Christian Arnsperger: Drawing ideas from Switzerland’s “horizontal metropolis”- Wed., July 19, 2017 at L.A. Eco-Village

Veggie Potluck and talk on L.A.’s perma-circular future:

According to Dr. Christian Arnsperger, Los Angeles has never been just an unsustainable, sprawling,

Christian Arnsperger

resource-guzzling behemoth. At least since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s, there has been a small, persistent, and varied underground that wants “another LA.” The city has been variously (re)imagined by Olmsted and Bartholomew as a garden-and-park idyll, by Richard Register as a network of ecocities, and by Paul Glover as a network of ecovillages. People have puzzled about how to make Los Angeles more regenerative, more bioregional, and more human-scale. In his talk, Christian Arnsperger  will reflect on this “other LA” as a sympathetic outsider, looking at our city from the Swiss vantage point, drawing elements from his ongoing collaboration with Swiss and Italian urbanists. Switzerland can be viewed as a “horizontal metropolis” — a city-territory of 8 million inhabitants with a very specific way of weaving together the urban and the rural, the cutting edge and the traditional, the dense and the diffuse — a time-tested recipe against sprawl and wastefulness but also against destructive densification and concentration. There may be very interesting things to learn about a sustainable, “perma-.circular” future from a comparison between the LA metropolitan area and the Swiss horizontal metropolis.

***********************************
About Christian Arnsperger
An economist by training, I’m a professor at the University of Lausanne. My affiliation is with the Faculty of Geoscience and Environment, and I am a member of the Institute for Geography and Sustainability. We are a multidisciplinary institute focused mainly on the human- and social-science aspects of environmental issues.  My own teaching and research revolve around Sustainability and Economic Anthropology. That’s what my chair at the University of Lausanne is called. Yes, really …

read more about Christian and see his blog here.

Christian visited L.A. Eco-Village
last year to a full house.  Please come join us again this year.


EVENT DETAILS:
Reservations please:  crsp@igc.org or 213/738-1254

Date & Time: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 
6 to 7:30pm:  Veggie potluck.
Please bring your own non-throwaway eating ware and make this a zero waste event

7:30 to 10pm: Talk, Q&A, discussion

Fee:  $5 to $15 sliding scale at the door
If paying by check, make checks out to “CRSP”

Location: 
Los Angeles Eco-Village
117 Bimini Pl – Lobby and courtyard
Los Angeles 90004

 

 

 

 

Scroll to top