As Los Angeles recovers from its devastating wildfires, environmental engineers, urban planners and natural disaster experts are casting forward with visions of what could come next for neighborhoods that have been reduced to ash and rubble.
Apartment buildings could spring up where strip malls and parking lots once stood, with locals walking to ground-floor shops, offices and cafes, European-style.
The city could “infill” vertically to add affordable housing in safer downtown areas, rather than outwards with more single-family homes on fire-prone hills.
Some blocks could be turned into buffer zones, where no building was allowed. And the city’s trademark palm trees, which burn like Roman candles, could be replaced with fire-resistant native trees.
These are some of the bold ideas academics have for Los Angeles as it recovers from the Eaton and Palisades fires, which killed 28 people and damaged or destroyed nearly 16,000 structures. Together, the blazes charred 59 sq miles (152 sq km) — an area larger than Paris.
The city is far from rebuilding, with many people only now being allowed back to their burned neighborhoods. When construction does begin, few of the dozen experts Reuters spoke to expected their dream plans to be adopted, citing factors ranging from lack of future insurance coverage to political pressure to rebuild as before.
