Newsletter — Summer 2017 FREE

RUDY ESPINOZA

ASHLEY Z. HAND

GUNNAR HAND

SEAN DEYOE

K AT SUPERFISK Y

L AUREN BON

JULIA MELTZER

BET T Y AVIL A

L.A. FORUMARCHITECTURE.URBAN. DESIGN.

1 Summer 2017

We exist at a time in the Unites States that engenders great concern over how our leaders will define “prog-ress” and “growth” in our cities. For much of the 2nd half of the 20th century, urbanists have been focused on making space available to people, advocating for more inclusive and equitable public spaces for all. In Los Angeles, new civic spaces such as Grand Park, Tongva Park, Vista Hermosa, the Los Angeles River Masterplan, and Pershing Square Renew all seek to connect the ur-ban fabric of the city and, in doing so, connect to all populations.

This trajectory of opening up spaces to become more public, more inclusive, and more democratic faces an uncertain future. A renewed rhetoric of nationalism and exclusion questions who has a right to the city. In the city, the front line of our democracy lies in our freely accessible spaces. As urbanists, we need to continue to advocate for dynamic, open, and engaging public realms.

In this issue of the L.A. Forum Newsletter we are exploring the definition of public space in Los Angeles today. In order to best advocate for expanding our pub-lic realm, we need to better understand the complex network of public spaces in Los Angeles. In addition to normative models of public space (parks, plazas, and gardens), Los Angeles today exemplifies a public realm that is both symbolic and tangible. Many of these places are technically semi-public, yet have engrained them-selves into communities and become vital parts of the cultural life of the city. This blurring of public and private opens up further complexity over how these spaces are controlled, regulated, and protected.

In a city where developers become political actors, the users of the city often find themselves in a power-less situation. However, it is the everyday Angelinos of the city that generate the cultural vitality and currency of contemporary Los Angeles. With this newsletter, we

01 EDITORIAL→SPACE MADE PUBLIC

Astrid Sykes and Christopher Torres

We must leverage data

and adeptly “future proof”

our public space to allow

for greater fl exibility.

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←E D I T O R I A LSPACE MADE PUBLICAstrid Sykes and Christopher Torres

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↑E S S AYHOW STREET VENDING IS REDEFINING PUBLIC SPACE Rudy Espinoza

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2 3 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

will begin to explore some of these questions, in the hope of starting a broader conversation of the future of public space in Los Angeles.

In “How Street Vending is Re-Defining Public Space,” Rudy Espinoza explores the economy of street vending and how the street is transformed from infrastructure into a vital part of the local economy.

The street continues to be a central theme in “We Circle in the Night,” by Sean Deyoe, in which he de-scribes the radical transformation of space, beginning at California Donuts #21, that occurs every Wednesday evening at 8:30pm. Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, a weekly bike ride, heads out from this strip-mall donut shop to discover a new way to engage the streets, weaving a different tapestry by which to understand Los Angeles.

This transformation of the city through public actions can also be seen in the arts organizations Self Help Graphics, the Metabolic Studio, and Clockshop. We interviewed Betty Avila, Lauren Bon, and Julia Meltzer. These leaders understand how their organizations’ mis-sions frame and challenge the notion of public space in Los Angeles today.

Moving from the street to wilderness, in “The Allure of the Urban Wild,” Kat Superfisky challenges us to un-derstand the great natural resources of Los Angeles as a vital and over overlooked public space. Furthermore, she advocates for an understanding of the city that is non-binary, moving away from nature and the city to a hybrid of urban-nature, an understanding of the region that could fundamentally restructure our experience of public space and nature in the city.

Moving to an even more meta understanding of pub-lic space in the article, “How Data Creates a New Public Space,” by Ashley Z. Hand and Gunnar Hand, explore how open data and the democratization of civic data

creates the opportunity to rethink how we design our public spaces by having a real-time understanding of how users experience and interact with the city. Most importantly, they advocate for more than an acknowl-edgment of the data, calling for an active practice that integrates this information into all practices of making space public, an action that could reframe all of the public space efforts being explored in the newsletter.

The process of curating this newsletter has revealed to us that public space emerges between the tension of democratic ideals and political conditions. Public space stands out as a complex and culturally loaded topic, yet we have remained inspired by seeing how Angelinos have already made 2017 a milestone year for reflecting on the democratic nature of the city.

Thousands of Angelinos poured into the International Terminal at LAX in response to a Muslim travel ban and the Woman’s March brought 750,000 people marching on Pershing Square. In a city that is often considered to have a poor public realm, Angelinos are awake and will continue to resist any regression of the progress made in this city. As we have seen in this newsletter, resis-tance happens not only in protest marches, but also in the everyday lives of Angelinos who, regardless of race, wealth, immigration status, or gender, are able to inhabit and lay claim to the public life of the city.

It is worth noting that we consciously curated a group of authors working outside of the traditional realm of architecture and the allied design professions, to illus-trate the need to understand public space from more than a designer’s perspective. Now we present back to you, the L.A. Forum Community, these reflections on public space, with the hope that we will all take on the responsibility of being advocates for the public realm — protecting it and expanding it in perpetuity.

M.D.

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“HOT GRILLS, FOLDING CHAIRS AND TABLES,

ELECTRIC SIGNS, AND STRING LIGHTS MAY BE MODEST FURNISHINGS,

BUT THEIR PL ACEMENT IN

THE PUBLIC REALM PUSHES US TO RE-IMAGINE HOW

OUR STREETS COULD FEEL IF WE DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE,

NOT CARS.”

5 Summer 2017

On February 15, 2017, the Los Angeles City Council took an important step toward supporting thousands of the city’s entrepreneurs: It voted unanimously to decriminalize street vending and barred any further misdemeanors from being levied onto street vendors. It also began the process of creating a vendor permit system.

While street vendors can still be cited, removing major criminal penalties and the possibility of arrest, and even deportation, was not only an important win for advocates who have fought for years to legalize street vending, it was also part of L.A.’s slow but steady movement toward being a city that embraces diversity in its streetscape, not just cookie-cutter developments and strip malls.

