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Community and economic development: Seeking common ground in discourseand in practiceRaul P. Lejano a; Anne Taufen Wessells b

a Department of Planning, Policy, and Design, SE-I, Room 218G, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA b

School of Social Ecology, SE-I, Room 226, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

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To cite this Article Lejano, Raul P. and Wessells, Anne Taufen(2006)'Community and economic development: Seeking commonground in discourse and in practice',Urban Studies,43:9,1469 — 1489To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00420980600831684URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00420980600831684

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Community and Economic Development: SeekingCommon Ground in Discourse and in Practice

Raul P. Lejano and Anne Taufen Wessells

[Paper first received, June 2005; in final form, July 2005]

Summary. As communities evolve greater capacities for mobilisation and political action, localissues are finding new entry-points into development and land use planning. In this regard, twostrong discourses emerge: that of economic development and community. What are thesynergies, antagonisms, or other relationships between these two frameworks? Do policy actorsreconcile the differing discourses by appealing to a metanarrative, engaging in a pluralistic oragonistic process, or finding compromise solutions? Are there differing narratives within each ofthese broad frameworks? This article examines the divergences and convergences of these twodiscourses. It then focuses on Taylor Yard, a vacant brownfield in downtown Los Angeles,California, to study how policy actors reconciled differing visions for the use of the land. It canbe seen that attempts to construct a metanarrative, that of a park, served to create a coalition ofpolicy actors that was powerful enough to overturn a strong pro-industrial narrative. However,the weakness of the metanarrative became evident when tested by the need for explicit action,pointing to the need to fashion movements out of real relationships and grounded action. Ifdiscourse is conceived as text, then action requires that text encounter and be shaped by context.

I. Introduction

The underlying concept of community econ-omic development (CED) is that, somehow,society finds ways to pursue projects thatmake economic sense (for example, to theentrepreneur) while, at the same time, benefit-ing community members and meeting localgoals. In trying to understand how this mightoccur, it helps first to imagine two separatediscourses, that of community and, secondly,that of economic development. Our purpose,in this article, is to inquire into how differingnarratives about land use might converge anddiverge in concept and in practice.

The word, community, evokes the vision ofquality of life that residents hold for theirneighbourhood. It speaks to concerns that are

local and communitarian—the last termempha-sising the need for equity and the ability toprovide for all. On the other hand, the term,economic development, speaks to efficiencyand the maximisation of total utility, whilepaying less attention to distribution and equity.

It also speaks to the merits of entrepreneur-ship, where the latter term is most oftenassociated with private capital. In conceivingof CED, we construct a notion of progressthat is able to combine both these worlds—increasing capital gains while spreading thebenefit to the entire community, and seekingbenefits that are not solely financial but alsoinclusive of other aspects of local quality oflife.

The images that each discourse evokes canbe posed in contrasting terms. For example,

Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 9, 1469–1489, August 2006

Raul P. Lejano is in the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design, SE-I, Room 218G, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7075, USA. Fax: (949) 8248566. E-mail: [email protected]. Anne Taufen Wessells is in the School of Social Ecology, SE-I, Room226, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7075, USA. Fax: (949) 8248566. E-mail: [email protected].

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economic development suggests the idea ofprivate capital that is completely mobile,freed from ties to place and subject tothe utility-maximising discretion of theprivate entrepreneur. On the other hand, theimage of community is intimately linked toplace, collective vision and goals that cannotbe completely commodified into profit. Thefirst term deals with financial capital, whilethe second deals with social capital (Bourdieu,1990). Often, these images portray a conflictbetween community and profit (and, in termsof agents, between residents and the develo-per) and decisions might be posed as trade-offs between these two contending ends. Theliterature on negotiation posits that contend-ing parties develop a common alternative bydesigning a compromise solution (Young,1991). However, the trade-off model mayunderstate the possibility of finding common-alities between these two elements. In fact, themost crucial ingredients of CED—the forgingof commonalities in vision, the evolution ofshared patterns of action and the creationof effective policy forums for the co-designof development strategies—lie largelyoutside the simple portrayal of the issue interms of trade-offs. As we will see, in somecases, the main task is not to seek a compro-mise, but a metanarrative that all parties canagree over (Schon and Rein, 1994). Inaddition to metanarrative formation is theneed for the emergence of a strong coalitionto champion and enact the metanarrative(Hajer, 1995). The latter notion is also consist-ent with the literature on coalitions whichposit that solutions evolve in a pluralisticprocess in which the most powerful coalitiongets its way (see, for example, Ordeshook,1986). At any rate, the main focus of thisarticle is the possibility and challenge ofreconciling differing priorities (or, as we willcall them, narratives) into a single plan ofaction. We highlight the questions thatconcern us the most, namely

—How do stakeholders with differing idealsand objectives develop a coherent, over-arching vision (or, as we will call it, ametanarrative)?

—Does a coalition of actors develop aroundand champion this metanarrative?

—Does the metanarrative remain an abstrac-tion or does it translate to specific landuse solutions? In other words, can we findcommon ground in both discourse andpractice?

—Can solutions be worked out formally(through analysis), or do some activitieson the ground need to be engaged in?

—Why do ostensibly participative forums stilllead to impasse and what planning practicesare needed to translate concepts into collec-tive action?

We will reflect on these issues conceptually.Later in the article, we study how the siteplanning process unfolded at Taylor Yard, acontested brownfield in the City of LosAngeles, California. As the case study willshow, discussions between policy actorsneed to evolve beyond the simple dichotomyof developers versus community or profitversus quality of life. As we will see, whatis required is the evolution of a coherentland use strategy and the parallel forging ofa coalition strong enough to achieve it.However, there can be a gap between identify-ing a general, unifying concept and translatingthis into a richer, more explicit land use plan.In concept, contending positions might be

reconciled in different ways. There is, ofcourse, the construction of a compromise sol-ution that gives each party less than its idealbut more than what each would gain fromextended impasse (Fisher and Ury, 1991).With regard to land use decisions, compro-mise may literally lead to a jigsaw puzzle ofmixed uses on one site, assembled togetherincoherently. On the other hand, otherauthors conceive of it not as a compromise,but as the construction of a new understandingof the situation, or metanarrative, which allparties can agree on (Schon and Rein, 1994).What does it mean to form a metanarrative,however? First, there is the possibility ofsimple synthesis, where elements of both pos-itions are simply combined into one policy.However, land use decisions preclude otherdecisions and a single site cannot

1470 RAUL P. LEJANO AND ANNE TAUFEN WESSELLS


accommodate everything all the parties want.More desirable is the possibility of finding anew understanding which all parties willaccept—such as a higher value or a superiorconcept. However, would this higher conceptsimply be an abstraction that, in its generality,can be inclusive of all the parties’ priorities, oris there a possibility of actually finding a new,specific solution that all will agree is betterthan their original notions? Yet another possi-bility is that of resolution through communi-cative rationality, where parties eventuallycome to a consensus on the strength of thebetter argument (Habermas, 1987; Healey,1996). In this agonistic model, parties cometo realise, through an idealised speech situ-ation, that one alternative is backed by justifi-cations that are more legitimate than theothers (also see Arendt, 1958).

What are the elements of the two discoursesthat we need to reconcile? In a somewhat sim-plified manner, we can portray these differ-ences as related to that of structure andagency. Economic development is all aboutthe promethean genius of human agency, asembodied in the individual entrepreneur. Incontrast, the community discourse focuseson the needs of place and the sacrifice of indi-vidual gain for the collective, somethingwhich can be seen as embedding in thesocial structure. There is also some diver-gence along the normative dimension, wherethe primary motivation for the first is utilitar-ian, while the second is more about the ethical.Economic development emphasises the maxi-misation of benefits, regardless of where thosebenefits fall (or, regardless of the fact that thedeveloper may reap all the benefit). On theother hand, community is all about the goodof the whole and this speaks to distributionalequity and shared values.

