Will a different city emerge from the Los Angeles fires?
Time and again fires have fast-tracked urban change. London after the Great Fire of 1666 rewrote its safety laws, widened streets and erected new public buildings, like the domed St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, which decimated downtown, invented the modern American metropolis with newfangled steel-frame skyscrapers.
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The fires in Los Angeles, aside from tightening already elaborate building codes, probably won’t result in anything as dramatic. For starters, it is a very different kind of city, one that isn’t concentrated around a center. The fires ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena, primarily residential neighborhoods in the hills, amid the combustible chaparral. More than how those neighborhoods were built, the problem was where.
But, outside of climate and urbanist circles, discussions about moving people out of harm’s way are not front of mind at the moment, for understandable and very human reasons. The focus is on returning displaced residents to their communities. Not everyone who lost a home may elect, or be able, to return, but over the course of conversations on the streets in Altadena, in living rooms in Malibu, and elsewhere all across the city, I have yet to meet a displaced Angeleno who doesn’t wish to go back. Replacing those homes will be a struggle and costly.
Rebuilding communities will be harder still.
Risk has of course been baked into life in Los Angeles for as long as people have lived in the region. The city’s rich, storied history includes a steady drumbeat of fires, mudslides, floods, droughts and earthquakes. What seemed different about these latest fires, Angelenos told me, is how the unusually fierce Santa Ana winds, combined with a drought that turned dozens of square miles into tinder, threatened to blow embers from the hills and canyons into urban flatlands not usually considered vulnerable to wildfires.