Numerous cities across the globe recognize the value of street vendors, who contribute to thriving economies, provide jobs to largely low-income workers, and are sometimes purveyors of world-famous cuisine. But street vendors have another important benefit: They are some of the most effective activators of public space.

Almost single-handedly, street vendors demonstrate an ability to revitalize the for-gotten areas of cities with simple interventions that transform the urban environment. Hot grills, folding chairs and tables, electric signs, and string lights may be modest furnishings, but their placement in the public realm pushes us to reimagine how our streets could feel if we designed for people, not cars.

To street vendors, the barren sidewalk, littered parkway, or forgotten alley offers an opportunity for renewal, activation, and energy.

02 ESSAY↓HOW STREET VENDING IS REDEFINING PUBLIC SPACE

Rudy Espinoza

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Street vendors show us the potential of public space. It’s not uncommon to see a vendor in South L.A. reimagining a walkway or an unused train track, or a parking lot after business hours, as hap-pens in Boyle Heights. With their mod-est means, these people are creating dining experiences for their customers in neighborhoods with few sit-down restaurants and a proliferation of fast-food chains.

Because of this, street vending should be celebrated in L.A.

The city has an important opportuni-ty to once and for all legalize street ven-dors, not just for their potential to add to the tax base or their ability to create jobs, but because they can be partners in realizing the potential of our public space.

Instead of creating arbitrary limits on how many vendors should be allocated per block, or requiring that they obtain permission from local business owners to operate, two serious recommenda-tions being considered by City Council, we should empower street vendors to activate commercial corridors and work with brick-and-mortar businesses to attract pedestrians.

The L.A. Street Vendor Campaign, a coalition of vendors and communi-ty-based organizations, believes that to leverage the full potential of street vending, these entrepreneurs should be able to operate in a manner that takes into account the city’s built environment and varying dimensions of public space. Instead of arbitrary limits, street vend-ing should have reasonable restrictions that prioritize public safety and don’t block entrances to small businesses. The public’s safety and health should be the guiding force to develop restrictions on vending, not a fear of competition.

If crafted thoughtfully, L.A.’s street vendor policy can be a national guide-post. Allowing street vendors to acti-vate public space legally will not only allow the city to benefit as described, it will also have intersectional benefits for other priorities.

For example, as Mayor Garcetti’s Vision Zero initiative moves into imple-mentation, street vendors can serve as important safety ambassadors. Every 40 hours, someone is killed in L.A. in a traffic collision, a startling statistic that will be tackled by Vision Zero through the Department of Transportation and

other agencies.Street vendors can be important

allies in this effort, too. After all, they are already working outside, generally in the communities where they live or those they are deeply familiar with. Vendors can be important “eyes on the street,” bearing witness to the activity and informing future design changes.

Similarly, street vendors can help monitor cleanliness, reporting issues like graffiti and illegal dumping. Some of us have witnessed street vendors sweeping up their space on a sidewalk before and after they work: Why not in-vite them to help keep an eye on their surroundings beyond their modest space?

Engaging street vendors in these ways will not only help keep L.A. clean and safe, it will validate them as mem-bers of our communities, opening the door to leverage their strengths as ambassadors of public space. For the benefit of us all — even the few who may never stop to enjoy what the city’s street vendors work tirelessly to provide.

Data alone cannot create a physical space. Ones and zeros are a means to convey more complex sequences, but they have no meaning or value of their own. The ar-chitecture of this information grows with our ability to collect, decipher and utilize it; it is through analysis and application that potential arises. So we create new tools to cultivate an understanding of place in an age of rapid data proliferation. Today, anyone who knows how to code, build an application, or access online data portals can participate, and the marketplace is overwhelmed with myriad possibilities. As designers, we must be discerning and balance the qualitative with the quantitative to make a more cohesive informational whole. Knowing what data can best inform the design of a public space, the funding of an infrastructure project, or the delivery of a service is more of an art form than a science, and there is no silver bullet application in the public realm.

But where does “public” end and “private data” begin? Can it be more than a digi-tal place, but also enhance the three-dimensional space? To what extent does data inform human-centered design? Are we shifting the extent of “public” and “private” when we quickly, and almost always mindlessly, accept the terms and conditions of an application, and can we leverage usage and preference data, used quite adeptly for newsfeeds and marketing, to make a better city in the future?

WHAT LIVES IN THE PUBLIC REALM?For urban designers, the public realm is an all-encompassing concept that includes everything you can legally access — not just visually and physically, but also emo-tionally, intrinsically, and, now, digitally. The types of data we collect not just through our smart phones and other devices, but environmentally via a network of real-time sensors and other transactional data, are an increasingly diverse and potentially rich cache of human behavioral information.

Traditionally, we have understood public domain and right-of-way from a legal perspective, as the physical space between two typically privately owned parcels. Now, it expands to what our sensors can see on the ground or from above; the rather amorphous “cloud” of big data for the exchange of information; and, most import-

03 ESSAY

↓PUBLIC INFORMATION AGE:

HOW DATA CREATES A NEW PUBLIC SPACE

Ashley Z. Hand and Gunnar Hand

HELADOS

ICECREAM

“ IF CRAFTED THOUGHTFULLY, L .A.’S STREET VENDOR POLICY CAN BE A

NATIONAL GUIDEPOST.”

R.E.

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ant, the interstitial spaces where public and private meet, between inside and outside, those unique hybrid experiences of privately-owned public space, and the overarching urban systems that fundamentally tie us to each other. We use our wayfinding app (pri-vate data) to navigate our streets (public assets) or to get real-time arrival information for transit (public data). We request a ride via Lyft (private data), create a financial transaction (public and pri-vate), and jump into a stranger’s car from the curb to get where we want to go (public asset). It’s not just about place anymore, but the ways in which we access and use public space. We are more connected now than ever before, but technology is only draw-ing our attention to this fact; it is not yet solving for it.