In attempting to reconcile the two, it mayhelp to consider points where the two dis-courses come together. Both respond to thediminishing of the state and decentralisationof governance (Manor, 1999). While thestate devolves and gradually decentralisesdecision-making, more responsibility is thento be taken up by both the private sector(i.e. developers) and local community

(i.e. residents, community groups, as well aslocal agencies). Both speak to a decentringof the state and a reclaiming of responsibilityfor local places. We see this in numerousmovements congealing around the distinctive-ness of community character, as in the PicoUnion district of Los Angeles (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2000). Both discourses also speak tothe need for change and visionary action.Both speak to the general welfare, althoughin the economic development discourse, it ismore akin to the notion of embourgoisement(i.e. trickle-down theory), whereas commu-nity is more about direct redistribution.

As we will see in the case study, while nar-ratives might be reconcilable in terms of anoverarching vision, where they may divergethe most is in the near term. In other words,even when parties can all agree on what theystand for, in general, they might disagreeover what to do next. The tensions betweencontending visions may be most distinctwhen they need to be translated into immedi-ate actions. The crucial transition from dis-course to action is problematic for planningpractice (see Albrechts, 2001; Lundqvist,2004). It is in the contemplation of actionthat resolution of these tensions, both sym-bolic and practical, is most needed.

Certainly, brownfield redevelopment is asituation that, in principle, can reconcileboth community and economic development.The restoration of a brownfield, which can bedefined as previously used property that is pre-sently abandoned or underused (Alker et al.,2000), is desired by both investors and commu-nity residents. In brownfield redevelopment,diverse parties are drawn together and mustfind ways to coalesce and co-ordinate strat-egies. These hopes are seen in the followingexcerpt, from a speech by then US EPA(Environmental Protection Agency) Adminis-trator Christine Todd Whitman on the signinginto law of the Small Business LiabilityRelief and Brownfields Revitalisation Act.

Thank you . . . for all the work you and thepeople of our Office of Solid Waste andEmergency Response are doing to helpcommunities invest in the future by

COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 1471


solving the environmental problems of thepast. . . . It [the Brownfields Act] was themost important piece of environmentallegislation to come out of the 107th Con-gress and it shows what can happen whenpeople put politics aside and work togetherfor commonsense ideas that serve thecommon good. . . . recognizing that moreoften than not, those closest to theproblem are best able to find the right sol-ution . . . Of course, I recognize that theindispensable element in so many success-ful brownfields projects is the privatemarketplace—the visionary businessleader or entrepreneur who can look at acrumbling building on a weed-choked lotand see opportunity . . . We are workingwith communities to help break the cycleof contamination and blight by supportingprojects that reuse brownfields with greenbuildings and cleaner energy generatingfacilities. . . . That’s why they call it SmartGrowth (Whitman, 2002).

These words point to unifying elements of thebrownfields discourse (see also NEJAC, 1996;Revkin, 1998; Baerny, 2004; de Sousa, 2005.The brownfield is seen as a link between theresidues of the past and the promise of thefuture—in a sense, linking structure andagency. Brownfield redevelopment furthersthe narrative of decentralisation and, more-over, attempts to combine the public sphere(‘commonsense’ and ‘common good’) withthe private (‘the visionary business leader orentrepreneur’).In other words, can brownfield redevelop-

ment be the metanarrative that unitescoalitions and provides a common strategyof action? If it is to function as ametanarrative, we realise that it is a weakone that does not necessarily translate intodefinitive action. While much attention hasbeen paid to the issue of environmentalclean-up, there remains, even after clean-up,the daunting issue of what land use toreplace the brownfields with (Chilton, 1998).Another related metanarrative, which isinvoked by the brownfield narrative, is thatof environmental justice (see Bullard and

Johnson, 2000 for a general treatment), butthe question of action still remains. Environ-mental justice is a general theme and itrequires the formation of a coalition to trans-late it to action (Schlosberg, 1999). In theprocess, however, we wonder if the coalitionis able to forge a coherent, positive theme,or does the narrative remain a negative one(i.e. the elimination of locally undesirableland uses)? Environmental justice can, infact, be inclusive of economic development(Foreman, 1998), but what specific formdoes the narrative take? Similarly, smartgrowth and sustainable development are twoother overarching narratives but, still, thequestion remains. Can these narrativescrystallise into action?As we will study in the light of the Taylor

Yard example, the metanarrative of brown-field redevelopment evolved into the metanar-rative of the park. But the park, in its mostelemental form, was simply the negative ofthe development alternative (in other words,the absence of land use). What was lackingwas a positive, constructive vision that couldsustain a movement and guide action. Thisleads to some tentative and practical obser-vations on how tensions might be moreeffectively resolved, and coalescence moredeeply embedded, in these movements.To study the case of Taylor Yard, we ana-

lysed documents dating back to 1992. Theseincluded news media articles, task forcesummary documents, environmental reports,newsletters, development studies, governmentplans, press releases, workshop reports, organ-isational literature and websites, and publicmeeting records. We supplemented ourarchival data with interviews with key stake-holders. Our objective has been aninterpretive policy analysis (Yanow, 2000),posing the following fundamental questions:what does land use policy at the Taylor Yardsite mean today; what has it meant over thepast dozen years or so; and who undertakesthis construction of policy meaning, as itevolves and implements itself over time?In this research, we depict events around

Taylor Yard as the play of contendingnarratives, beginning with the initial, strong



pro-industry position. We also seek out theconsequent emergence of an effective coun-ternarrative (Steinmetz, 1992; Ewick andSilbey, 1995). We rely on narrative analysisfor this task for two reasons. First, from amethodological standpoint, narrative analysisprovides a means of depicting the politicalpositionings around Taylor Yard. It allowsus to trace the discourses and actions thatinterest us: contending claims for thisparticular space, at specific points in time.As they play out on the ground, these are the‘causal stories’ of urban development practice(Clarke and Gaile, 1997; Stone, 1989)—aswell as urban development resistance. The lit-erature on social movements has, by now,recognised the role of narratives in construct-ing and legitimising collective action (Snow,1992; Gamson, 1988; Johnston, 1995; Davis,2002). Narrative analysis, indelibly influencedby the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy,seeks to understand the social and culturalmeanings embedded in the words, texts andstories of our common world (Patton, 2002).In land use planning, we see meanings,first worked out in discourse, ultimatelyconstructed upon the landscape, but whetheractions or words, these can be treated andanalysed as text (Ricoeur, 1971).

The second reason we turn to narrativeanalysis is because it provides a structuringof the myriad events in the history of theTaylor Yard situation. A longitudinal narra-tive analysis evidences both the internalcohesion of a policy story, as well as itscapacity to change over time. While werely on content analysis ‘to identify coreconsistencies and meanings’ (Patton, 2002)in our data, we do not take these coremeanings and policy objectives to be eter-nally static. Rather, we understand the nar-ratives of our data as representative andconstitutive of meaning: policy stories,and the actors who tell them, inscribethem, communicate and perpetuate them,become ‘agents of social transformation’(Riessman, 1993). For this reason, narrativeanalysis is well suited for a treatment ofcoalitions, symbolic politics and policy pro-cesses that are far more fluid and variable

than traditional pluralist or game theoreticmodels contend.

