A Vision for the City: Introduction

NINETY YEARS AGO, ATTORNEY, SOCIAL THEORIST AND future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis looked at the cities and states that were just then establishing municipal power companies, child-labor laws and anti-sweatshop provisions, and termed them "laboratories of democracy." Los Angeles had more than its share of turn-of-the-century progressives and socialists; it's because of them that we have the DWP, which they battled for three decades first to establish and then to preserve.

Today, L.A. is poised to become a laboratory for the next century's democracy. No other major city has so polarized an economy and so dynamic a movement for social and economic equity. No other major city will play so large a role in determining the destiny of America's third great wave of immigrants. No other major city is changing so fast. In the struggles of immigrant workers for a living wage, of parents for decent schools and medical care for their kids, of families for homes, of motorists for time, of a city for air it can breathe, the American future is being born.

Saturday's PLAN conference begins at 9 a.m. with a session in which activists unveil and discuss their platform. It concludes with a noon-to-2 p.m. mayoral-candidate forum, in which the candidates will be questioned on issues -- poverty, housing, labor, bus service, inner-city environment, outer-city sprawl -- that don't routinely surface in electoral politics. Members of the public are invited to join the members of the groups that constitute PLAN at Saturday's conference. Patriotic Hall is at 1816 S. Figueroa St.; parking is behind the hall or on side streets. For further information, and for PLAN's platform, call (323) 259-1412, or go towww.progressivela.org.