Meanwhile, our public right-of-way cannot keep pace with the speed of technological innovation and the shifts in human behavior that result from the introduction of new tech-nologies. Infrastructure is built to federal standards; it lasts for gener-ations, and it takes time for the rules to change. We must consider how the public realm can be more fluid, adaptable, and responsive in an era of uncertainty. Consider the challenges cities have faced in regulating new mobility services such as Uber and Lyft, applications that have transformed how we think about personal vehicles, access to transportation, and real-time demand. Yet cities are being reactive, struggling to re-vamp their regulatory framework as they have an unclear picture of what this all means systemically. We must leverage data and adeptly “future proof” our public space to allow for greater flexibility. The data we need to make these decisions, however, which in this case is generated by private companies, is not always available, thus impeding the possibilities.

OPEN DATA Cities across the country are developing open-data portals for the public. Much of this information is being leveraged by the private sector in order to monetize it. While some very interesting partnerships among universities, municipalities, and private companies are occurring to better manage civic systems and services, the bulk of the innovation

is coming primarily from startup companies mining this data and repackaging it in an understandable and increasingly visually dynamic and interactive way.

Chicago has launched the Array of Things, a citywide system of sensors that is es-sentially the open instrumentation of the built environment. It creates the possibility of getting microclimate data, for instance, that is specific to a city block instead of generalized weather reports from a station miles away. Noise levels, street tree moni-toring, pedestrian traffic patterns, and other data will allow designers to rethink ways of shaping the public realm at a very context-specific scale. Big data is getting very local, very specific. As responsible urban designers, we have an obligation to factor this data into our approaches, our programming, our designs, and our evaluation of the success of our interventions. As data opens up, so too must our methodology.

Meanwhile, private interests are going into the public realm and generating their own data to utilize and/or sell for monetary gain. The multiplicity of approaches, contracts, intents, and outcomes of such data generation is still not fully understood. What access should the government, stewards of the public good, have to this pri-vately generated data, particularly if it impacts the public realm? Should this data be protected, shared, or sold? If you create an app that requires the public realm as part

of a service, should regulators require data sharing? How can we transform the information collected from individuals into a value for the greater good? As city governments try to reconcile this new social contract, urban designers must challenge themselves to seek out and request the data that will bring value to their design process.

DIGITAL ACCESSCompounding these questions is the digital divide between rich and poor communities and across generations. While two-thirds of adults in the U.S. have a cellphone, not everyone has a

smartphone or access to high-speed in-ternet and data services. This means there is an inherent imbalance in who is gener-ating data. In Boston, for example, where an application was tested to empower citizens to report broken infrastructure and other issues, there was a geographic and so-cioeconomic imbalance that did not reflect the entire city. Neighborhoods with greater means and digital access were more likely to

We must leverage data

and adeptly “future proof”

our public space to allow

for greater flexibility.

05.08 .2017

Noise levels, street tree monitoring, pedestrian traffic patterns, and other data will allow designers to rethink ways of shaping the public realm at a very context-specific scale. Big data is getting very local, very specific.

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report a problem than communities that may have greater needs, but less access. As designers, we must be sensitive to the potential bias the data may have, no matter how complete or comprehensive it may appear on the surface.

Equal representation in data is important, but so too is the ability to access and interpret that data. And this is where the public realm begins to bleed into the digital sphere, as almost all of this big data is generated, stored, and analyzed online. As such, internet access is rapidly becoming synonymous with public access. High-speed internet as a right was championed by the Obama administration as a means of empowering communities, but recent trends have seen a massive shutdown of

previously public information. What is so important about data?

DEMOCRATIZATION OF DATAData is factual information. As data from the public realm becomes more public, how we visualize it, how we interact with it, and how we ultimately use it to make our lives better will be shaped by the policy decisions that are made today. The phys-ical space of the public realm creates an entirely new arena of collaboration and gives new meaning to public-private part-nerships. How to value the data as a result of the creation of a business, a job, or a sale, and how the public sector sees a return on that investment are critical issues. Is the creation of the economic activity enough of a public good, or does the public sector require a more proportional benefit?

While the public sector is the steward of the information, it lacks the ability to invest in the use of the data for public good, at least for now. LinkNYC, an initiative that converted 15,000 old payphone stations into interactive kiosks with WiFi, smart city sensor bays, free video calls, and internet access, would

never have happened without Google and its Sidewalk Laboratories spinoff. And while these kiosks have shaped the smart city conversation, it is merely one version of an interface. The information is only as good as what you use it for. So how do we use big data to inform the design of not just the public realm, but entire metropolitan regions?

DATA-DRIVEN DECISION-MAKINGWhat this information can do is much more powerful than track spending habits, hail a ride, or even engage with an interactive screen either on the street or in the palm of your hand. It is in the way that it shapes our understanding of the built environ-ment that makes it so valuable. If we know the right questions to ask, then we can begin to create decisions from information instead of anecdotes. In Paris and New York, for example, the public realm has been radically transformed by taking passive user behavior collected from sensors counting vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians in

the public right-of-way, together with public input from kiosks, to redefine how the streets and public squares are designed. These cities have leveraged data to take back the streets for people where it is most needed.

If we can engage the community and identify values, then we can define metrics for those values. And if we do not have the data to best understand those metrics, then we can create our own data baselines. From this dashboard approach, our de-cision-makers can either make data-based decisions, or explain to their constituents why they did not. Google Waze, for example, shares anonymized data with cities around the world about congestion, incidents on the roadway, and general public commentary made via a wayfinding tool. What if we had used this data as a part of the selection process for Measure M projects? What if we leveraged this data to not only identify opportunities to improve mobility in our cities, but to evaluate the impact of our designs? As designers, we can fundamentally shift the nature of our community conversations by backing up our proposals with data.

CONCLUSIONWe are asking more questions today than offering solutions, as the future is uncer-tain. The proliferation of data is creating new opportunities to understand how cities

function — or, more specifically, to know when and where they do not work in real time. If we can use information to make cit-ies more mobile, accessible, sustainable, and resilient, then we must use the existing information to help shape the built environ-ment, as well as direct the information of the future by determining what data should start being collected now. As designers, we have an obligation not only to understand the potential this data can bring to our work, but to advocate for best practices to help us help our cities. We must interject our expertise and lead this conversation, which is inherently about the design of the built environment. Perhaps the public realm really is limitless …

How can we transform the information collected from individuals into a value for the greater good? As city governments try to reconcile this new social contract, urban designers must challenge themselves to seek out and request the data that will bring value to their design process.