In structuring our research along these lines,we draw from a long tradition in narrative(and, more generally, textual) analysis (seeLeitch, 1986; Riessman, 1993; Daiute andLightfoot, 2004; and Feldman et al., 2004,for general treatments). The power of narrativelies in its ability to unify diverse events (ormembers) into a coherent whole—it is anorganising principle for collective action(Bruner, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1988; Griffin,1993). From a broader perspective, we alsodepict the entire career of events at TaylorYard in the form of a coherent narrative(Labov, 1982).

The approach we take in analysing the casestudy is, first, to structure the recent history ofthe site into three distinct windows of time. Ineach window of time, we employ a hermeneu-tic mode of analysis (Gadamer, 1960/1975;Ricoeur, 1991) by first studying the text and,specifically, characterising the contendingnarratives and the coalitions of policy actorssupporting each. We then bring in elementsof the larger context (i.e. events in the cityand state) to further our understanding ofthese narratives and coalitions.

Narratives, we remind ourselves, are notsimply ethereal constructs that float freelyabout in the public sphere, but are frames ofunderstanding that are maintained andsupported, conceptually and materially, bycoalitions of policy actors (Berger andLuckmann, 1966). The pluralist model por-trays this as a game in which the strongercoalition (and, hence, their narrative) wins.As we will see, the pluralist model can onlycarry the analysis so far. In the first place,we ask why it is that groups might coalesceinto a coalition and support a narrative? Bar-gaining theory posits that each individual (ororganisation) would stand to gain more fromjoining versus not joining the coalition (vonNeumann and Morgenstern, 1943)—but,even before this type of rationality canapply, this requires the formulation of acommon narrative, a notion echoed by theconcept of advocacy coalitions (Sabatier,1991). As we will see, it is not enough



simply to take sides; the strength of thecommon vision has to be clear enough tosustain a strong coalition. It is in this areathat the analysis of narrative is most useful,since we find that an ill-defined cause,shared as it may be, can create weakcoalitions. We will also see that the need forcommonality is a deep one. It means notonly supporting the same alternative, as bar-gaining theory would posit, since this wouldallow groups to rally around a common narra-tive for different reasons. To some extent,people have to have values and motivationsin common—otherwise, the coalition breaksdown under the discerning lens of action.Moreover, this commonality cannot liesimply in the negative (i.e. defeating analternative) but requires engagement in theconstructive (i.e. creating a new reality andbeginning to act on it).

2. The Story of Taylor Yard

The case study is about a former rail yard ineast Los Angeles, bounded to the north-eastby the roadways, industrial development andresidential neighbourhoods that typify thearea, and to the south-west by one of the fewremaining natural reaches of the Los AngelesRiver. For over a century, the 244-acre prop-erty was owned by Southern Pacific Railroad(SPRR), who used the site as amajor switchingstation and maintenance facility from the1920s until the mid 1980s. In 1985, SPRR cur-tailed its operations at the site and, since 1991,the company has systematically sold offparcels for redevelopment, continuing afterits acquisition by Union Pacific Railroad(UPRR) in 1996. Due to its intensive use forthe service and repair of diesel locomotives,the property was identified as a brownfield asearly as 1980 and each parcel sold has requiredconsiderable removal action and remedialmeasures for purposes of environmentalmitigation.The residential area around Taylor Yard

(most immediately, census tracts 1871,1852.01 and 1852.02) is similar to the rest ofLos Angeles County in terms of age break-down (see Table 1). On the other hand, the

Taylor Yard community has a significantlylarger Latino and Asian community than therest of the county. Individual incomes areabout 84 per cent the county average. Theparcel itself is the largest remaining undeve-loped piece of land along the Los AngelesRiver south of the Sepulveda Basin and liesalong one of the few remaining, unpavedstretches of the river (running about 7 miles).Community members’ memories of thriv-

ing neighbourhoods are almost certainlylinked to an era of economic prosperitydriven by local Los Angeles industry. TaylorYard itself, between the 110 and the 2 Free-ways, north of the I-5 and the river, andnorth-east of downtown Los Angeles, is inwhat used to be the manufacturing core ofCypress Park. When the railroad ceasedoperations at Taylor Yard in the mid 1980s,hundreds of jobs were lost, the most recentblow in a pattern of localised economic disin-vestment. By the mid 1990s, Cypress Park hadgained a national reputation for gang crimeand urban decay—in 1995, a three-year-oldgirl was accidentally killed in a gang-relatedshoot-out and the story received international

Table 1. Demographics: Taylor Yard communityand Los Angeles County compared

TaylorYarda

LosAngelesCounty

Age structureUnder 18 years old(percentage)

27.0 28.0

0–9 years old(percentage)

16.0 16.1

Per capita income(US$/year)

17 464 20 683

Race/ethnicityHispanic/Latino(percentage)

62.7 44.6

Asian (percentage) 18.2 11.9Families under povertylevel (percentage)

14.4 14.4

Individuals underpoverty level(percentage)

15.5 17.9

aCombined totals for census tracts 1871, 1852.01 and1852.02



coverage. While many residents took issuewith the extreme and damaging coveragetheir community received at the time(“Cypress Park got a big black eye from it”,Armando Ramirez told the Los AngelesTimes in 1999), the image of lawlessnesslinked to unemployment was a ready-madestereotype for many Los Angeles neighbour-hoods following the 1992 Rodney Kingriots. An abandoned relic of an age longeclipsed by the freeway network, steeped inoil and creosote, Taylor Yard seemed toreify the perceptions of blight and underdeve-lopment in Cypress Park.

During three particular periods of time, wesee narratives emerging in distinct pairs.

(1) Between 1991 and 1998, an incompletelydelineated community-based narrativebegan giving ground to a dominantindustry-based one. During this period,community began organising aroundTaylor Yard, but the coalition was a forma-tive one, as was the narrative. On the otherhand, the industry development coalitionhad all the earmarks of a classic growthmachine (Logan and Molotch, 1987).

(2) Between 1999 and 2001, the industrialimperative is rechallenged, this time bythe clear, overarching concept of thepark, which proves powerful enough togain precedence. During this time, wesee a strong coalescence, reflected in andaided by the construction of a distinctmetanarrative of the park.

(3) In 2002 and 2003, the newly triumphantparks narrative appears to be incongruentwith the actual needs and expectations ofthe surrounding community, as well as theinstitutional capacity of the organisationswho will be responsible for the site’s

development, operation and maintenance.During this latter period, we find not somuch a contest between contendingnarratives, but a problem with mergingtext (the narrative) with context (theactual community).

The periods are summarised in Table 2and, in Figure 1, we depict the nature of thecoalitions that formed during each period.We will use this diagram to link narrativeswith the nature and dynamics of coalitionformation.

2.1 1991–98: Industry and the First MoverAdvantage

Figure 1 attempts to capture the organisational(and discursive) elements of this landscape,albeit in broad strokes. Between 1991 and1998, we see the discursive and politicalspace occupied by relatively few stakeholdergroups, with the dotted line indicating thebalance of power clearly in favour of stateand private business interest narratives.However, the community–industry dichot-omy only gets us so far, analytically. Thecommunity’s desire to plan for the site as awhole consistently lost out to the piecemealindustrial development of individual parcelsand community representatives did not voicewholesale opposition to industry per se and,in fact, incorporated parts of the industryelement in their proposals.

