Cut the palm trees and Hollywood sign. For the 2028 Olympics, what’s the real L.A.?

Los Angeles is well-versed in deception. Bring water to the desert, and everything will turn green. Build miles of freeway, and no place will be out of reach. Promise a dream, and the city will grow.

So when Tom Cruise dropped from the sky this summer, landing next to the Hollywood sign, and when a skateboarder coasted down the Venice boardwalk, ending up in Long Beach, few cried foul. In the name of entertainment, all’s fair (doubly so for the sake of promotion, as in this case: Paris handing off the Olympics to Los Angeles).

But when the cameras went dark, some were left wondering why the truth is so hard to bear.

Los Angeles is a congested city on the verge of drought. Opportunity is scattershot and dreams hard to realize. Yet here, millions have found a way to live with one another — sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord — creating a polyglot mosaic of communities that mirror the nations of the world.

If Paris could tackle its dark history — revolution, beheadings, barricades — and still celebrate its beauty, then the city that invented noir should be up to the challenge when its turn comes to play Olympic host.

From Tovaangar to today, Los Angeles has straddled the line deftly between utopia and dystopia, boosterism and nihilism, hope and resignation. While the past cannot be forgotten — nor the tragedies experienced over the decades — the city’s cultural vitality remains a critical through line.

Not long after the Watts riots, Ed Ruscha burned a gas station on canvas. Just as a Compton mayor got out of prison for corruption, Kendrick Lamar rapped about a Mad City. A year into the shutdowns of the pandemic, Los Lobos took to an empty hilltop in Lincoln Heights to record a video for its ballad to the city: “I dream about the day you’ll take me back / I’m your native son.”

Today, Los Angeles is under a state of emergency over homelessness. Copper thieves have left some streets dark. Smash-and-grab mobs plunder department stores. Yet still the old myths hold sway.

Perhaps the palm trees and the Hollywood sign have led to a state of arrested development, as architect Michael Maltzan suggests. Perhaps we need to cut them down to reveal the Los Angeles the world should see when the Olympics arrive in 2028.

Before we do anything rash, The Times asked 11 public intellectuals — poets, historians, urbanists and artists — to talk about the real city of today, a city more tethered to reality, and a reality more worthy of being celebrated, than is popularly accepted.

The time has come, they argue, for a clear-eyed reckoning — minus the cliches of the past — of what Los Angeles is, especially in the third decade of the 21st century.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Architect Michael Maltzan at the 6th Street Bridge, which he designed.

(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

The 2028 Olympics give us a chance to answer questions about our civic life, much as they did in 1932 when they put L.A. on the map and made buildings like the Coliseum the civic and cultural icons they are today, and as they did in 1984, when they took a new and more inclusive, democratic approach to the design of the Games, threading the city together so that you felt their presence no matter where you went.

I think we should similarly see the ’28 Olympics as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the issues that define us today — especially the challenges we’re facing like housing, transportation, sustainability — and create a more cohesive identity, not just for the world to see but, even more importantly, for us as well.

I was disappointed with the handoff — from Paris to L.A. — that we saw during this year’s closing ceremonies. The beach, the ocean, the lifeguard stations — fantasy keeps us from understanding our potential.

I’ve often thought that we should get rid of the palm trees and the Hollywood sign, because as icons of the city, they keep us in a state of arrested psychological development.

Maybe they had a place, but now they are emblems of a cliched sensibility, of Los Angeles as some sort of dreamland, that doesn’t capture or express the depth of this city, its uniqueness, its complexity, its messy, sprawling beauty. We need to capture that and tell it to the world.

Jessica Kim, professor of history at Cal State Northridge, poses for a photo in the parking lot of the Chung Ki Wa Plaza in Koreatown.

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

My dad arrived as a new immigrant in Koreatown in the 1970s. He and his parents were part of the diaspora, displaced by war and economic hardships on the Korean peninsula.

The glossy presentation of Los Angeles is a celebratory story of a city of immigrants in a nation of immigrants. But when you read neighborhoods historically, you get a more nuanced sense of Los Angeles’ connection to the world and how world events have shaped this city.

