This interview with Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne was conducted by Boom editor Jon Christensen and Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture, urban design, and urban planning, and director of cityLAB at UCLA. Hawthrone is charged with covering new developments in architecture and urban design in Los Angeles and the United States, and thinking and writing about new buildings and how they might-or might not-change the way we live. More broadly, his subject is not just buildings, but the city itself, and how we understand it and ourselves. Hawthorne calls his big project “The Third Los Angeles.” Like no other critic in the land, Hawthorne has grasped the challenge of telling the story of a great city-its past, present, and future-while playing a prominent role in shaping the city's vision of itself, intellectually, creatively, and pragmatically. Hawthorne discusses the evolution of public and private space in Los Angeles, competing plans for the future of the Los Angeles River, freeways, housing, climate, and much more.

Maps have power. They can make the illegible legible and the invisible visible. They can make the obvious even more obvious and the impossible seem possible, as a map published in 2012 did when it mapped the routes of the private buses that ferry techies between their homes in San Francisco and their jobs in Silicon Valley. It shows that tech companies, in their libertarian, do-it-yourself way, have solved the transit problem for themselves, not waiting for a potentially time-consuming, representative political process to do the job. That, the author argues, shows a failure of belief in the city as a commons, a city that supports existing residents and new arrivals by integrating them into the collective spaces and systems perhaps best represented by public transportation. That there are entire networks of free transit options available to only some of the city’s wealthiest residents cannot help but create tension, especially against a background of skyrocketing housing costs and a wave of no-fault evictions.