Reading L.A. and its networked ecologies

Over the new few months, the architectural discussion website mammoth will be hosting an online discussion of a forthcoming book, "The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles," as an "experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text." According to the site, the book's editor, Kazys Varnelis, uses the introduction to frame Los Angeles as the American city most fully indebted to infrastructure for its existence and survival:

If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. Its ecological footprint greater than the expansive state it resides in, Los Angeles exists by the grace of infrastructure, a life-support system that has transformed this wasteland into the second largest metropolis in the country. Nor was this lost on Angelenos. They understood that their city’s growth depended on infrastructure and celebrated that fact. After all, what other city would name its most romantic road after a water-services engineer?

Nice. The site says it will post a piece summarizing and commenting on each chapter "as a conversation starter, but we hope that a rich discussion will spiral out from that central hub, through comments, through other participating blogs...and into other corners of the internet (twitter, etc.). To that end, participation in this discussion — this 'book club' — is open to any and all interested readers." Just get yourself the book and chime in.

Photo of Terminal Island and the Port of Los Angeles at mammoth / Lane Barden