Undevelopment One

Collaboration (partners are signed up and ready to hit the ground running!)

The Metabolic Studio transforms nutrients into energy, actions, and objects that nurture life.

Lauren Bon’s Metabolic Studio and the Harrison Studio, Center for the Force Majeure, propose to renew downtown LA’s historic flood plain. While we don’t support the LA River haphazardly flooding, carefully constructed basins allowing saturation into unused industrial lots could create a flood plain corridor that runs along the LA River and makes use of the network of storm drains receiving water from the mountains and the hills around Northeast LA. Eemian age plants, from roughly 115,000 years ago would be introduced to prepare for a climate change, creating a prophetic ecology along the river corridor. Climatologists predict that the climate experienced during that time is close to that which we will be facing in 50-100 years

Undevelopment One will be the pilot project for a hoped for network of Undevelopments that could, over time, create a paleo-botanical eavesment by redefining our historic flood plain. We have counted around 25 storm drains and about as many potential brownfields that are candidates for Undevelopment. By Undeveloping we mean pounding out unused tarmac and concrete and adding water and letting the land regain agency. Lauren Bon and The Metabolic Studio are about to break ground on a waterwheel which will bring LA river water back up to the city. When construction begins in early 2015, the Harrison studio is proposing that cores be drilled down to the Eemian, 115,000 years ago, in order to conduct the appropriate pollen analysis to locate the species that had once lived there. Undevelopment One would take one of several possible sites along the edge of the LA River, reconnect it to LA River water, and establish on that site a greenhouse inside which potential future plant ensembles would be grown and released in the larger environment, in small experimental sites over the years as the weather warms. Our hope is that inspired cooperation among land owners and agencies will allow remediation without necessarily owning and controlling the land. We hope to educate through Undevelopment One that Another City Is Possible, one in which we are connected by a common goal to see LA survive into the future with a limited water supply and warming temperatures and see water as a human right and a social commodity. We see this as a kind of utilitarian prophecy that is at the same time a botanical adventure.

The LA River corridor and the broader Los Angeles watershed and community

Undevelopment will provide innovative solutions to the environmental toxicity we have inherited from the 20th century industrial landscape.

Success will be measured by resource efficiency, community engagement and replicability on other sites and regions.

The Harrison Studio has been looking at the Arroyo Seco’s repurposing since the mid 1980’s. First proposing a transformation of the lower Arroyo, then arguing for the restoration of the Arroyo Seco River and thereafter, redesigning the Devil’s Gate debris basin, which later became Hahamonga Watershed Park in Pasadena. Lauren Bon and The Metabolic Studio transformed a train yard into a cornfield in 2005. Notacornfield brought the Los Angeles State Historic Park into public consciousness. Ninety miles of irrigation stripping were used to irrigate what used to be a cornfield irritated by the unbridled LA River. Since that time they have been working to reconnect land and water in Los Angeles and in the Owens Valley where much of our urban water is sourced. Bending the River Back Into the City, a three part metabolic sculpture, will make a permanent reconnection possible. The studio is interested in extending the capacity of the waterwheel to include a large distribution network. Together the Harrison Studio and The Metabolic Studio see Council District One in Los Angeles as a political area that can become a role model in how water can be seen as social capital capable of supporting community and creating the capacity for environmental renewal.

We have already identified the necessary permits, mapped potential implementation sites, and have confirmed the partnerships needed to accomplish the pilot Undevelopment project.

Land use restrictions and permit delays could possibly create timeline push backs for the pilot project. We will and have already begun to engage all the appropriate stakeholders, agencies, and channels to create an efficient and timely path to completion and success to avoid such delays.