2

AS DATA FROM THE PUBLIC

REALM BECOMES MORE

PUBLIC, HOW WE VISUALIZE

IT, HOW WE INTERACT WITH

IT, AND HOW WE ULTIMATELY

USE IT TO MAKE OUR LIVES

BET TER WILL BE SHAPED BY

THE POLICY DECISIONS THAT

ARE MADE TODAY.

12 13 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

FIND YOU

R BIKES!

“Find your bikes!” I make the traditional call, and the 15 or so cyclists gathered at the corner of New Hampshire and 3rd prepare to depart. Conversations pause, blinking lights switch on, and we head out onto the street. So begins the 392nd ride of The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time.

Each Wednesday night or the last eight years, co-organizer Nathan Snider and I have led people on bicycles through streets, down trails, and, occasionally, for miles underground in the tunnels of Los Angeles. While L.A. may be a city of cars by day, at night the drivers are tucked away at home, and the streets opens up to us, relatively clear and mostly empty. And, generally guarded by signage alone, whether they are nominally closed or private matters less than if they are, quite simply, passable. As long as we keep moving, by the time anyone registers our presence, we are gone.

We head north and take a right on 1st. That merges onto Beverly. A quick left onto Robinson and right onto Council. We skip the nearby alleys filled with graffiti by a recently opened art gallery, signifying the neighborhood’s transition from Historic Filipinotown into the more marketable “Hi-Fi.” Graffiti by kids or gangs is read as a nuisance. When sponsored by galleries and developers, it is “street art,” the dazzle camouflage of gentrification.

Up Vendome, a few more turns, and we merge onto Silver Lake Boulevard. Around the dog park, along the reservoir, then a right on Cove, a short, steep nub of a street leading up to the Mattachine Steps. As the first of us reaches the stairway — pop! —

04ESSAY→WE CIRCLE THE NIGHT

Sean Deyoe

Photographs by Sean Deyoe

Photograph by Sean Deyoe

16 17 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

“I get a nice shot of a somewhat infamous little bridge that, while only spanning a couple feet, always seems to be missing a board or two.”

there is what sounds like a blowout somewhere in the back. We carry our bikes up the stairs, and at the top it turns out that someone does indeed have a flat.

As he fixes the tire, we take temporary residence in the cul-de-sac. At a house atop this hill in 1948, Harry Hay founded

“Bachelor’s Anonymous,” among the first gay rights groups in the nation. It later became the Mattachine Society, and then One. Some of our rides are intended to be more overtly edu-cational and include short lectures on history, but this week’s ride is, well, just a ride. No lectures tonight. Like kids playing in the suburbs, we’re simply hanging out in the street.

When the group gets going again, we head down the hill, across Glendale Boulevard, and up Loma Vista. This turns into another, longer stairway. We go up the many steps to the top and then down more steps on the other side. As we wait for everyone to reach the bottom of the stairway, a rider notices that it’s marked by a street sign. Los Angeles actually has quite a few of these “stair streets,” many of which are lined with res-idences. Some refer to these passageways as “secret stairs,” after the name of a popular guidebook, but in truth there is nothing secret about them: They’re public thoroughfares and may be found on maps. Like many urban forms, they hide in plain sight, willfully ignored.

A left on Allesandro leads to a pathway that connects down to Corralitas Drive. We’ve often gone left again at this point, along the Corralitas Red Car Trail, a dirt path that opens up into a dirt road, along an old trolley right-of-way, and a de facto public space long threatened with development. (Thankfully, no one ever seems quite able to seal the deal.) Tonight, instead, we pass under the 2 and down to Riverside. From there, we make the climb up Stadium Way and into Elysian Park.

Los Angeles’ precious few parks are, in the daylight hours, filled with hikers and picnics and dogs and families and chil-dren. But when the sun goes down and they are officially closed, many parks become ideal places for riding. Griffith’s ample trails, usually limited to hikers and equestrians, are es-pecially nice, as are those of Ernest Debs and Ascot Hills.

We regroup at Angel’s Point Road, and I warn everyone that the trail we’ll proceed upon from there is a bit precarious and will probably require some walking. It starts simply enough as a fairly wide but unpaved trail winding up and around the topography. But as it bends to parallel the 5 freeway below, it narrows to single track. And while it does in parts become rather steep, more serious is the drop-off to the side. To go over it would be less a slide than a long, calamitous fall. I advance cautiously, but many riders, especially those on mountain bikes, speed ahead when I pause to take photographs. I get a nice shot of a somewhat infamous little bridge that, while only spanning a couple feet, always seems to be missing a board or two.

We are on the Portola Trail. I assume the initial Spanish expedition of 1769 did not actually traverse this particular steep hillside, but it is still interesting to imagine, in a city often regarded as having little or no history, that the explorers who

named the city made their own passage somewhere near here over two centuries ago.

The trail continues across Grand View drive, becoming much wider and easier to ride. But the recent heavy rains, combined with the preceding drought, have placed several uprooted trees in our path. We make our way over, under, and around their outstretched branches and down to Park Row Drive. Crossing the 110, we see multiple people with cameras on tripods, capturing the iconic view up the highway to the downtown skyline. We don’t stop to take in the view ourselves tonight, instead turning left down a hillside trail after the bridge.

Bisected by the highway, this area of Elysian has many odd pathways and places, remnants and dead ends. One can fre-quently spot gay cruising activity nearby. Homeless encamp-ments dot the vicinity, shuffled around periodically by law enforcement. The homeless are often our unwitting allies, re-programming the marginal spaces into which they are generally pushed by blazing trails and piercing fences. We try to be as respectful of them as possible; in truth, however, we are but in-surgent tourists into what few places they might call their own.

At the bottom of the hill we proceed until we find a hole in the fence through which we can pass. This leads out to the 110 walkway, a piece of incunabular infrastructure built in an era when a pedestrian passageway along a highway must not have seemed absurd. Beginning along the upper, southbound lanes, it leads to a spiral staircase that winds down to the northbound

18 19 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

When I tell people that I moved 2,300 miles across the country for the Los Angeles River, I am greeted, more often than not, by puzzled gazes and perplexed responses like, “L.A. has a river?”