The juggernaut of development. From thetime that the site was first slated for clean-upand redevelopment, it has served as a focalpoint for contending land use visions. In1991, the Northeast Los Angeles CommunityPlan Advisory Council had spent over a year

Table 2. Development of main narratives

1991–98 Industry as central narrativeSub-text: development

$ Community as counternarrativeHybrid text: mixed use

1999–2001 Community as central narrativeMetanarrative: park

$ Industry as counternarrativeHybrid text: mixed use

2002–2003 ConceptText

$ ActionContext



debating possible redevelopment alternativesfor the newly available site when, unbeknownto many, the Los Angeles County TransportCommission acquired a 67-acre parcel forcontinued use as a rail yard, effectively insecret. Because the historical land use wouldnot change, no environmental impact reviewwas required and neither the advisory commit-tee nor local residents were informed of the

sale. City council members and city plannerswere surprised to learn of the purchase,which was packaged with a larger, $450million right-of-way transaction between therailroad and the transport authority, andbusiness and community leaders on the advi-sory committee watched nascent plans forsite reclamation fizzle in a “lack of communi-cation amongst government agencies” and

Figure 1. Mapping coalitions around Taylor Yard



their perceived “failure to tell the community”about the transaction (Los Angeles Times, July18, 1991).

Los Angeles County was moving steadilyforward with its own industrial expansionagenda: the US Army Corps of Engineershad been enlisted to conduct a reconnaissancestudy in support of further transport infra-structure projects at the site, located as it ison the Corps-controlled Los Angeles Riverchannel. It was at this time that the first indus-trial uses—for example, the Fedex facility—were sited. We see, then, that industry-leddevelopment served as the default scenarioor sub-text for Taylor Yard.

Community response. Perhaps in response, inOctober 1992 the first public meeting to focusexclusively on the former railyard site washeld: the three-day Taylor Yard Planningand Urban Design Workshop. Sponsored bylocal architects, urban designers and planners,more than 200 people attended and the report,entitled A Catalyst for Community Change,was issued in December 1992. Both theNortheast Los Angeles Community AdvisoryCouncil and the Catalyst for Change work-shop report call for commercial and retailinvestment.

The early flurry of planning activity sur-rounding the Taylor Yard site did not stopwith the urban-design-led workshop of 1992.Perhaps having been pushed tomake a strongercase for their Taylor Yard development plans,and to take into consideration the recommen-dations from the land use workshop, in early1993 the MTA contracted with a corporateengineering firm, a local planning firm andan economic development consultant to crafta transit study and land use analysis workbookfor the site. This in turn grew into an October1993 master plan compilation for the site, theTaylor Yard Development Study. Five designteams included representation from the AIA,MTA, Southern Pacific Railroad and the LosAngeles County Department of PublicWorks. No explicit lines were yet beingdrawn being ‘community’ and ‘industry’ and,in some ways, the development study pre-sumed the successful integration of both,

including provisions for transit, publicamenities and services, and retail land uses.Nonetheless, a conflict between the twodiscourses was beginning to emerge.

The contrast between industry and commu-nity narratives, and the predominance of theformer, manifests itself in a number of waysduring this period. First, the industrial impera-tive was so clearly the presumptive and‘sensible’ land use objective that it functionsin documents from the earlier years (1991–93) as a given (i.e. as the sub-text). In thedocuments where community input is soli-cited during this period, there is a tendencyof residents to value proposals consistentwith their memory of the site and this comp-lements the desire on the part of the stateand private enterprise to perpetuate formerland uses and thus bypass many of the morerigorous environmental clean-up standards.That is, to the extent that redeveloping fornew uses (such as community amenities)was even considered, it then appears to havebeen assumed that the cost of major site miti-gation would necessarily have to be offset byrevenue-intensive redevelopment: industrialand commercial uses. Despite the determi-nation of design professionals to mobilisepublic attention around the site, the historicityand path dependence (Pierson, 2000) of thesite’s land use make themselves felt even inthe Catalyst for Change workshop report.What is left unsaid, unrecorded and unarticu-lated during this period is as telling as whatsurvives as a textual record—essentially,Taylor Yard served as a palimpsest of thearea’s history. The economics of the regionand the powerful position of the propertyowner (Southern Pacific, then Union PacificRailroad) provided serious disincentives forany redevelopment proposals that took thecommunity’s needs, dreams and potential asa true baseline, and the presumption was tokeep the existing land use and create atransit hub or an industrial park.

Despite these powerful forces in support ofrenewed industrial investment at Taylor Yard,there is evidence of community opposition touncritical and/or single-use redevelopmentwhose sole purpose would be maximising



the site’s investment potential. Thus, thesecond place the conflict manifests itself isin the workshop and planning documentswhich sought to diverge from the industry pro-posal. Objections to the notion that ‘anydevelopment is good development’ wereclearly raised and recorded. This challengesurvives in the preference for balanced,mixed-use master planning that emerged asearly as 1992 with the AIA workshop and itpersists over into the MTA-backed studies ofthe following year. These early documentsgive a glimpse of how the community beganto establish a voice vis-a-vis Taylor Yard.That it was not ineffectual is seen in LosAngeles County Public Works’ willingnessto reduce the site’s total industrial acreagefrom 189 to 100 in its 1993 Conceptual Plan.The third place we see the community nar-

rative specifically challenging the industrialnarrative during this period eventuallyproves the most potent: the community-based discourse finds a home in the environ-mental movement and, eventually, begins totake on an anti-industry rhetoric. TaylorYard’s adjacency to the Los Angeles Rivermade it something of a focal point for theriver restoration movement, led by the non-profit Friends of the Los Angeles River(FoLAR). Founded in 1986, FoLAR hadbecome, by the 1990s, a highly visible advo-cacy group. In 1994, the Los Angeles TimesMagazine featured a story on the possible rec-lamation of the Los Angeles River as a naturalwaterway through the city, portraying amythical stand-off—“Concrete vs. Nature”.In describing one of FoLAR’s river clean-upevents near Taylor Yard, the story noted thatparticipants included “the kind of peopleenvironmentalists rarely attract to meetings:working-class Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino,Latino and Anglo home-owners” and,without explicitly portraying it as such, never-theless took advantage of an already-existingenvironmental discourse.How can we characterise the community

narrative at that point in time? Basically, itwas a call for development that allowed bothcommunity use and preservation, yet it wasunclear exactly what this entailed since the

roundtables produced tentative conceptualschemes, simply relegating the nature of thisnarrative to the idea of ‘mixed-use’. Thecoalition of policy actors reflects this tentativephase in community organisation, as we seeinvolvement but not coalescence. As seenin Figure 1, the community/environmentside was less of a solid coalition than acollection of groups beginning to questionthe status quo.

Context. All this occurred in an era of pro-growth boosterism, fuelled by the boomtimes of the late 1990s. The push for econ-omic development was typified by theattempts of Los Angeles’ city government to‘streamline the development process’ and toseek ‘less red tape in LA’ (CaliforniaConstruction Link, December 2000) and tomake the “inner city . . . the next frontier foreconomic development” (former MayorRichard Riordan, Economic Vision address,March 1999). Led by Riordan, who wasmayor from 1993 to 2001, and senior adviserssuch as real estate developer Steven Soboroff,the familiar narrative pointed to privateinvestment, project construction and jobgrowth as the keys to urban revitalisation.Riordan was widely lauded—and in somecircles, roundly criticised—for his seeminglysingular focus on economic growth.

Riordan’s economic mantra—“jobs, jobs,jobs”—changed City Hall’s approach toworking with the private sector. Riordanfacilitated turnaround for construction pro-jects and development by streamliningpermit processes and instituting one-stopcenters. . . . Under Riordan, Los Angelesled the U.S. in manufacturing jobs,surpassed New York City in fashionjobs and had more multimedia companiesthan Silicon Valley and New YorkCity combined (www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/mgi/campaign/2002/cal/primary/gov/riordan/website/about.htm).

