative" ones cannot be maintained. Play has become serious and the time for its implementation is at hand. Change rarely happens across LA on an institutionalized or mass scale. The city will never succumb to a master plan, or grand gestures. Instead, LA has generated an adaptive culture that that constantly tries to re-imagine itself and defy its own conventions on a street-by-street level.

Outside of personal opinion, however, are some very real facts. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, census data shows the region grew well below its projected 2010 estimates, suggesting a general decline in California's appeal. Perhaps that is exactly why LA needs to be written about so frequently. LA has to constantly re-invent itself appeal to the outside world and project an idea of its own image that is stronger than the private experience of it from within an automobile or the autonomy of private homes and low-density apartment buildings. For many, that is LA's appeal; living within its borders allows you the power to create your own vision of the world around you within a relatively safe cocoon. As that cocoon becomes threatened you slowly adapt and change but never lose sight of the city's greatest communal resource and principal value; potential, potential, potential.

No More Play

The megalopolis of Los Angeles provokes a book-length treatment that surveys it through a multiplicity of voices.

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