Freakish Grounds: an urban botanical collection

SMO+ park is a botanical collection for a hotter LA, it will not be a conventional urban green space. It is not a tabula rasa on which we will superimpose a design object. It will need to be a resourceful park, funded in spurts, perhaps with long gaps. Its unity will be derived not from a master plan, but from a method of preparing the ground. SMO+ will not adhere to conventional formulas that punctuate Los Angeles’s urban fabric with patches of delusive green. The southern California heat produced leisureland, but the old paradigm must go the way of Santa Monica’s elderly palms. Aridity and urban heat will need to produce a landscape that is as tactical and savvy as the desert ecosystem. SMO+ park will demonstrate how Santa Monica can live well with less. It is a place where Los Angeles abandons the bucolic aspirations of the past, embraces the freakish reality of the present, and the prepares for the urban ecology of the future. The cosmopolitan urban ecology is presented as an outcome of technological advancement in dialogue with natural process. Here, Angelinos encounter the hyper-artificial environment stripped bare. In this park, contradictions are not resolved, but emphasized. SMO+ is a garden of the freakish. Cloistered native remnants are invaded. Here, ornamental species facilitate ecological process, native species are displayed as botanical specimens, and non-native volunteers are welcomed as guests. The urban park of the future must offer an alternative to the narrative of loss. It cannot placate the public with a stage set of a lost landscape, or one that never existed. It must embrace the identity of the urban desert, assembled ad hoc.