Riordan’s brand of private-sector leader-ship and his administration’s palpabledisdain for bureaucracy created an environ-ment where projects got built quickly—and



the fragility of a community counter-narrativebecame abundantly clear. Despite the publicrecord of good-faith planning processes thatsought to engage a community-based dis-course at Taylor Yard—the neighbourhoodplanning council, the urban design workshop,the MTA study, the co-operation of CountyPublic Works, the Sierra Club roundtable—the clearest sign of the strength of the indus-trial discourse persists not just in the era’stext, but most of all in the warehouses thatwere constructed at Taylor Yard in 1997. Ben-efiting from a ‘streamlined process’ and aMitigated Negative Declaration (instead of acomprehensive Environmental ImpactReport) from the Department of ToxicSubstances Control, a new Federal Expressdistribution facility and name-plating factorywere built and commenced operation on theproperty. While these developments were suc-cessful by standards of net economic growth,they were not integrated into a larger siteplan for Taylor Yard. The Federal Expressfacility sits in a conspicuous portion of theoriginal site, effectively shaping and limitingthe spatial configuration of any and all sub-sequent land uses and essentially nullifyingover five years of effort to bring a communityproject to the site.

Why industry prevailed. Why and how didindustry win out? First of all, as we pointedout, industry and development were part ofthe sub-text that had underlain this entire situ-ation. The pretext of this site was that it was anindustrial parcel and, in fact, was the formersite for Southern Pacific which, symbolically,stood for growth and the conquest of thewestern frontier. Industry was part of thehabitus of the site (Bourdieu, 1977). Theindustry narrative had the power of the sub-text, which is dominant enough that it neednot even be spoken. Moreover, we see thatthe pro-development coalition had all theelements of the classic growth machine(Logan and Molotch, 1987): the forces of thestate, developers and industry. The strengthof the pro-industry coalition is depicted inFigure 1, wherein the (hypothetical) fulcrumseparates a protean but underdeveloped

pro-community coalition from a solid, long-standing development faction.

On the other side of the fulcrum in Figure 1is the community coalition which representeda smaller, weaker set of policy actors. Thiscoalition had not yet, at this point, fully devel-oped the community narrative that it needed tosolidify its coalition. What came out of theCatalyst for Change workshops was apromising, yet amorphous resolution to seekmixed-use development which, by definition,is a hybrid vision—it simply lacked clarity.The primary reason for the existence of thecoalition was a negative exercise: counteringthe industry alternative. However, there wasno clear delineation of what the coalitionwanted, exactly. We can say with some assur-ance that industry did ‘win out’ during thistime, by simply taking stock of what didhappen: a number of industrial facilitieswere sited and built on Taylor Yard—namely, the Fedex building, the LA MediaTech Center, the plating facility and the newMTA Yard.

2.2 1999–2001: The Strength ofMetanarrative and the Pro-park Coalition

The stand-off between industry and commu-nity sharpens and gains momentum between1999 and 2001, with the industrial narrativeworking to incorporate some of the languageof community and the community narrativeworking to strengthen and articulate itsagenda. Industry, at least initially, is ridingthe crest of a booming national economy andan entrepreneurial, business-minded mayorwho had hopes of ushering in an era ofinner-city revitalisation. It is during thisperiod that we see a critical shift in the politi-cal balance (as suggested by the imaginaryfulcrum in Figure 1). In order for real gainsin coalition-building to be made, the word‘community’ is displaced by one less proneto turf wars and more prone to universalacknowledgement: the park. The strength ofthis narrative allowed the movement tocoalesce.

We trace the start of a different era of dis-course to the year 1999 for two reasons.



First, the mayor’s office became moreaggressive in claiming fast-track industrialdevelopment, but the latter could happenonly if shown to be beneficial to communityand if done with public participation. Sec-ondly, city embarked on rebuilding innercities and, in March 1999, Mayor Riordanannounced his Genesis LA programme,designed as “a bold new initiative to turbo-charge economic development in inner cityareas” (press release, 17 March, 1999).Taylor Yard was one of 15 identified siteswhere the new programme would provide aspecial funding and incentive structure tostimulate private investment in the city’smost underserved neighbourhoods. At thistime, Lennar Partners unveiled a proposalfor the 40-acre ‘centrepiece’ of the site.Surrounded by the remaining empty riverfrontparcel, the MTA rail maintenance facility, theFederal Express warehouse, the new LosAngeles Media Tech Center and SanFernando Road, the development would beplanned in collaboration with the surroundingcommunity, following the relative success ofthe Tech Center process two years earlier.Residents were found to be strongly infavour of retail and entertainment uses andthe proposed development included a 20-screen movie complex, stores and restaurants,in addition to 650,000 square feet of industrialwarehouses. Councilman Hernandez toutedthe quality-of-life benefits that would accrueto Cypress Park residents and Lennaracknowledged that, while it was a strangecombination—retail and industrial—theywere “trying to make it work”, although they“couldn’t do it without some assistance”(Los Angeles Times, 29 February, 2000). TheCity Council would eventually approve$4.37 million in public subsidies for theproject. One effect of the engagement of com-munity and environmental groups in thispublic process was to allow the pro-parkcoalition to become more cohesive and itsplatform to be more coherent.

Community coalesces. The critical politicalevent between the autumn of 1999 and theautumn of 2001 was the creation of the

Coalition for a State Park at Taylor Yard.The initial coalition members came togetherout of the organising that had been takingplace at the site for several years prior tothis time: FoLAR’s Melanie Winter, whowould found the non-profit River Project,solicited critical participation from localenvironmental groups (Heal the Bay, North-east Trees, Coalition for Clean Air, SantaMonica Mountains Conservancy), nationalenvironmental advocacy organisations(specifically, the Natural Resources defenceCouncil), local recreational groups (LABicycle Coalition, Anahuak Soccer Club)and various neighbourhood organisations,religious groups and artists’ collectives(Figure 1).These organisations were essential to the

success of the Coalition for a State Park atTaylor Yard for various reasons. The endorse-ment of Heal the Bay, with its strong mediaties and exposure, brought immediate politicalvisibility. Northeast Trees provided a moreeco-centric veneer to the movement as theyhad worked tirelessly over a decade forgreenspace and pocket parks in north-eastLos Angeles. The Coalition for Clean Airbrought its history of successful engagementwith and against Southern California industry.The Coalition for Clean Air would prove par-ticularly important in the litigation eventuallyinitiated by the park coalition over potentialCEQA violations at Taylor Yard. The SantaMonica Mountains Conservancy (SMMC)proved critical to the park coalition for tworeasons. As a state-sponsored agency withpowerful local leadership, the SMMC pro-vided a crucial link to Sacramento (the seatof state government). Symbolically, in thisaggregation of environmental groups, thecoalition is seen to have achieved somesense of integration (i.e. water, nature, airand earth).The local recreation groups who joined the

park coalition would also be crucial to itssuccess. These organisations represent ahuge and diverse constituency: bicyclists andsoccer players. The involvement of theBicycle Coalition grew out of FoLAR’sefforts to complete a bikeway along the Los



Angeles River and to sponsor regular rides inand around the river corridor to introducecyclists to this dream. These cyclists, whobecame aware of Taylor Yard and then sup-ported the coalition and the vision of a statepark at the site, were mostly adults whohailed from all over the city and the region.The soccer players, by contrast, came mainlyfrom the residential neighbourhoods of eastLos Angeles, and were mostly Latinochildren. The faces of the young members ofthe Anahuak Soccer Club would become theiconic image in the struggle of the coalitionto secure a state park at Taylor Yard. Theywould appear in the newspaper, in the gover-nor’s press materials and on the coalitionwebsite. A primary problem for parks advo-cates, from a political standpoint, is the diffi-culty of isolating and characterising a park’sbeneficiaries, or users. In the faces of theseyoung, mostly lower-income, mostly min-ority, soccer kids, and in the increasingengagement of their parents, everyone saw ablissfully simple and emotionally powerfulnarrative: children and the future of LosAngeles. For the time being, it did notmatter that the kind of park they needed wasdifferent from the kind of park that many ofthe other coalition members envisioned. Thenear-term objective was simply to claim theterritory.

