Local Concrete

A landscaper who hates lawns and wants to make LA more sustainable. You can hear it in her voice, the frustration with projects that have huge lawns and no local materials.

Local concrete has to make you laugh. Can you even have local concrete? Of course you can, by comparison with marble imported from Italy, and compared with LA’s riot of non-native species: even the famous palm tree is not from LA, but imported from more tropical places. But LA is also famous for being a concrete wasteland: we famously filled our one natural river with concrete to control flooding and now, as Jenny Price famously said, we water the pacific with our rain as a result.

Concrete is the very antithesis of nature, of living things, and yet it is the most central material in an urban environment. So central, and so ubiquitous that it creates its own weather.

I always try to use local concrete.