GCDN Annual Convening – Los Angeles 2025

Successful placemaking involves many factors – community involvement, access, design and safety, to name just a few – but perhaps the most critical element lies in the stories we tell about places, their authenticity, their appeal, and their congruence with physical reality. Humans search for meaning, and we experience cities through the lens of the narratives attached to them.

Nowhere is this more evident – or more complex – than in Los Angeles. LA exists in the interstices of overlapping and competing narratives. The city of noir and Hollywood mythmaking, of extremes in wealth and poverty, multiple cultures and diasporas, perpetual motion and reinvention… it resists easy definition. For many – whether American or from overseas – it remains the most elusive U.S. city to understand. Unlike the structured grids of New York and Chicago, or the civic core of San Francisco, Los Angeles is a place of dispersion, layering, and constant reimagination.

What, then, is ‘place’ in LA, let alone placemaking? What role do cultural anchors like The Music Center play in grounding this city’s identity? How can the arts help define and strengthen cohesion in a city that is, by its very nature, decentered? And, in this era of polarization, how does cultural policy reflect this? This session explores placemaking in a city that defies the concept – and in a moment when the very idea of shared narratives is unraveling.