More learning from Los Angeles -- "L.A. Renews Its Libraries as Modern Civic Centers"

‘NEUTRAL TERRITORY’: Eric Johnson, 17, a senior at Jefferson High School, helps Andrew Hernandez, 5, with his reading at the new Ascot branch library. (Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times). As part of a $317-million program, the Los Angeles Public Library is adding 47 branches, bringing the city's total to 72. The new ones are designed to be large, high-tech and inviting. Many new branches, designed with input from the neighborhoods they serve, have become landmarks and have helped to strengthen the sense of community in Los Angeles.

In view of all my post-Citizen Summit writing about not getting the point about planning, that making great places is economic development, comes this article from the Los Angeles Times, "L.A. Renews Its Libraries as Modern Civic Center--More than just housing books, the new and refurbished branches bring people together." From the article:

On a dusty, hot summer afternoon in South Los Angeles, 13-year-old Joseph Robinson and 9-year-old Franklin Flores are in a favorite place — huddled in front of a computer terminal playing RuneScape together. For the boys, one black and one Latino, the new Ascot branch library at Florence Avenue and Main Street is their daily meeting place, a refuge from a gritty neighborhood where interracial tensions recently sparked violence at a local high school.

In the Pico-Union neighborhood, older residents go to their new branch for a library-sponsored Coffee and Conversation, which brings together strangers to talk about Iraq, immigration or whatever topic may be in the news. And in Chinatown, dozens of immigrants flock to the 2 1/2 -year-old branch for a weekly citizenship class at which, between gossiping with friends, the students prepare for the test by shouting out answers to questions about the Constitution, communism and the Supreme Court.

This is the new face of public libraries in Los Angeles — versatile and thoroughly modern places that have fueled a 70% explosion in library usage over the last decade. It was not always so. For years, cramped and crumbling branches testified to a civic purpose sapped by riots, tax revolts and urban decay.

Today, Los Angeles is nearing the completion of a $317-million modernization program to build and renovate 63 branch libraries, finishing them on time and under budget. Librarians from as far away as Singapore and Sweden have come to see what the city has accomplished.

How Los Angeles rebuilt its libraries is more than just a public works success story.In an atomized city where social isolation is almost a civic credo, the rebirth of branch libraries appears to reflect another side of the metropolis, both more prosaic and more humane. Libraries are filling a demand for community. These public institutions are encouraging ties between immigrants and their new city as well as helping to bridge divisions of class and race with the simple act of bringing Angelenos together in safe, beautiful spaces.
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Libraries, Schools, Parks and other public assets need to be considered not merely from the often too myopic perspective of the agency and what they perceive as "their" property portfolio, but as the building blocks of great neighborhoods and a great city, as amenities for neighborhoods, and as the social institutions that bring people together and help create true community.