The Greenways Plan is ‘opportunistic,’ proposing a new set of urban scale organizing principles based on ‘found’ features already present in the environment. Because of the rapid post-war growth of the Los Angeles region, particularly in single family detached homes and commercial districts, public parks and regionally connected public spaces were all too often neglected in favor of the privatization of land. Unlike some older American cities, Los Angeles never had a city beautiful or garden city movement foregrounding grand open spaces and parks as part of the city’s infrastructure. Consequently, Los Angeles devotes approximately 4% of its surface area to public parks, unlike New York City where it is 17%, and Boston and San Francisco where it is 9%.

The Greenways Plan uses residual and underutilized regional land resources—abandoned alignments of the old Red Car rail system, power line rights-of-way, and river and flood control channels, the region’s ‘grid’ road system—historical land resources largely forgotten in planning for the city’s growth. The Greenways Plan links these land resources in a network more than 400 miles long, through new bikeways, jogging trails, and parks. It connects existing town centers, schools, libraries, post offices, and senior centers and where greenways intersect new transit lines provides sites for urban infill and intensification. Aspects of the Greenways Plan were adopted and incorporated into the official City of Los Angeles General Plan Framework; and Metro’s joint development planning projects have begun to yield public open space benefits anticipated by the plan.