The half-mile length of the Hollywood Freeway that skirts the northern edge of Los Angeles’s downtown is the focus of EDAW’s 2008 Intern Program. Built in a trench in the 1950s, the Freeway disconnects the city’s historic core from its expanding, present-day hubs of activity and development. Program participants will craft a visionary urban design solution to cap the freeway and reconnect the origins of the city at El Pueblo, Union Station, and Chinatown, north of the Freeway, with the civic, cultural, and financial cores of modern Los Angeles on the south – Civic Centre, Bunker Hill, the retail corridor of Broadway, and the numerous historic districts that quilt the fabric of downtown.

The cap will provide an opportunity to create an iconic urban park in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Great parks - Central Park in New York being the most visible and successful – have historically created immeasurable value for the cities they serve. More recently, parks like Millennium Park in Chicago have recast the relationship between urban infrastructure and the public realm and become iconic representatives of their cities. The cap park in Los Angeles will likewise focus on re-visioning the existing infrastructure that supports and encircles the core of the city —freeways, channelized rivers, streets, and public transit. Those that stand to benefit most are the densely urbanized and park-poor communities of inner Los Angeles. The interns will engage stakeholders from the adjacent, predominantly Hispanic and Asian communities of Chinatown, Angelino Heights, El Pueblo, Boyle Heights, Civic Center, and Little Tokyo, which together are home to over 30,000 residents (almost a third of whom live in poverty).

The program will develop solutions that can be applied to both specific opportunities, as well as serve as prototypical approaches to developing new sustainable infrastructure. Examples include improved viability for mixed-use development at or near Union Station; greater accessibility and potential redevelopment of the Los Angeles Mall and the City Hall East Annex; improved urban grid and transit connections leading to visible redevelopment in Chinatown; renewed impetus for the development of the Latino Cultural Center at El Pueblo; and signature urban boulevards that will become models for developing great streets throughout Los Angeles. Numerous private redevelopments already underway in the vicinity are likely to become more attractive as the cap takes shape in the public mind and, ultimately, as a physical feature in the urban landscape.

The program will place participants in an intensive learning environment challenged by international approaches to sustainable city-making to produce an outcome which galvanizes the energies of young professionals, stakeholders, and city agencies. The ideas produced can then underpin the review and rewriting of the City's own planning approaches and documents. The challenge for program participants is to propose a globally original and locally relevant urban design solution that blends a compelling vision with rigorous pragmatism.