"Mayors are always late," a mature woman in the row behind me said to her companion as if it were tacit knowledge. The mayor of Los Angeles may be the only municipal executive chief with an excuse as valid as the rest of us -- that ruthless terrorist of Angeleno early-evening punctuality: traffic.

That's why it was truly surprising when Mayor Eric Garcetti -- new as of seven months ago, and busy with untold political onuses back at City Hall -- took the stage only eight minutes after he was supposed to. In front of the crammed Keck Theater at Occidental College -- conspicuous in its proximity to the precipitately developing York Boulevard retail district -- Garcetti joined L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne for an extempore discussion of public policy surrounding a diverse array of city planning subjects.

The talk opened with Hawthorne running through a slideshow illustrating the shift from the "privacy-conscious" ideal of the hilltop modernist house to a more metropolitan archetype. "There's a good deal of anxiety about that change in some quarters," explained Hawthorne. "[In other quarters], a great deal of excitement. I think what people are really interested to hear is the mayor's sense of that change, and how it looks from his vantage point in city hall and his vision for shepherding that change."

The most significant changes that Garcetti invoked were a population-fueled necessity to urbanize and a desire to shake up the infrastructure that was built for another time's isolationist city, one where people didn't need parks, because the parks were their front lawns. "There's a limit to the old way of navigating the city," said Garcetti. "We have to create spaces that are more compact, more varied. [And] people are increasingly hungry for some sort of meaning in their life. There's a richness of life that people are discovering at the same time that they're facing tougher challenges with navigation. Most people don't spend their day worrying about the design of their buildings. They spend their day worrying about how long it's going to be until they get home."

Hawthorne argued that, perhaps because of increasing frustrations with a car-addled city, more people are trying to live locally. Garcetti agreed, telling an anecdote of settling first in Silver Lake, which became a fashionable neighborhood, and then in Echo Park, which many people said wouldn't improve, but did. Pointing to the evolving York Boulevard, the mayor said, "It's not that the trendiness has shifted from place-to-place, because those other places have embedded, it's that people do want a more self-contained neighborhood -- a place they can live, a place they can work, a place they can go for a drink, a place they can have dinner. People determine where they're going to live by: 'Where am I going to spend the bulk of my time?'"

One of the common gripes about neighborhood life is the utter dearth of parkland, a vestige of that time when Angelenos considered their yards all the green space they needed. When Garcetti was the city council member for the east side of Los Angeles in the 2000s, he increased the number of parks from 16 to 48. "[It was] done there when land prices were soaring, [and] when there wasn't a lot of extra money lying around," the mayor said, describing enlisted entities like the Neighborhood Land Trust and the Trust for Public Land, who could move more nimbly than the city could, and working with Community Garden Councils to put gardens in. "As mayor, that should be the goal for green space: to have a park within walking distance for everybody in Los Angeles."