Imagining that the overly developed landscape of Los Angeles could contain a 51-mile long river with decent water quality and hundreds of different fish and bird species sounds ab- surd to most. Los Angeles is better known for the glitz, glamour, and gossip of Hollywood than it is for being a “biodiversity hotspot” on par with Madagascar and the Tropical Andes.  

Thanks to urban planning classes everywhere, Los Angeles is seen as the quintes-sential example of urban sprawl and the “non-naturesque,” which is why most folks can’t imagine why an ecologist from Michigan like me would ever set foot in this concrete jungle — let alone come all this way for a river that resembles a freeway far more than it does a waterway.

Cities like Los Angeles are mistaken for ecological wastelands, places that have been wiped clean of the true, majestic magic of Mother Nature, and therefore fall on the far side of the spectrum from what is considered to be “natural.” Land use datasets

lanes below. At the bottom of the spiral, cars rush by as they exit toward the 5.

We continue to the path’s end, turning down a stairway to San Fernando Road. At Figueroa we enter the new traffic circle that accompanies the recently built Figueroa-Riverside Bridge. We go around several times as the back of the group finishes descending the stairs and Nathan gives the thumbs up, signaling that we’re all here.

We stop the circling and pull our bikes up into the central island. Several people cannot resist the concave, human-scale sculptures of faces and climb inside them. Taylor, one of our regular riders, points out how very Los Angeles it is to build this inviting space within a traffic circle, where ostensibly no one is supposed to go. Someone on a mountain bike attempts (successfully) to ride atop the perimeter sculpture, a low, topo-graphic circuit of more faces.

We get back on our bicycles, make a final loop around the circle, and head over the bridge. At its end I notice an open gate leading under and take us through. After passing below the new bridge, we come upon the extant stump of the one it replaced. What remains is a particularly impressive ruin, the truncated span of archways looking more like something from antiquity than the 1920s. Underneath, we find the expected trash, castoff spray cans, and signs of encampments. More in-congruously, a small Subaru sits parked up a dirt embankment. After a while, a tiny dog comes bounding out of the darkness

“But although we haven't journeyed far, we have traveled through a city many miss entirely during the day — a city of unexpected connections, of disorientation and reorientation, a place more an accident of history, more at the mercy of natural forces, more shaped by use.”

05 ESSAY↓THE ALLURE OF THE URBAN WILD

Kat Superfisky

towards us, followed by its owner. We apologize for disturbing them, and I wrangle everyone together to leave.

We reverse course back to the L.A. River Bike Path and then dip through the corner of Frogtown over to Riverside Drive. We take a left back onto Stadium Way but then a right onto Landa. This quickly becomes steep and bumpy, with weeds pushing through its crumbling pavement. We encounter another fall-en tree, this one requiring even more effort to circumvent. At Landa’s apex we take a left onto Echo Park. We make the long, rapid descent, turning left where the road ends at Bellevue to pass through the little Laveta Terrace tunnel under the 101.

The remainder of the ride is an easy shuffle up Temple to Union to Beverly and then over to 3rd. We arrive back at California Donuts just shy of midnight. At less than 15 miles, this was for us an exceptionally short route. But although we haven’t journeyed far, we have traveled through a city many miss entirely during the day — a city of unexpected connec-tions, of disorientation and reorientation, a place more an accident of history, more at the mercy of natural forces, more shaped by use. And now we’ve returned whence we came. We eat our victory donuts and ride off in separate directions until next week.

20 21 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

blanket over these built environments with gradients of grey, depicting urban areas as nothing more than “developed” or “undeveloped.” As a result, scientists and en-vironmentalists continue to overlook the minutiae of urban areas and instead invest their time, expertise, and National Science Foundation grant funding on “intact” eco-systems in the wild. Their argument: Cities have nothing left to save. My argument: The urbanwild exists and offers the best defense against most ills plaguing the planet.

What is the “urban wild,” you might ask? The first thing I assure you is that it is not an oxymoron. According to the dictionary, “wild” is defined as “uncultivated, un-inhabitable land”; something that is uncontrolled, unrestrained, and downright bar-baric. Which sounds pretty close to Los Angeles, if you ask me. But aside from its “uncivilized” character, Los Angeles possesses plenty of other examples that help to classify this urban space as “wild” and worth protecting.

Take, for example, the insect traps set up in backyards around Los Angeles by scientists from the Natural History Museum. In just a few years’ time, these tiny traps have helped to discover 30 new species of flies. Yes, you read that right: 30 species that were previously unknown to science, found living in the middle of a major me-tropolis, instead of in the middle of nowhere, as one might expect. Who knows what kind of cancer-curing plants could be growing in our alleyways — just waiting to be discovered, if only we thought to look there.

Then there’s P-22, the charismatic megafauna mountain lion living in the Holly-wood Hills. This cougar came all the way from the Santa Monica Mountains and man-aged to somehow cross the 405 and 101 freeways before safely making it to Griffith Park, where he now resides. I retraced P-22’s journey across the fragmented land-scape of Los Angeles last October with the California Director of the National Wild-life Federation and can personally attest to the fact that his expedition to become an urbanite was no cakewalk. But P-22 somehow defied all odds and is now living in a patch of open space that is a mere fraction of the size that most mature male moun-tain lions need to survive. Even with the subpar conditions we’re provided thus far, plants and animals have figured out how to coexist with us in cities.

In 2016, the Academy of Sciences put Los Angeles and San Francisco head-to-head in the City Nature Challenge, a competition to see which city could observe and record more occurrences of “nature.”

To the surprise of many (although not all), Los Angeles came out on top, boasting more birds, bats, and Baccharis pilularis than its northern rival. Sure, people were cataloging palm trees, but they were recording a lot of other, seemingly more “sig-nificant” species, as well. Even though we have paved over ecosystems with asphalt and encased our waterways in concrete, nature still prevails, proving that cities are not desolate wastelands devoid of nature; on the contrary, they are teaming with ecological importance and what I would argue to be untapped potential.