Industry gives ground. At the same time ascommunity and environmental non-profitsfound a universal and dominant metanarrativein the park, the industry-development coalitionbegan to yield elements of their vision and giveground to a mixed-use type of development(inheriting some aspects of the earliercommunity discourse). In the fall of 2000,the Lennar proposal for Taylor Yard began toencounter increasing opposition. There was aserious challenge to the industrial develop-ment mantra and it presented itself in anarrative centred on urban parks. As the, bythen, receding economy caused the delay ofthe retail and movie theatre componentsof the proposed development, the Lennarproject began to look like nothing more thansome warehouses that would block a future

riverside park from the surroundingneighbourhood. By November 2000, FoLARwas appealing against the PlanningCommission’s approval of the Lennar projectto the City Council. The council upheld thePlanning Commission’s approval, but amore politically tenacious dissent appearedto be in the offing.

Essentially, the pro-development discoursethat had dominated plans for the brownfieldsite began to be challenged by a broadcoalition bringing together elements ofjustice and ecology. While environmentaljustice has traditionally been a defensivemovement by poor and minority groups tofight against environmental ‘bads’, employ-ment of the park as metanarrative allowedthe coalition to construct a narrative aroundenvironmental ‘goods’

But what is unique about Taylor Yard as astate park is that a dense population livesamidst these natural treasures in a burgeon-ing city that has some of the lowest parkspace per capita in the nation . . . Thepartnership. . . will plan together, hand inhand with the community, to create aunique and seamless urban park that willmeet a multiplicity of needs in this vibrantcity (The River Project; at http://www.theriverproject.org/tayloryard).

Groups like FoLAR and the NaturalResources Defense Council have historicallybeen perceived as conservationist elites, withlittle or no sympathy for the aims of disenfran-chised communities who were fighting to keeptoxic, locally undesirable land uses out of theirneighbourhoods. However, with park acreageper 1000 residents at less than 1 acre in theCity of Los Angeles—less than any othermajor city in the country—and less still inthe city’s eastern and southern neighbour-hoods (as opposed to the Westside), parkprovision and access were being partlyframed as a social justice issue.

Context. Some elements of the larger contextmay help us further to understand theseevents. In March 2000, California voterspassed Proposition 12, approving a bond



issue for $2.1 billion to support state andcounty parks, largely in urban areas. Thenotion of creating and maintaining greenspace in Los Angeles began to seem less far-fetched. The coalition lobbied the state touse some of the parks money to buy propertiesfor the Los Angeles River Greenway, includ-ing the 61-acre riverfront parcel at TaylorYard, between the Lennar parcel and theriver. In June, a state budget committeeapproved the funding and Governor Davisofficially committed $45 million to funding anew state park at Taylor Yard. The presstook notice: by August, another Los AngelesTimes Magazine article appeared, proclaimingthat “the River People are onto something”(20 August, 2000). When, in November, theSanta Monica Mountains Conservancyopened a new, three-quarter acre riversidepark in Montecito Heights and announcedplans for a pocket park in Compton, stateSenator Hayden deemed it a “major turningpoint”, calling the emerging Los Angelesparks movement “the first environmentalrenaissance that takes into account the innercity” (Los Angeles Times, 7 November 2000).Secondly, throughout the spring and

summer of 2000, the technology-crazednational market corrected itself dramatically.The, by now, undeniably recessionaryclimate hit California particularly hard andthe energy crisis that began to affect thestate hard in the spring of 2000 exacerbatedthe situation. Although the Los AngelesMedia Tech Center at Taylor Yard wassupposed to be “emblematic of the transform-ation” of the local urban economy throughe-commerce, the demand for office spaceand office workers was dropping off. Simi-larly, media stocks declined and SouthernCalifornia’s movie theatre industry slumpedand, as a result, Lennar Partners delayed themovie theatre component of their proposed40-acre development at Taylor Yard. Resi-dents who had been involved in the planningprocess were infuriated. “People do notlisten to the community . . . the commercial(centre) will probably never get built”bewailed a local resident to the Los AngelesBusiness Journal (20 November, 2000).

Lennar was reneging on its commitment tothe public participation process at the sametime that other, more community-friendly,options for Taylor Yard were gaining steam.Thirdly, before the state bond issue passed,

FoLAR had continued to work doggedly tofocus attention on riverfront parcels thatcould be claimed for redevelopment intopublicly accessible open space, consistentlypushing the issue onto the radar of localmedia outlets and politicians. BetweenAugust 1999 and September 2000, OccidentalCollege’s Urban and Environmental PolicyInstitute joined with FoLAR to sponsor theyear-long programme, Re-Envisioning theL.A. River—not one or two, but 40 forums,events, activities and projects to affect publicthinking about the river. It is during thisperiod that we begin to see a considerableuptick in Los Angeles River and urban parkcoverage in the local press. By 2001,mayoral candidates began incorporating theparks issue into their campaigns, includingJames Hahn, who would later win themayoral race.

Why the park prevailed. On 20 July, 2001,Los Angeles Superior Court ruled in favourof coalition members who had sued the cityover the Lennar project’s hasty approval. Itwould now require a full environmentalreview and a new city council approvalprocess. Councilman Reyes told the LosAngeles Times

What this decision does is it gives residentsa tremendous new opportunity to shape anddefine what they want for the neighbour-hood . . . it’s the opportunity to start allover again (Los Angeles Times, 21 July,2001).

Robert Garcia, an attorney for the Center forLaw in the Public Interest (CLIPI), added

They now have to consider the park alterna-tive. And they have to allow the communityfull and fair participation in demandingTaylor Yard (Los Angeles Times, 21 July,2001).



By September, Lennar Partners agreed to sellthe property to the American Land Conser-vancy, who would buy the site with statepark bond money and then turn it over to thestate.

During this period, the coalition grew insize and strength, both cause and effect of aparallel clarity in its narrative. The conceptof a park was the metanarrative aroundwhich the entire coalition would unequivo-cally organise—it was, essentially, a univer-sal platform. This narrative functionedprecisely because it remained a universal cat-egory devoid of particulars—essentially, thediametric counterpoint to the industry-development narrative. In its purest form,the metanarrative was most characterised bythe absence of development, a negativeconcept. Coalescence was physically mani-fested in the formation of the Coalition for aState Park at Taylor Yard. As importantly,the coalition gained at least partial supportfrom the state as the Department of Recreationand Parks intervened in favour of open space.The strength of this newfound coalition randeep and the shift in the balance in Figure 1reflects this realignment of power.

How does a metanarrative work? In somecases, it works by taking a possibly diverseset of narratives and formulating a new,encompassing concept that resolves and inte-grates the former (Schon and Rein, 1994). Inother cases, as we found in Taylor Yard, themetanarrative involves finding the lowestcommon denominator of the mergingnarratives—in this case, this happened to bethe absence of industry-led development. Ina sense, the park served almost like the zeropoint in a zen landscape at which bothnothing and everything are found. On theground, the metanarrative worked as a wayto funnel the resources of the mergingcoalition members. The concept may havebeen a negative one, but the material andpolitical resources brought to bear in supportof it were real and immediate. What character-ises a winning coalition? In a pluralistic situ-ation, we can understand this to be simplythat side that amasses the most resourcesand, in this game of chicken, Lennar was the

first to cash out. However, there is anotherreason behind this and it involves the clarity,strength and resilience of a narrative that cansustain a coalition through a politically plural-ist process.

