LINEARIZED LOS ANGELES

The linearized California project connects the metropoles Los Angeles and Las Vegas in a straight line. Over-densification has been a major concern for urban planning and city design projects over the last

century. The produced urban sprawl within the U.S. West Coast has become a global phenomenon, known as “culture of congestion”, an everlasting challenge for architects. The Los Angeles population rose from about one hundred thousand inhabitants in 1900 to four million in 2016. Similarly, Las Vegas has faced an enormous rise in population. We speculate that over the next 60 years, these cities will extend into a continuous urban sprawl of an unprecedented proportion. Besides an aggravating housing crisis, infrastructural short-comings and full eradication of natural land will be inevitable consequences. Aquifers in the coastal basin and the central valley are shrinking due to over drafting and continuing drought, affecting rural owners dramatically which will result in a statewide water shortage. The proposed scenario superimposes a new city, abandoning the existing, opposing current trends to restore the traditional city. This intends to eradicate the urban sprawl in what opposes the urban transect by keeping only the center, which will be extruded to both cities. It is bound by a unified underlying infrastructural core, offering mass transportation and sequestered water from the Pacific while freeing up the surrounding land to be used for agriculture. In terms of aesthetics, the proposal exhibits a stylistic gradient of both cities, retaining their inherent cultural identity while accelerating these typologies to their

extreme.