South Park Should Be The Social District

In 2000, Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”. This groundbreaking work explores how Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another and the consequences of this decline for civic engagement, democracy, and community well-being. Putnam identifies several factors contributing to this trend, including increased mobility and urban sprawl, which disrupt stable communities, and television and digital media, which encourage passive consumption over active participation.

“Bowling Alone” was written a decade before Twitter, Tik-Tok, and Instagram became a part of our lives. I first discovered Putnam’s work in 2005 while working to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. What I realized then, was that you couldn’t rebuild roads and levees, an entire school system and criminal justice system, or the economic infrastructure to support an entire city, without first rebuilding community. And you could not equitably rebuild a hollowed-out city with a quarter million residents displaced, without sufficient social capital, even if financial and political capital were abundant.

My work continued from New Orleans, to Dallas, and to Vancouver, before I arrived two years ago in South Park. There are many similarities between population loss in post-pandemic downtowns and the dramatic depopulation of New Orleans nearly 20 years ago. Our disconnection has been accelerated since Putnam’s work by our reliance on social media and a global pandemic. Our isolation into silos has increased our proclivity to be manipulated and therefor distrustful and it influences how we view not just our world, but the hope we have for our neighborhoods.

The antidote to this is not millions of new users signing up for Threads or BlueSky, but people living in densely populated and diverse communities leaning into these spaces being real places for both intimate and communal connection. South Park needs to become the Social District in response to the insidiousness of our more recent trends of creating artificial and virtual realities. It’s a place where an immersive experience means attending a conversation with a musical icon at the GRAMMY Museum or getting your hands dirty with a friend at Throw Clay.

South Park should be the Social District. We are the epicenter of sports and entertainment at L.A. LIVE for millions of visitors who share a common interest in music or teams. And we spend Saturdays strolling the neighborhood farmers’ market, where likes and shares are purchases and recommendations, not clicks and bookmarks. The dopamine hit of making a new friend at yoga in the South Park Commons, replaces the addition of your 10,000th follower you’re likely to never really know. Being an influencer in the Social District means you take social capital and leverage it for community gain, not personal adulation.

Humans are social beings, and it is our basic instinct to transform parking lots and empty retail spaces into parks, public spaces, restaurants, bars, cafes, and galleries where we can connect and explore. When we have been at our best, we’ve forged genuine relationships that have produced enough social change to reinvent our world, and with a fraction of that investment can almost certainly change a neighborhood.

A rally in solidarity with our neighbors might take place in the public square, but the grass roots organizing probably took place in a café. A modern residential tower might replace a parking lot and house hundreds, but the deal was negotiated over many lunches and dinners at neighborhood restaurants. We can celebrate a World Series in the streets together peacefully in a place we collectively respect.

South Park will define what it means to be a Social District, and in a society, that’s trending to be predominately online and augmented, I look forward to our work together to build a place that lives up to the aspirations of a tangible and authentic community. I’ve chosen to raise my family in a place that can be intimate one moment, and expansive the next. We’re working on a new park for the Social District, and the thing I look forward to most is telling kids to get offline and go touch grass, and there being clean and safe grass for them to stand in, in the Social District.