By Tom Angotti
Wildfires have destroyed parts of the Los Angeles area. Progressive planners need to challenge the dominant narratives that blame extreme weather and weak zoning regulations for the damage done. Instead of changing the zoning, we need to learn from the failed policies that promoted upscale housing development in fragile ecosystems and the official neglect of proven Indigenous custodial practices.
Many planners are now calling for stricter land use controls, new technology, and more chemical drops from the air, but the problem goes much deeper. Zoning has been an historic failure because it promotes the use of land as a commodity; it is shaped to follow and buttress the for-profit housing market. It is hardly surprising that zoning is rarely challenged as the preferred solution, while at the same time Indigenous practices that for millennia have protected fragile land as sacred continue to be shunted aside.
This catastrophic situation was described, analyzed, and predicted in the brilliant book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis (NY: Vintage, 1999). Davis showed how local governments in California, unhindered and encouraged by the state, promoted development of exclusive high-end residential areas in California’s coastal regions – areas that were historically vulnerable to seasonal wildfires. They erroneously claimed that low-density housing in the hills and along the coast was not only the “highest and best use of land” but necessary to protect the land. Local and state governments ignored calls to limit new development in precarious areas and instead endorsed the developers’ claims that traditional fire prevention and fire fighting methods (including, absurdly, taming wildfires by using the water from swimming pools and, outrageously, employing prison labor) would be sufficient.
The loudest voices among the planners accepted the phony theory that low-density (luxury) settlement of vulnerable areas created the best opportunities to preserve them. Now we have proof that these policies did just the opposite. Instead of using zoning to protect the land they used it to enrich developers and create super-elite, sprawled ex-urban enclaves. This should not be surprising; it’s a replay of the nation’s urban policies after World War II. Also, with typical colonial blindness, government did not shrink in shame when they assigned prisoners and low-wage workers the dangerous tasks of fire-fighting.
The colonial hubris runs deep. For centuries, Native people staved off fires by practicing controlled burning. Then colonizers drew down the water tables to promote industrial agriculture and urban real estate development, and they let cars and trucks connect the sprawled urban peripheries. They told us that zoning for more low-density development, coupled with new technologies and chemical sprays, would lower the fire risk. In true settler-colonial fashion, they continued to lie and ignore the ancient traditions of sustainable management by Native Americans.
The planners and their political angels promoted exclusionary zoning, sprawl and suburban disasters. And they are doing it again.
Tom Angotti is Professor Emeritus at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Visiting Professor at Parsons/The New School, and an editor at Progressive City.