Nature in cities might look and smell and function a bit different from its tradi-tional wildland counterparts, but who are we to judge? Large to small (even micro-scopically so), we’re seeing species adapt to our urban conditions in ways we never thought possible. Peregrine falcons are using office buildings instead of rock out-crops to build their nests and raise their young, and Puerto Rican tree frogs are sur-viving in 24” box trees placed in parking lots at Bergamot Station. Point blank: We are not giving cities, and the interstitial spaces within them, enough credit.

Continuing to overlook the possible role cities can have in conservation is a huge missed opportunity, and I mean huge. Not only does nature already exist within cities, but more important, so much more nature could exist within cities. Metropol-itan areas across the world occupy significantly large land areas, and are continuing to grow in size. The Greater Los Angeles Area alone spans over 33,000 square miles. If treated in the right way, urban areas like L.A. can become expansive curated eco-systems that provide essential habitat refuges and support some of the world’s best

biodiversity. Urban areas, in a sense, could be a Noah’s Ark. In this day and age where so much is already developed, the question is no longer

“whether or not to build” but rather “how to build,” and in the case of Los Angeles and most other urban areas, “how to re-build.” Instead of treating the symptoms of sprawl by preserving “pristine” parcels of land on the periphery of our destructive develop-ments, why not focus instead on the root cause itself — the way we are building our cities. Figuring out how to make human development less of an ecological impedi-ment seems like the most effective strategy in the long run, and is the exact reason I moved to L.A.  

As planners, designers, artists, and more, we are constantly re-creating the spac-es around us. So why not do so in a way that also makes these spaces inhabitable by more than just us? Instead of continuing to allow our development to come at the cost of other species, let’s figure out instead how to re-design our cities in ways that promote coexistence.

Who’s to say the tops of bus shelters can’t be planted with milkweed and become perfectly spaced habitat patches to assist the Monarch

and El Segundo Blue Butterflies in also getting around our city? Why can’t we treat electrical lines and transmission corridors

as viable freeways for rodents, migratory birds, and mid-sized mammals like bobcats and coyotes? Or rethink

our cemeteries and landfills to be safe havens for insects and bats? Heck, even the rooftop amen-

ity decks in downtown L.A. can become outdoor destinations for more than just

people. I’d rather sit in traffic on Sun-set Boulevard or the I-5 freeway if

I was surrounded by aromatic swaths of sages and other

climate-appropriate California poppies, wouldn’t you?

That’s the best part: Re-building everyday

spaces in urban areas to be more suitable for plant and

animals simultaneously makes cit-ies like Los Angeles more livable for

us, as well. From backyards and balconies to outdoor

concert venues and public parks, every ounce of “open space” in our cities can be utilized as part of

the urban wild. And if you’re skeptical that species will be able to find these ecological oases sprinkled throughout

our city, let the burrowing owl of Esperanza Elementary School convince you otherwise. This brave bird flew through the Dodger

Stadium-lit night sky to nest in a newly greened LAUSD campus near MacArthur Park. What?! How did he know that tiny patch of green existed

in this sea of gray? Had he received an email about the ribbon cutting? Doubtful. More important than wondering why and how the owl showed up is acknowledging that he is here, proving the point that if we build it, they will come.

Rather than sitting around hypothesizing how species such as P-22 and the Phorid flies knew how to find the little patches in the middle of our metropolis, the more productive use of our time will be designing and creating as many more of these postage-stamp-size preserves throughout our city as possible. So how do we

“Yes, you read that right: 30

species that were previously

unknown to science, found

living in the middle of a major

metropolis, instead of in the

middle of nowhere, as one

might expect.”

“Instead of continuing to allow

our development to come at

the cost of other species, let’s

figure out instead how to re-

design our cities in ways that

promote coexistence.”

22 23 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Since 2005 you have challenged and brought awareness to brownfields and underutilized infrastructures. Can you talk about how the city of Los Angeles itself, with its unusual net-work and/or lack of normative public spaces, has influenced the way you have conceptualized the Metabolic Studio space and mission?

Metabolic Studio was conceived in the traumatic after-math of 9/11 and marks the beginning of my endeavors transparently aimed as counterarguments and alterna-tives to what I saw as the oversights of our civic infra-structures. I see the potential for my studio’s actions as showing that another kind of Los Angeles is possible. My work is fundamentally a constellation of acts of restitu-tion — of soil and water, of rightful responsibilities to our environment, and the human spirit and its material survival. The first public demonstration of my aims for Metabolic Studio was Not a Cornfield (2005-06), which transformed the abandoned rail yard in Downtown Los Angeles that is now the Los Angeles State Historic Park into a 32-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle. It be-gan almost a decade of remediation of this iconic and neglected site — the last remaining undeveloped land of the native Tongva and Gabrieleno people and the site of

the Zanja Madre (or “mother ditch”) that linked the L.A. River to the first Spanish settlement in Los Angeles.

Not a Cornfield was a consciously public action, with clearly public entry points, from a mile-long path around the site for anyone to use, to a weekly fire circle at night, to rituals which offered moments of transformation for everyone who came. What was incredible is that the day-to-day taking care of the field became very public. Peo-ple would come to weed the field and tell stories. The Tongva and Gabrielino people where hosted there and aloud to reconnect by their own terms and at their own time to their ancestral breadbasket. I truly feel that this is what art needs to be — to be transformative and with the intention to make a gift. To be in a large cornfield in the middle of the city, with all of the sounds and smells, and sense of life — to have the space to pay attention to the passing of the seasons — is a powerful thing. There were no robberies or attacks or crimes of any kind, and we eventually took down all the fences around the field so that it was just open and anyone could walk through at any time. We could do this because everyone who came to the field fundamentally understood the shared nature of it.

06 CONVERSATION↓

Lauren BonMetabolic Studio

Julia MeltzerClockshop

Betty AvilaSelf Help Graphics

This tripartite interview was envisioned as a sampling of voices at a moment in time in a changing Los Angeles where the tension of our political climate should awak-en us all. We look to our arts organizations to catalyze energy and create a new lens through which we can view the city and the challenges we face. The work these three organizations produce is not just artifacts or objects, but the strategic curation of ideas and energy that give way to radical and ephemeral experiences in public space.

create “symbiotic cities”? Luckily, the answer isn’t rocket science. All we have to do is expand our myopic concept of conservation, start seeing and utilizing the minutia of urban landscapes, and define a new ecology — an urban ecology.

