Residents -- Not Planners -- Create The City Center In L.A.

"This spring's massive immigration-rights protests in Los Angeles drew more than half a million white-shirted, chanting marchers downtown March 25 and packed another several hundred thousand along Wilshire Boulevard on May 1."

"The marches raise compelling and so far mostly overlooked questions about public space and the role the downtown core will play in a city that is increasingly dense and increasingly Latino. In that sense, they qualify as the biggest architecture and urban-planning story to hit Southern California this year. One way to understand them, in fact, is not as an anomalous outburst of civic anger or energy but as a particularly clear message about how the relationship between Angelenos and the physical spaces of their city is changing as L.A. evolves, however fitfully, from a private metropolis to a collective one."