How economic hardship and revolution in Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prompted by American — even Angeleno — exploitation, brought a wave of migrants and workers to Los Angeles, who created a center of Mexican life in East L.A.

How the defense industry in Los Angeles after World War II was key in the Pacific Cold War, contributed to the Korean and Vietnam wars, and created economic migrants drawn to Southern California.

How American foreign policy in Central America fostered war in Guatemala and El Salvador that led immigrants to Los Angeles, who then revitalized neighborhoods such as MacArthur Park.

By understanding American power around the globe, you arrive at a better understanding of Los Angeles. Displaced migrants have remade the city, turning communities faced with deindustrialization and white flight into more vibrant places.

Thom Mayne in 2021.

(Kurt Iswarienko / Milenio Magazine)

If our playbook for 2028 starts with found things — palm trees, the Hollywood sign or the Venice boardwalk — then you begin with a yawn. We must begin with creativity.

Los Angeles is a place where every generation is looking for a future that never arrives. I find it’s the perpetual search for the next thing that makes L.A. so unique.

The upcoming Olympics should encourage architects and urban planners to talk this out. This is an event that will leave a legacy, but what will that be? Will we be talking about cost? About whether L.A. broke even? Or will L.A. make an investment that will give something back to the city that will last for decades? Will it be about the money or about our contribution to the urban fabric?

The 2028 Olympics should trigger a conversation about what Los Angeles needs — upgraded infrastructure, more housing, more public space — as well as take advantage of what we have.

Just look at what Los Angeles represents in the current political climate — where ethnicity, gender, the culture wars are at the center of so much debate — and you’ll see we’re a case for celebrating diversity and heterogeneity. We are a global city, and the athletes who will participate in the Games in Los Angeles in 2028 should see themselves in our neighborhoods and communities.

Visual artist Jay Lynn Gomez, pictured in Redlands last month, recently had an exhibition called “Under Construction,” which details her life transitioning.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Seeing Los Angeles is not easy. It comes to us in edited fragments on our TVs, our phones, on video posts to social, a random meme. We saw that during the closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. That video — Tom Cruise skydiving to the Hollywood sign — made no sense, and yet it did. The cliches are comfortable. They are familiar, and we thrive off of them. But they also muddy the water for people who buy into them.

In Los Angeles, there are so many people we see but don’t value. Everyone is in constant movement in this city. We are always going somewhere. Permanence and impermanence are interwoven. That person we see selling oranges on a street corner one day is gone the next day.

We need to bridge this disconnection between how we see L.A. and what L.A. is. Beverly Hills by day is not Beverly Hills by night. We see the fabulous homes and yards, but we don’t see the child care managers, the gardeners, pool cleaners. We may thank them. In another context, we called them essential. But did they get our support?

How will we invest in these communities? How will we support them? That’s our challenge as we move toward 2028.

Héctor Tobar, author of “The Tattooed Soldier” and “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino,’” in the L.A. Times Festival of Books photo studio at USC on April 24, 2022.

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

Watching the Paris Olympics, I felt like someone who is going to host a party and is looking at the person who hosted the party before, wondering how are we going to top this. But much as Paris celebrated the history that made it a world-class city, I think we have to ask, what has made Los Angeles into a world-class city? It is its neighborhoods.

We are the product of many different diasporas. The Iranian, Armenian, Jewish, Salvadoran, Mexican, Chinese diaspora — they all lead to this place. This is why so many nationalities claim Los Angeles as one of their largest cities. We’re the largest Iranian city outside Iran. We’re the second-biggest Guatemalan city after Guatemala City.

But the L.A. story is complicated. It is hard to tell it in a way that isn’t dark, grim or sentimental. That has been the challenge for L.A. artists for decades. The entertainment industry has tried, but it hasn’t looked at L.A. in a very deep or textured way. So when people imagine L.A., they think of the city west of La Cienega Boulevard. They think of the beaches and Beverly Hills. And when they think of the Eastside and Southside, it’s in a very cliched way.

