Cooperative Planning and Management for Mountain Scenic Roads: The Case of the Santa Monica Mountains of Metropolitan Los Angeles

With the construction of roads, popularization of automobiles and urban expansion, mountain scenic road projects have appeared on a global scale, meeting metropolitan population’s demand for landscape quality along the journey, many of which are located within or connected to mountain-type protected areas, showing different landscape characteristics from plain roads. Different stakeholders have differences on how to deal with the relationship between scenic roads and mountainous landscapes, and they need to coordinate through cooperative governance, but there has not been an in-depth analysis of metropolitan mountain scenic roads with different types of activities, construction intensity, governing bodies and land ownership. Los Angeles has a demonstration effect on other cities in the United States and the world in terms of urban mountain cooperative governance. This study takes the Santa Monica Mountains near downtown Los Angeles as an example, analyzing relevant regulations, research reports, planning schemes and design guidelines to explore how to cooperatively plan and manage automobile-oriented mountain scenic roads. The study found that the scenic road development in the Santa Monica Mountain has obvious phase characteristics, involving four contradictory external demands, including infrastructural development, real estate development, scenic tourism, and ecological protection. In view of the disturbance caused by these external demands on the mountain landscape, three types of cooperative scenic road planning and management models based on corridor regulation have been formed among relevant governance entities. The research results show that these cooperation models are conducive to balancing different external demands, clarifying the rights and responsibilities of all parties, and building a resilient mountain landscape that can adapt to the metropolitan environment full of change and complexity.