Although at times I feel like a fish out of water as an ecologist in L.A., I am not alone in this effort to define a new way of thinking; there are plenty of other pioneers helping to chart new courses within their disciplines and organizations as well. The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, and National Park Service, just to name a few, are all beginning to pick up on the importance urban areas, and are investing accordingly in plans, projects, and programming in cities. Even government agencies, officials, and departments are taking note of the importance of “the oth-ers” and drafting policies and legislation that support biodiversity. But there needs to be more. Turning the ship will require the effort of an entire army, including you.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all a part of nature. So let’s stop pre-tending we’re something separate and superior, and instead start using this intercon-nectedness to our advantage. Let’s also stop submerging ourselves in eco-guilt and believing that humans taint everything we touch. If we have the ability to negatively impact the planet then we simultaneously have the power to leave a positive mark. After all, we are the ones who planned, designed, and built these places, so we are (and will continue to be) the ones who can rebuild them. This time, let’s do so in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of other species, but instead, invites them to coexist with us and our concrete, steel, and infrastructure.

Welcome to the urban wild. You’re right on time. We’re just getting started.

24 25 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Since 2004, your organization has challenged and brought awareness to our city brownfields and underutilized infrastruc-tures through the Bowtie project and other programs and events. Can you talk about how the city of Los Angeles itself, with its unusual network and/or lack of normative public spaces, has in-fluenced the way you have conceptualized the Clockshop space and mission?

The first project that Clockshop produced was a three-year series of artist billboards on Wilshire Boulevard from 2004 through 2006. My interest has always been to interject complex visual and intellectual ideas into the public landscape in Los Angeles and to place art in lo-cations that you might least expect it: on your drive to work, in a post-industrial landscape, or in a repurposed warehouse in Elysian Valley.

SHG holds a unique position in the network or the lack of public spaces in L.A. Can you talk about how the city of Los Angeles itself, with its unusual network and/or lack of normative public spaces, has influenced the way your institution conceptualized your space and mission:

Self Help Graphics (SHG) is a cultural arts center that has been serving the Eastside communities of Los Ange-les for the past 44 years. While primarily a printmaking space, SHG also acts as an intersection: we host artists from all over the word and welcome anyone from the community. SHG is a place for people to come together and where collaborations happen.

SHG was founded by two artists in 1970: Sister Karen Boccalero and two young queer artists from Mexico, Carlos Bueno and Antonio Ibañez. Since its inception, SHG makes its space and tools available to artists living on the Eastside and beyond. Our mission has always been about accessibility and the democratization of the arts; we offer a platform and a launching pad for artists early in their career.

In recent years, our key mission — housing artists and offering them studio space to work in — has proved itself even more relevant. As our organization find itself in the middle of an increasingly unaffordable city, SHG has become an invaluable type of resource to its commu-nity, offering spaces in the heart of the city to create and work for Latino and Chicano artists and others. 

We’re experiencing today a reawakening of public spaces in L.A. through the protest of the Trump administration, but also a potential clamping down on semi-public spaces. How do you see the role of your studio in creating an open place for expres-sion and challenging the current political administration?

My studio practice is dedicated to metabolic action and survival through movement together. Working at a scale

that can match the destruction inflicted upon us, and upon our environmental resources, is an ever-evolving process. It ranges from simple and immediate gestures, such as inviting other human beings to spend time in my studio, to the journey from conceptualizing to real-izing the signature actions of the studio, to a timescale r equired for the reparation of land and water.

Each Thursday evening since the beginning of 2017, we have hosted a print workshop titled Reimagine Everything. It is a weekly open studio created for those of us seeking a space to visualize what comes next in this urgent climate, supplied with everything you need to re-search, design, and silkscreen. The gatherings have built a substantial library of silkscreens donated by local, na-tional, and international artists and activists, and the stu-dio supplies space, skill, and good company. The work-shop is run by Rich Nielsen, who also started the Print Studio at the West Hollywood Veterans Center in 2010, for the use of military veterans, as part of my Strawberry Flag action.

My current action, Bending the River Back Into the City, is a much more blatant embodiment of the scale that artists need to create to bring about civic change for good and an implementation of living systems that genuinely, positively transform the city. Bending the River Back Into the City is a sculptural artwork that utilizes Los Angeles’s first water commons and demonstrates how the currency of water can create social capital and serve social needs. It required over 40 permits from over 20 federal, state, county, and city bodies. Within the coming year, the infrastructure will be in place to ex-tract and clean L.A. River water to potable standards and commence a distribution network that delivers water to the Los Angeles State Historic Park, Downey Recreation Center, and Albion Park in East L.A.

My goal is always to provide opportunities to bring peo-ple together in a space to interact and engage with each other. After the election, I felt intuitively that people would want to do this —maybe because I wanted it and so I just followed my gut. In January 2017 we launched a series called “Counter-Inaugural” that brought writers, scholars, and journalists together to talk about a topic that they know very well. This series has been very well attended, and I hope that we have contributed, in the words of historian Tim Snyder, to “make life seem less chaotic and mysterious, and democratic politics more plausible and attractive.”

The core mission of SHG has always been about creat-ing a space for gathering, collaborations and creation. Speaking to the recent elections and our current political climate, a lot more people in Los Angeles are growing more aware and want to get involve in the civic process.

One way they get involved is in the art making process of resistance. Due to our legacy of promoting art that is oriented towards social justice, SHG has become a nat-ural home to hosting events related to the resistance. In January, we hosted a printmaking workshop in prepara-tion of the Woman March; over a thousand people at-tended the event. The majority of the event attendees were unfamiliar with our space and organization. It was an incredible moment for us, with people on every inch of the floor making art to tell their story of resistance. For us it was such a fascinating moment, seeing people eager to engage in political discourse and realizing that our organization was now seen as a “senior” organization in that space.

