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Los Angeles is our home and living laboratory. For four decades at RIOS, we’ve pioneered design that confronts complexity, believing that every urban challenge carries profound opportunities for transformation. The recent catastrophic fires aren’t just a crisis, but a critical inflection point for reimagining resilience.
Our landscape practice, led by Katherine Harvey, has always understood that urban design is an act of collective imagination. This moment demands we move beyond survival to radical reinvention—a challenge that resonates deeply with our founding ethos of designing for dynamic, adaptive futures.
Katherine’s background in landscape architecture, academic research, and residency in downtown Los Angeles provide her with valuable insights into the city’s future. She offers thoughtful perspectives during this moment of sorrow and hope for the city we cherish.
The following reflection from Katherine emerges from our commitment to Los Angeles, a city we’ve helped shape and continue to believe in, even—and especially—in its most vulnerable moments.
Los Angeles 2025
This year arrived with unimaginable devastation for the Los Angeles region. The catastrophic fires present a test for how we will address our city’s future and the generational challenges and opportunities we have before us. As we move from shock to recovery, the debates have already begun on how, what, and where we rebuild. Immediate momentum addresses the human impacts, which will continue to unfold in the coming months. How we sustain that momentum and act deliberately toward our future is more uncertain. This recovery will be a massive work of city remaking and reenvisioning. This unanticipated moment grants us a window to address Los Angeles’s past and present challenges as we confront our global climate reality.
Territory, governance, and collective recovery
Most major acts of city-making have denied the complexity of existing communities, history, or environment in the service of narrow motivations and achievements. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has historically been plagued by the incremental and individual motivations of capital, resulting in a dispersed and decentralized city. Can we learn from these historic dichotomies of singular grand plans versus incremental individualism and define a collective recovery urbanism? One where we build back a city that reduces further harm to our residents and environment. One where we do not accept the inevitable results of extreme weather ending in disaster, but instead lay out ambitious plans for adaptation to build back more brilliantly.
Many have speculated that our distributed jurisdictions and centers of power have held us back from a collective vision for the basin. Even the city’s Mayor Bass has acknowledged our lack of comprehensive planning and “fragmented governance” as recently as October, when tackling street improvement initiatives.
Could this event induce enhanced cooperation between disparate places: Altadena and Pacific Palisades, county and city, mayor and supervisor? With the appointment of a chief recovery officer for the city, Steve Soboroff, we now wait to hear if the county and city will find a method for shared cooperation. What may be needed is an agency that collates across these governances to address the kindred struggles and the unique geographies. Despite our snarled infrastructure, our LA Metro public transit system has been a remarkable model for what is possible when we remove the friction of inter-urban territories and support cross-agency planning.
Design a collective vision
There are many who will continue to say these events were inevitable, in the face of a warming climate. Yet we have a chance to change the next inevitability. As a landscape architect and creative director at a global design collective I am part of a design community where envisioning the future is integral to our daily work.
This event has opened questions for us that would have gone unasked without this disaster. Can we rebuild our neighborhoods as places that will evolve from serving our immediate resheltering needs to more robust buildings? Can these new buildings be fire-hardened and passively coexist with the environment? Can we address equity and ongoing displacement more aggressively, in what will no doubt be an aggravated housing and affordability crisis? Can we amplify and restore the wildland urban interface and bring back our former basin ecologies, grasslands, and coastal sage scrub, as ecological buffers from intense weather?
A wealth of ideas, research, and plans have been brought together under the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. Yet this work needs to become actionable and translated to our region and the urban context of these fires. For the design community, the translation of this expertise to scalable solutions for communities, neighborhoods, and buildings will be essential next steps.
Allowing ourselves to dream in this moment of collective pain and trauma is imagining ourselves in a place beyond catastrophe. If we can do that, we can sort out the steps to get there. It will require invention and retooling, no different than what has already been initiated in hundreds of California’s climate initiatives to mitigate our projected climate future. It is the work our generation needs to do anyway. This is our moment to decide whether we will play a major role in defining that trajectory towards reduced vulnerability and increased resilience for future extreme weather as a city and region.
Pacing ourselves
It will not be an easy time to choose a collective vision over the instrumentality of executive orders or the facility of individual decisions. As of writing this on January 28 it is clear there will be a larger resistance to such a path from both a dismissive federal perspective and those that see the climate crisis as a fate we cannot change. Yet there are many more voices, from community members to experts, that will contribute to these questions and optimism about our future if we commit to this generational shift in city-making.
Institutions, universities, community members, and storytellers will need to be engaged and empowered to move us imaginatively toward our future. Ultimately, a collective vision will need an engaged citizenry to imagine a different future that is invested in enhancing our regions’ livability and vitality. In this process we will revive the waning histories of these places, in combination with the nascent futures that were just beginning and are now emerging after this event. If we choose this as a generation, then the process we design will be as vital as the outcome.
Jessamyn Davis is co-CEO and Katherine Harvey is creative director and landscape architect at RIOS.