2.3 2002–2004: Text Meets Context

The park movement began to encounter sometension with community aspirations between2002 and 2004. There arose friction over theexact nature of the uses of the park, alongwith some difficulties in sustaining the dialo-gues between groups. This was particularlytrue in early 2002, when these conflicts wereexacerbated when no one agency seemedquite equipped to undertake the kind of‘hybrid’ park into which the site was evolving.And while the academic contributions tostudying and promoting the Taylor Yard sitehad been almost entirely positive until thisperiod—making it the object of active learn-ing for students of political science, urbanplanning, architecture and urban design atOccidental College, UCLA, SciARC, USC,Cal State Fullerton and Harvard’s GraduateSchool of Design (GSD)—in 2002, we findmore of a mixed result from the collaborationwith outside academic ‘consultant teams’. Aspart of a studio class at Harvard, GSDembarked on a design workshop for a parkat the newly acquired Lennar site and pre-sented preliminary designs at a rather politi-cised community meeting in November2002. The design project resulted in fouralternative concepts that included gradedgrassy areas, parking areas, picnic areas, dirttrails, restrooms and native vegetation res-toration, in varying combinations andquantities . . . but no soccer fields. Mostnotably, the absence of soccer fields fromthe site plans repolarised a community thatwas only just beginning to believe that theirneeds might be heard. To some extent, thenews media may have overplayed the extentof the rift. However promising the designconcepts may have been, there is invariablyan alien character to the design project,appearing as text coming from nowhere,landing upon a context and proceeding to



colonise it—and community resisted. As wewill discuss below, it was not enough tobring a design (text) into a place, it needs tobe realised in it (context).In this period, we see a different type of dis-

course emerging from groups like the LatinoUrban Forum and the Center for Law in thePublic Interest (CLIPI), who adamantlypromote the creation of open-access, activerecreation park space throughout the down-town corridor. The tone of their pro-community advocacy diverged from that ofthe Los Angeles City Council’s Ad Hoc Com-mittee on the Los Angeles River and (some-what surprisingly) FoLAR, who had begunpromoting arts-oriented and retail develop-ment along the river corridor, a considerablymore gentrified, upper-income notion ofopen space. All of this diverged, moreover,from the consistently conservationist narrativefrom individuals at The River Project andNortheast Trees. CLIPI was quick to criticiseState Parks in early 2002 for their historicalmission of passive recreation, although thiscriticism may have been premature andunfounded. The arrangement brokered byState Parks for the development and operationof a State Park at Taylor Yard has been delib-erate, public and, so far, seemingly successful.The state did agree to lease part of the TaylorYard site to the city parks department to runsoccer fields. Moreover, the public review ofboth the environmental documents and thepark design proposals throughout 2003 waswell publicised, well attended, carefully exe-cuted and well received.The site’s history of attempts at community

involvement might have predicted just such aninconsistency. The stakeholders at TaylorYard had had no experience of legitimisedplanning processes. On the one hand, the sitebore the physical results of opaque trans-actions between interests like the City, therailroad, the MTA and private developers,perpetuating the dominance of the develop-ment narrative. On the other hand, forumslike the Community Plan Advisory Commit-tee in the early 1990s and the design charrettesand conferences organised by FoLAR in themid-to-late 1990s, which seem to have been

generally inclusive attempts to build an auth-entic community movement around the site,were regularly ignored or dismissed by gov-ernment officials. Their reports persistedonly in the abstract, in outline form thatlived in the minds of their proponents, butwhich never made it to the stages of seriousdeliberation and actualisation.As a result of this non-history of community

involvement, by November and December of2002, the differing goals of the park spaceadvocates, the conservationist agenda of theState Parks Department and others all cameto a head. The soccer enthusiasts, who hadbeen so instrumental in lending legitimateneighbourhood support to the effort to defeatthe Lennar proposal, felt betrayed. Nor wasit lost on anyone that the agency actively sup-ported baseball, running ballparks in MalibuBluffs and Will Rogers state parks in the afflu-ent westside. Robert Garcia, an attorney withthe Center for Law in the Public Interest,voiced the community’s frustration

Loose talk from state parks that theirmission is to protect natural resources isjust plain wrong, and we’ve called themon it . . . if they can provide public playingfields for wealthy white communities inthe west side of town, they had better doit for working-class Latino communitiesin Cypress Park (Los Angeles Times,22 December, 2002).

Soccer, essentially, had become a metaphorfor community spirit, civic order, the youthand cultural identity and, at this point, a coun-terpoint to the seeming cultural elitism of theconservancy movement at Taylor Yard.Further, ‘soccer’ (as opposed to ‘baseball’)carried significant meaning, especially forthe Latino residents surrounding Taylor Yard(Garcia et al., 2002), whose park use as aLos Angeles ethnic group appears to beoriented towards organised social interaction.What occurred during this latest period?

Essentially, we see that these tensions arenot well described by the classic pluralisticmodel or even that of coalition formation.The problem here was that, until this point,the metanarrative that had sustained the



coalition so effectively, came up against theneed for action. Essentially, the park had tobe realised not through an alien design ornew resolutions (text), but through engage-ment of community with the site itself(context). That is, the park was a social con-struct that needed to be enacted. This wasnot a battle between narratives anymore, butthe inadequacy of the construct, when themovement needed action. Community, tothis point, had not reclaimed the site, nothad contact with it, nor learned to use thesite in ways that it might be reintegrated intothe community. The construct of the parkhad not found a home in the daily life of thecommunity and ‘soccer’ had become a euphe-mism for all that separated community lifefrom the alien, negative concept of the park.Still, there is much that is positive going onat Taylor Yard. The establishment of newrelationships between community and policyactors has begun. Importantly, the state isnow an active proponent of the communitypark concept—on 17 September, 2003, thestate partnered with the City of Los Angelesin initiating public workshops around commu-nity planning for the site. As presently envi-sioned, the state would lease 20 acres to thecity for a community park and maintainanother 20 acres for a nature preserve.

3. Concluding Observations

The attempt to build movements around a siteplan is often described, and often carried out,as a process of coalition building. However,we are reminded that the ‘C’ in ‘CED’ is notthat of a coalition, which in the politicaleconomy literature, resembles a loose, shift-ing association of players strategicallyaligning towards a common alterative.Rather, it calls for the forging, or realisation,of a community of people with a shared, life-long stake in the process. This is an issuewhen we are reminded that, often, the pro-methean entrepreneur of the developmentand brownfield discourses may not at all beof the place. Lacking the lasting ties toplace, movements that build on these freeassociations of coalitions can fracture later

on in the process. As seen in the case ofTaylor Yard, the coalition that was strongenough to halt the encroachment of ware-houses onto the site, gathered around a meta-narrative of open space. However, thismetanarrative suffered when put through thelater, more discerning lens of action, sincehere, it required an understanding of whatkind of open space was to be envisioned.The lesson is that, while coalitions can strate-gically coalesce according to the order of theday, community vision and cohesion needto evolve long before the immediacy of siteplanning. This echoes observations in theconsensus-building literature which empha-sises the fostering of long-term relationshipsthat go beyond the formal, in an attempt toensure implementation of agreements (forexample, see Susskind, 1999).

This requires policy mechanisms for com-munity (not site) planning. To avoid the piece-meal parcelisation of a contested site, thecoalition needs to engage in communityplanning where open space issues are delib-erated across the entire community, not justat a single site. Unfortunately, community/neighbourhood plans are most often draftedin the recesses of a city planning department.It also requires policy forums wherein a trueexchange and sharing of vision can beattempted. The problem seems to be that, inthe case of Taylor Yard, those forums thatmost closely aspired to this type of exchange(such as the Neighborhood Advisory Commit-tee) were those that the institutional processleast legitimised. Furthermore, the environ-mental impact assessment process, whileinstrumental in preventing noxious land uses,has proved to be a blunt instrument withwhich to forge these community processes.There is a need for bolder, more progressive,attempts at crafting new institutions.