I grew up in various L.A. neighborhoods: East Hollywood, Montebello and South Whittier. I moved away for school and a job, and when I came back to work at The Times in the late 1980s, I saw the city as never before, as an incredible stage of human drama, of poverty, inequality, anger, violence and resilience.

So what are we going to say about Los Angeles in 2028? Sometimes it takes a big event like this for a city to wake up to its own richness.

Venita Blackburn, author of “Dead in Long Beach,” in her home in Fresno, on Dec. 28, 2023.

(Kiana Hernandez / For The Times)

The common presentation of Los Angeles is of a high-gloss fantasy, dream-like world. Growing up in Compton, I could see that despite the urban problems — the drugs, the gangs, homelessness — there was a magic to this city. We were living our ordinary lives, but there was potential for the extraordinary. That possibility is the magic.

As you get older, you realize that most of real life doesn’t happen in this dream world, but these places still exist simultaneously.

The beauty of Los Angeles is in possibility and the limitlessness of imagination. However, there are different rules for different people. There is room for everyone to ascend, but the window is smaller for some than for others. Even in Compton, you have this legacy of creativity and success, despite the gangs and the police and corruption. Think about Serena Williams and Kendrick Lamar.

When we think about 2028, we can represent the dream, palm trees and all, but we have to be honest about what is going on. We have to respect the contradictions. We have Beverly Hills and Skid Row. We have wealth and poverty. The beauty of affluence and fame can be quite ugly. If we are not honest, we are not going to grow. We will impose stagnation upon ourselves and lose the dream entirely.

Author D.J. Waldie at Lakewood City Hall.

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

Critics, going back to the 1920s, have long made the claim that Los Angeles is something less than real. The myths of sunshine and noir are part of our reality. They can’t be unseen any more than the palm trees or the Hollywood sign or shelterless Angelenos sleeping on a downtown sidewalk. What we can do, however, is read our history: the dispossession of Indigenous people in the 18th century, all the familiar, degrading prejudices that the Midwestern immigrants to Southern California brought here.

When I first started writing about my hometown, Lakewood, it was denigrated, dismissed, despised by critics of suburbia, much as Los Angeles has been. But I also made a commitment to these disregarded places.

In 1984, the image that Los Angeles projected to the world was sunny confidence. The aesthetics of those Olympic Games were charming rather than impressive. Traffic flowed. What happened since 1984 — civil unrest, wildfire, earthquake, economic recessions, the disaster of COVID — has refigured how Los Angeles is seen.

In 2028, Los Angeles could make use of all of that history by bringing forward the people who embody what Los Angeles has become.

Angelenos are all kinds of people. We’re all from somewhere else, mixed in our races and ethnicities, speaking a strange combination of languages, a mixed sensibility, not beholden to any tribal allegiance. And we should be everywhere in the decor of the games — just being ourselves.

I won’t care if there’s a palm tree or two in the background. If the city’s image to the world could be, “This is us; we are this place,” it might not change the world’s opinion of Los Angeles, but it could change how we see ourselves.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris at the Luskin School of Public Affairs Building on UCLA’s Westwood campus.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

The flashy Hollywood imagery of L.A. is often what the world sees. It’s the CityWalk and the Disneyland versions of sanitized public spaces. This imaginary world gives you elements of our streets and public spaces, but a lot of the reality of what is out there — the real people going about their everyday lives, the street vendors, the unhoused — is missing.

Los Angeles is so much more than what the outside world knows. When we, as outsiders, think about Paris, we see the Eiffel Tower and the river Seine. But Paris is much more than that. No city is as sanitized as the tourist or movie industry wants us to believe.

We have to be talking about our diversity, about our multiple identities and cultures. Somehow — and this is what makes L.A. unique — we have a city that is a fusion, a mix of many things. It would be great if we could highlight our collection of diverse neighborhoods and not show only the cliches or put everything under a bright, sanitizing light.

We want to show the world our unique cultures — from the various ethnic cuisines to our public spaces, our murals, our art. It would be a missed opportunity if we don’t highlight these. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to invite various neighborhoods — from Little Armenia to Chinatown, Little Tokyo, East L.A., Watts, the Valley, to name a few — to tell us who and what they are?

