Tag: Christian Arnsperger

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

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.

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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.