In another sense, the case study is a lessonon the peril of analysing a situation frommerely a narrative or constructionist point ofview. We saw that metanarrative was usefulin the process of coalition formation. Thepark was a negative concept or vacuum thatserved as a counterpoint to industry-leddevelopment. However, what was missing



was a parallel process by which text mergeswith context: this is a process that comesabout only through action and experience. Ina sense, part of the problem stems from anotion that there exists a separation of policyfrom implementation (Pressman and Wild-avsky, 1979), as if one only had to constructa text (policy) and import it into a situation(implementation). The construction of a posi-tive vision involves not just construction butaction in the form of engagement of commu-nity with the site. In a sense, community hadto find ways to act around and in the site,making the plot of land, which had longbeen estranged from community, a part oftheir daily round. It is in this engagementthat different movements and narratives areeffectively integrated.At the same time, we have to be careful not

to hypostatise or evoke ‘community’ as if itwere some holy grail or use ‘participation’as yet another metanarrative. Rather, let usunderstand it as a place-based process ofseeking out what residents aspire to or valuein their place. It is not the metanarrative ofcommunity or participation that we seek, butthe authenticity of the process. Such pro-cesses, be they community design studios orplanning boards, need to be deliberatelydesigned into the larger institutional frame-work and not simply be an ad hoc practice.What happens to the age-old dichotomy

that policy-makers are fond of positing—i.e.capital versus community? As we see in thiscase, the questions are richer than thissimple dichotomy. Posing the situation as atrade-off between values leads one to searchfor an analytic that integrates all these con-cerns (such as decision analysis). However,we suggest that no such analytic ever reallyworks and that integration occurs in otherways. First, it occurs in the process ofcoalition formation. In the deepest sense, inte-gration occurs in the lives and experience ofthe resident, which brings us back to themoral and cognitive authority of the latter. Itis for this reason that we urge the creation ofpolicy instruments that allow other policyactors (agencies, developers, non-profits)to have collaborative interactions with

residents—not just public consultationexercises, but activities dealing with co-design and mutual learning so as to producesome sharedness in vision and culture.Contrast the early attempts at communityroundtables, which involved evolutionarysteps, with the expert-driven, fast-trackstudio project. That the latter would encounterinertia was predictable—more difficult,however, is the envisioning of studioprocesses that might actually lead to asharing of culture.If there were an actual, physical realisation

of any metanarrative for Taylor Yard, it is notevident. When one looks at it, the parcelseems to be the result of a pluralistic processof give-and-take wherein the compromise sol-ution seems like a little piece of the pie foreach side: four light-industrial facilities,some preserved open space, baseball, soccer,playground and others which represent, inparcelised fashion, the pursuit of quality oflife and other norms. However, the workingout of possibly more coherent designs hasbeen, so far, elusive. There is need for moreprogressive policy instruments for developingmixed-use designs. As an example, recentbond measures (such as Prop. 47 andMeasure K) provide incentives for joint useof land (for example, schools and parks).All these provide lessons for building

coalitions between economic development,community revitalisation, environmentaljustice and other movements. It is not justabout aligning strategically but, rather, theentire coalition learning to become part ofthe place. First, this suggests that allmembers of the coalition are, in a sense, noton equal standing. There is a kind of moralauthority about being of a place—i.e. beinga resident. The resident needs, in variousways, to be given a privileged voice, since itis in their experience, more than any con-structed narrative or artist’s rendering, thattext and context come together. Secondly,this suggests that the requirement for coalitionbuilding is not just a metanarrative, butforums for interaction so that membersmight begin to share values, motivations,and even to some extent a shared culture.



This means, physically, that coalitionmembers from elsewhere need to developsome roots in the place. Communitymembers, on the other hand, need to findways to appropriate and appreciate thisreclaimed property, perhaps rediscoveringthe river next to it and bringing the riverwaysproject closer to the life of the community. Ina sense, the process of design is one that needsto be enlarged beyond the concept of a studioor workshop and there needs to be greatersupport for community co-design processes.Formal membership of community represen-tatives in city teams tasked with revising com-munity plans (and specific elements of thegeneral plan) or establishing project fieldoffices in the community is a place to start.

Coalitions, moreover, are not simply aboutgetting numbers but engendering constructiveparticipation. The Taylor Yard Coalition grewstrong not simply because they had more thantwo dozen member groups, but because theyhad the resources and political capital of keypolicy elements: community, capital, publicinterest-groups and the state. In particular,note the crucial role of the State Parks Depart-ment in shifting the balance of power—thispaved the way for permit approval, courtdecisions, design forums and eventually astate–city partnership on a shared parkconcept. The lesson, here, is the need for thecommunity coalition to seek incorporation ofelements of the state into the movement.Also, we should recognise that the stateitself is not a homogeneous entity and thateven when one agency opposes a project, itis possible to appeal to others.

All of these elements: the tenuous nature ofcoalition building and, at least in the case ofTaylor Yard, the loss of meaning that takesplace in the crafting of a metanarrative (i.e.open space being the abstraction away of thebuilt environment) and the lack of strong pro-cesses for community planning, result in adiffraction of interests that can play out phys-ically on the ground. Taylor Yard is evolvinginto a jigsaw puzzle of not necessarily coher-ent land uses, pieced out according to the dic-tates of coalition building. In the end, the casestudy speaks to the alienation of community.

The Fedex facility, sitting alone in oneportion of the site, gives a sense of an alien,colonising presence. It is symbolic of thisloss of coherence and ineluctably brings outincompatibilities in land use (i.e. dieseltrucks, kids’ soccer leagues, nature preserve).The lack of an effective public sphere playsout on the ground. Furthermore, the lack ofpower of the metanarrative to sustain auth-entic community building is reflected in thisparticular story’s denouement: to date,Taylor Yard still awaits resolution.

The search for commonality is not just aproblem of analysis. Public hearings anddesign studios are short-term forums that areclosely tied to formal analysis. At best, theseforums are suitable for identifying compro-mise solutions—for example, the jigsawpuzzle accommodation of multiple and inco-herent land uses characteristic of recentdesign concepts for Taylor Yard. But thisfalls short of the forging of a collective andshared sense of vision and purpose, somethingwhich takes time and continuous engagement.In other words, what is required is the formingof relationships, which is not guaranteed bythe political construction of a general meta-narrative. There are no formal institutionsthat allow such continued engagement.

The most salient lesson is that, in theprocess of coalition formation, communityneeds to find ways to recolonise a site andengage each other over action in and aroundit. Such action may simply mean physical pre-sence, redirecting paths that used to lead awayfrom it, or pilot activities that test the compat-ibility of the site with community needs.Reclaiming a brownfield deserves a celebra-tion of rebirth. It is not enough simply tosustain a negative concept. We might learn afinal lesson from nearby MacArthur Park,just a few miles from Taylor Yard. Asone author recalls, driving down WilshireBoulevard on a summer’s day years ago,MacArthur Park was teeming with life—popcorn vendors, churros vendors, kids onskates, muralists, kite-flyers, bike-riders andgrandmothers. It was an occasion and a stagefor community. Community, however, whennot romanticised, carries with it the potential



for occasional conflict and, so, there wasindeed some conflict around MacArthurPark—violence, drug dealing, etc. What theCity of Los Angeles did was to respond witha negative concept—literally digging intothe earth and ripping the park out of itsplace. Today, what used to be a stage onwhich community played out the drama ofdaily life, is now Lake MacArthur, a silent tes-tament to alienation.

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