'Latino Urbanism' influences a Los Angeles in flux

Work crews in recent weeks have made major design changes to Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, widening the sidewalks and adding planters, chairs and round cafe tables with bright-red umbrellas where rows of parked cars used to be. The upgrades aim to make the street as welcoming to pedestrians as drivers.

They're also superfluous: the urban-planning equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle. Broadway has for several decades been among the most popular and vital walking streets in Southern California, one typically crowded with Latino shoppers, including many recent immigrants from Mexico   ...

The redesign suggests just how many politicians and policymakers in Southern California are finding inspiration in Latino Urbanism, a term that describes the range of ad hoc ways in which immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America have remade pockets of American cities to feel at least a little like the places they left behind ...

In a neighborhood remade by Latino immigrants, signs are mostly hand-painted, whether they announce an accountant's office or a nail salon. The walls of grocery stores are covered with pictogram-like drawings of milk jugs and boxes of detergent.

Fences are less barriers than thresholds (or impromptu storefronts). Parks are crowded on the weekends, but so are front yards, as birthday parties and other celebrations spill toward the street ...

Carmen Quintero, who lives with her extended family in a squat, tan bungalow with peeling white trim along Compton Avenue, has five grandchildren. Their parents work, and a daycare bill times five is daunting. A couple of years ago, to make extra money, she started hanging T-shirts on a chain-link fence along the sidewalk and selling them to people walking by.

Today the house and yard are barely visible behind the canary-yellow soccer jerseys and the girls' blouses, the toys and the bicycles and the giant, listing piles of old CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes. The yard, the front porch and the sidewalk have all been put to use as rooms in Quintero's open-air five-and-dime ...

Councilman Jose Huizar, who was born in a village in Zacatecas, Mexico, and came with his parents to Los Angeles at age 3, has also advanced changes to the design of streets and public spaces — including on Broadway. He has pushed to legalize street vending and helped reverse the city's mural-painting ban.

"In Mexico, every town has the local plaza, the town square," said Huizar, who has a master's degree in public affairs and urban planning from Princeton ...

Even as he worked to dramatically extend public transit, he backed a plan to turn Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way streets ...