In Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” an explorer describes places shaped entirely by memory—cities that exist as much in recollection as reality. Santa Monica is becoming Calvino’s inverse: a visible city that cannot remember itself, when physical presence masks memorial absence.
We stand at civilization’s edge—not geographic but temporal. When a city loses its collective memory, what remains isn’t a city but real estate. The reckoning isn’t coming. It’s here.
The Living Archive Burns
Cities function as humanity’s most complex memory devices. As philosopher Kevin Lynch observed, urban environments become “legible” through mental maps residents form over time. These maps layer personal experience onto collective form—the bench where you met your spouse, the corner where your child learned to bike, the shop your grandmother frequented.
But what happens when those physical anchors disappear faster than memory can adapt?
Santa Monica’s transformation represents catastrophic memory loss at urban scale. Every demolished bungalow contained decades of family stories that even the casual observer can sense. Every shadow-casting tower erases solar rhythms evolved over centuries. Every exiled family leaves with irreplaceable knowledge of place.
We’re not adding chapters to our urban story—we’re ripping out pages until the narrative becomes incomprehensible.
What Dies When Memory Dies
The practical costs are quantifiable: property values falling in shadow zones, small businesses closing without family customers, infrastructure failing under unplanned loads. But the memorial costs transcend spreadsheets.
When Santa Monicans cannot form stable mental maps of their neighborhood because it changes too rapidly, they lose what psychologists call “place attachment”—the deep security that comes from environmental familiarity. A city without collective memory becomes psychologically uninhabitable even when physically occupied.
The False Choice
Defenders of erasure present a false binary: embrace maximum density or accept stagnation. This ignores successful cities worldwide that honor memory while evolving. Copenhagen preserves human scale while adding gentle density. Barcelona’s superblocks reclaim streets for community memory-making. Paris maintains its fundamental structure while accommodating millions. These cities understand what architectural theorist Aldo Rossi taught: urban artifacts—the persistent forms giving cities structure—must be preserved and reinterpreted, not erased.
Although the state demands we add truly affordable housing, it’s only achievable by national and state-level resolutions for income and tax issues. The question is, will the demand favor investment in transient studios, ensuring cultural collapse, or will it favor family-sized homes that allow our community to endure.
Santa Monica can add housing to preserve collective memory through:
- Adaptive reuse of existing structures, maintaining a sense of continuity while enabling new uses.
- Requiring family-sized units that enable intergenerational presence.
- Preserving view corridors and solar access that orient residents in space and time. Maintaining street walls and rhythms that make neighborhoods recognizable to themselves.
These aren’t radical propositions. They’re basic principles of city-building practiced where cities are understood as cultural repositories, not mere economic zones.
The Alternative Future
Suppose that instead of allowing studio complexes fostering transience, we mandate housing that enables putting down roots. A city of transient studios has a transient economy.
This lacks the stable customer base for the small businesses that define our character. It sees massive infrastructure costs—new schools, expanded sewer and water lines—to support unplanned density, while existing infrastructure in family neighborhoods is underutilized as those very families are priced out. Preserving our community isn’t just a cultural act; it’s a fiscally responsible one.
Imagine Santa Monica choosing memory over amnesia:
- That our 1.2 million square feet of vacant office space is replaced with adaptive reuse housing.
- That we acquire existing apartments and deed-restrict them for permanent affordability.
- That instead of shadow-casting walls, we build permeable neighborhoods that preserve solar access and ocean breezes.
This isn’t nostalgia—it’s survival. Cities that cannot remember themselves cannot reproduce themselves culturally. They become non-places, interchangeable nodes in global capital flow rather than unique human habitats.
November 2026: Memory or Oblivion
Three council seats will be contested in November 2026. This election represents possibly our last opportunity to choose between a city that remembers and one that forgets.
But victory requires understanding what’s at stake. We’re not choosing between growth and preservation but between continuity and erasure, between rootedness and displacement, between city as home and city as commodity.
By law, candidates must refuse all campaign contributions from developers with active projects before the city. They must pledge to create a robust, independent ethics commission to review all potential conflicts of interest. We must break the financial pipeline that turns our city into a commodity.
The Deeper Crime
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that the public realm exists to ensure “the reality of the world and ourselves.” When that realm becomes illegible through constant transformation, we lose not just places but the ability to verify our own existence through stable surroundings.
Santa Monica’s erasure represents this deeper crime: the theft of collective capacity to remember, to recognize, to belong. We’re not just losing buildings—we’re losing the physical substrate that enables community consciousness.
This erosion is not accidental and is sanctioned by the city itself in the name of profit. When our leaders pass an ordinance to allow massive digital billboards to be bolted onto the facades of our landmarked buildings on the Promenade, they are literally covering our history with commercialism. They are choosing to monetize our public view and desecrate the architectural artifacts that give our city its unique structure.
This isn’t just about generating revenue; it’s about declaring that a blinking ad is more valuable than the enduring craft of a landmark, that the fleeting attention of a consumer is more important than the collective memory of a place. It is the most literal form of “profitable forgetting,” turning our most treasured streets into revenue-generating zones rather than shared cultural spaces.
The Choice Before Us
We inherit Santa Monica from generations who built a comprehensible city of human scale and multi-generational continuity. What we’re bequeathing is an investment vehicle stripped of memory, hostile to families, illegible to inhabitants.
This isn’t inevitable. Other cities resist. Other communities choose remembering over forgetting, continuity over rupture, evolution over erasure. The machinery destroying Santa Monica’s memory can be stopped—but only if enough people understand that memory, not money, makes cities livable.
The question for November 2026 isn’t whether Santa Monica will grow but whether it will remember. Whether the accumulated wisdom of place will survive the pressure of profit.
The choice is ours. But not for much longer. Once memory dies, no amount of development fees can resurrect it. A city that cannot remember itself is no longer a city.
It’s just real estate waiting for the next erasure.
Jack Hillbrand, Architect, AIA
Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Dan Jansenson (Former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner), Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA, Thane Roberts, Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA (Former Planning Commissioner), Sam Tolkin (Former Planning Commissioner), Michael Jolly ARE-CRE, Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Phil Brock (Mayor, ret.), Matt Hoefler NCARB, Heather Thomason, Community Organizer
For previous SM.a.r.t. articles, see www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing
