NORTH AMERICA & CANADA LA’s regeneration program The reason this program was founded was because the government began to understand the different methods to reduce costs in the way of socioeconomic and environmental standing, while realizing the potential of regeneration and how that could in fact bring in revenue from those same standings. Abandoned commercial buildings became the structure of choice to adaptively reuse, as the changing times of architecture, urban fabric and developments, lead to this typology being outdated, and eventually in disuse. Therefore, it was the reuse of strip malls from earlier decades, and similar buildings, that became a target strategy to implement for urban regeneration. These structures are capable of holding a plethora of functions simultaneously - the numerous booths and shops in the plan of these buildings are able to be re-partitioned into restaurants, galleries, libraries, and the like. For the LA program, buildings were reused into residential units. This residential regeneration of downtown LA has been a large-scale governmental project, constantly in the works since the 1960s. With the way this venture has dealt with building policy and selective criteria for choosing which buildings to adaptively reused, this program has taken exemplary, foundational steps in how to adaptively reuse across the globe. The type of building reused was, as previously mentioned, mostly commercial, and changed into residential units, due to the lack of residential units in areas of interest within the program. Love’s paper also studied how effective the program’s outcomes were, in terms of sustainability, urban regeneration and commercial viability.
Fig 1.1 The figure above shows some of the candidate buildings for housing conversion that were put forward.[15]
