Welcoming the Wild
Spring 2022 | Los Angeles, Californiainstructed by Chris Reed
How can we ensure that the walking, creeping, and crawling residents of Los Angeles all have their place in the city?
This project seeks to design a more hospitable and inclusive urban environment in Los Angeles, a city seemingly designed with only one inhabitant in mind - the automobile. In contrast to the pervasive car-dominated landscape of Los Angeles, this project foregrounds other mobility modes - crawling, slithering, bounding, scurrying, and walking - to create an urban environment that is both welcoming and wild. A series of wildlife patches, corridors, and crossings makes the first gesture in welcoming back to the city this land’s original inhabitants. An infrastructural approach of rewilding and reweaving knits the city’s more-than-human residents together, fostering a spirit of kinship and an ethic of care that ensures walking, creeping, and crawling Angelenos all have their place in the city.
This is accomplished through the construction of a wildlife crossing at the northeast corner of Griffith Park, where Interstate 5 and Highway 134 intersect with the Los Angeles River and Verdugo Wash. Unlike conventional wildlife crossings that manifest themselves in a singular land bridge, this Griffith Crossing gives value to the specific movements of area fauna and provides multiple threads of connection that are each sensitive to the diverse micro- and macro-habitat needs of their animal users. These wild threads connect Griffith Park and the greater Santa Monica Mountain region to three proposed wildlife corridors – a revitalized Los Angeles River, a naturalized Verdugo Wash, and a rewilded powerline corridor – that will ultimately link Los Angeles’ major wilderness areas together across the metropolitan region. In addition, the Griffith Crossing provides human connection to Griffith Park from Glendale and other adjoining neighborhoods currently separated from the park by the Los Angeles River and twenty-nine lanes of highway traffic. Carefully designed sectional relationships along the crossings provide opportunities for close encounters between human and animal species in settings that are both urban and wild, further weaving the previously disparate threads into a new, rewilded Los Angeles.