Luis Rodriguez, an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic and columnist, in the L.A. Times Festival of Books photo studio at USC on April 23, 2022.

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

Imagine a new Los Angeles! Imagine the next Los Angeles!

Los Angeles has a unique story, a character and life that go well beyond the superficial representations so often rolled out to visitors. I learned this as a teenager when I was homeless and living downtown. I learned this in my 20s when I was trying to get away from gangs and crime by finding work in the now-long-lost industrial corridor of Southeast L.A. Now I’m living in the northeast San Fernando Valley, the once-named Mexican side of the Valley.

We shouldn’t have to whitewash these truths — that the Spanish missions enslaved and tried to erase the First Peoples, that this land was taken from Mexico, that there was an anti-Indigenous genocide during and after the Gold Rush, that there were a massacre of Chinese immigrants on the streets of L.A., that Japanese families were forced from their homes into concentration camps, and Black migrants from the South came here looking for a better life and found redlining and discrimination waiting for them.

Yet still Angelenos stood up — during the Zoot Suit Riots, the Watts Rebellion, the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War and the 1992 L.A. uprising — and out of the dust, we created such beauty from our lowriding culture and skateboarding, surfing, music from Ritchie Valens to the Doors, War to Hiroshima, Los Lobos to N.W.A.

So as Los Angeles prepares to host the Summer Games for the third time, we should celebrate the good with the bad, the dark with the light in a harmony of arts and athletics. There should be art, song, dance, theater, poetry and more poetry.

Wendy Cheng, professor of ethnic and American studies, at Arlington Garden in Pasadena.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Typical representations of L.A. go from downtown to the Westside, highlighting Hollywood and the beaches — pretty much what we saw in the handoff video. But that picture of the city erases and omits South L.A., the Eastside and the San Gabriel Valley, which happen to be where the majority of Black, brown and Asian people live.

Where are the taco trucks, the strip malls with businesses run by immigrants from all over the world? Where are the boba shops and world-class second-generation Asian American restaurants? Where is the vibrant, working-class street culture of East L.A.? The Afrofuturist worlds of Octavia Butler, born and raised in Pasadena?

I grew up in San Diego in a majority-white suburban neighborhood, but as Taiwanese immigrants, we came to the San Gabriel Valley to buy Taiwanese groceries and eat in restaurants. When I would go there, I became aware that many people in L.A. live in a way that is radically different from the dominant ideas of what it means to be American. In the L.A. I love, they are not aspiring to be anything other than who they are.

We know that the Olympics will reshape the city, but how can the Olympics benefit all of the people of L.A.? I’d like to see the stories of the Tongva, the Zoot Suiters and P-22 told by the communities to whom they belong. I’d like to see recognition that many of the most celebrated things about L.A. have come from racism and oppression, like world-famous rap and hip-hop coming out of the intense anti-Black segregation and policing of South L.A. This will be a rare moment when people and cultures — such as lowriders, taco trucks — toward whom the city has had a contentious relationship can be celebrated.

But we need even more than that. We need to make sure the Olympics employ people from communities that need jobs. Build infrastructure that can help unhoused and marginalized communities.

Community Arts Resources president and co-founder Aaron Paley on the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Angeles.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

We don’t tell each other stories about how complex this place is, how complicated, how disjointed it is. Even the most experienced of us end up with just a sliver of understanding of this place.

We can’t do with our Olympics what Paris did. But we can do what L.A. does. We have a history of innovation. We make things up in scrappy ways — and on the cheap. We’ve never had enough money to do all that we dream.

We can celebrate all our amazing communities, from Pomona to Pacoima, Lancaster to Long Beach with public spaces and events. Let’s create a 10-week-long car-free zone from Exposition Park to Chinatown, or from SoFi to the Coliseum, and allow Angelenos to move across town without their cars. Let’s create neighborhood ambassador programs where young people are trained on the history of the area. Let’s allow street vendors into more places, like bus stops, Metro plazas and stations, so we can have affordable culinary choices as well as more of a presence in these public spaces.

The Olympics can be an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge our diversity and provide the unity that we’re missing.