This is not new work for our organization or for the artists that associate themselves with us; the struggle of our communities has existed for much longer than the re-cent elections. This has been our world, we have always occupied this “space” and done this work. Now we are able to open up even more in response to the interest.

The social justice oriented art we produce here and the space itself both embodied the act of “resistance.” For a lot of the artists working here, the creation of art work is driven by the idea of changing system of oppres-sion and calling out injustice. This is not all we do, but it’s a large majority of the work. I think the space itself pushes people on a different kind of level. The idea of resistance is part of our identity.

Given the major factors defining the growth of the city — an ever- densifying urban core, wider access to public transit, rapidly decreasing affordability, an even more diverse population and expanding ecological challenges — do you see public space in Los Angeles changing in the coming decades?

Real estate and politics in the city of L.A. are very pow-erfully connected. Projects that transform blighted areas with healthy seeds and soil have traditionally not been strong in their leverage, but they can push a critical envelope. In order to not just propose but activate resti-tution of public green spaces, you have to hit the political ground running. I work alongside the people that I bring on board to be effective in the course of political time. If you want to make some kind of significant change on an urban scale, you have to get it done while your network is empowered and your innovation “collateral” is high.

Yes, I definitely see public space in Los Angeles changing as the city becomes denser and as people crave more and more engagement and interaction with the city. An architect once said to me over a decade ago that Los An-geles is an adolescent city. Los Angeles is now entering early adulthood, and with that there will be more need for the city to grow up and actually function like a real city with an urban core that needs to provide ways for people to get around. Let’s just hope that the politicians and urban planners can help facilitate that happening. 

“My goal is always to provide opportunities to bring people together in a space to interact and engage with each other.”

26 27 Summer 2017Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

L.A., known for its lack of normative models of public space (parks, plazas and gardens), has started to explore and embrace its atypical fragmented network of interstitial spaces that have come to generate powerful places for people to gath-er. Among these spaces, are galleries and museums, art instal-lations, art institutions and art studios organization like yours acting as space that brings people together in what could be define as “public space”?

I think that art galleries and studios are responding to the human need to come together. I don’t think that this is something new — and especially not for L.A., which has a strong history of civic activism and artistic collectiviz-ing in the face of the intransigence of dominant ideology. This past winter and early spring, the fabled Woman’s Building undertook a Metabolic Studio Special Project in Archiving. From 1975 to 1991, the Woman’s Building was located in the Beaux Art Building on North Spring Street in downtown L.A., which is adjacent to the Met-abolic Studio. The Woman’s Building was always highly ambitious in its creation of women’s initiatives, and has changed many lives. It was the home of far-reaching pro-grams including the Women’s Graphic Center and the Feminist Studio Workshop. Spending time seeing these women reanimating their archives — and the outcomes of the 15 fellowships for younger women artists respond-ing to the legacy of the Woman’s Building — has been incredibly inspiring and shows how indebted we are to creative strategies for articulating and initiating import-ant social change. Bending the River Back Into the City is my attempt to swerve the downgrading of our desire to work together to rectify and sustain what we share and to move beyond crisis into a better world. I aspire to sup-port the watershed of Los Angeles for the common good and orchestrate a scalable relationality between us, and with the environment that we depend on, and to know that it is better to proceed without full solutions than it is to be defeated.

I like the Argentinian concept of milonga, which sug-gests any place is a public space if two people can tango there. Are museums, art galleries and art institutions moving into inclusivity in their programming? Do Native Americans feel less invisible there then they do normally in our city? Do people without jobs feel welcome? Do the homeless get invited to use bathrooms of have a shower? How does the infrastructure of these spaces provide for long-term activation of public space? Can true social change be enacted during open hours of an institution? What really needs to get addressed is what we consider our commons by living in Los Angeles and other Amer-ican cities: access to water, soil, seeds, and community process. How can that access be maintained by water organizations, boards, elected officials, schools, and in-stitutions where we place our common interests?

Los Angeles is growing and changing. There are many people and groups who are organizing and doing amazing things, and I feel a lot of energy in the city. I fear that unchecked real estate values might dampen the possi-bilities for spaces like ours to exist, and I don’t know the answer to that problem. My hope is that Los Angeles will see a growth in the number of philanthropists who think carefully about the need for public space to be protected and accessible. 

One critical aspect of SHG is its ability to exist between two worlds in a way that few institutions can match, working between serving the local creative need of our community here in Boyle Heights and beyond but gen-erating a citywide reputation of producing art. Our work within our community has expanded beyond its geogra-phy; we have built great relationships with the larger art institutions in L.A., and our archive at UC Santa Barbara gives our production of art a regional impact.

Today we witness larger institutions showing interest in engaging with more communities across L.A., partly driven by a better understanding of the demographic making of the city and the county and realizing their audience doesn’t reflect the city. As they are developing strategies on how to capture the full demographic of the L.A. Basin, we see a lot of new very interesting satellite programs across the city emerging. For us, this is where we started, and our work is so rooted in the idea of col-laboration we have been able to draw in a great diversity of both artists and audiences, making our space truly in-clusive.

We don’t actively seek bringing any particular type of person to SHG; we make sure our door feels open enough for all folks to engage in our programming. The people interested find themselves here. Our purpose continues to bring people together.

“I like the Argentinian concept of milonga,

which suggests any place is a public space if two

people can tango there.”

28 Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

2017 Sponsors

PartnersCalifornia Arts CouncilCity of Los Angeles Department

of Cultural AffairsGraham Foundation for Advanced

Studies in the Fine ArtsLos Angeles County

Arts CommissionNational Endowment for the ArtsWoodbury University School

of Architecture

BenefactorsArupHouse & Robertson ArchitectsW.K. Day Foundation

AdvocatesArchinectCO ArchitectsClive Wilkinson ArchitectsJoe Day and Nina HachigianMarmol RadzinerNelson DalyPerkins + WillSouthern California Institute

of ArchitectureTaslimi Construction Company

FriendsAIA|LABestor ArchitectureArkturaCoolhausCorsini StarkChu+Gooding ArchitectsDSH ArchitectsGriffin Enright ArchitectsImaginary ForcesJFAK ArchitectsKirkpatrick Associates ArchitectsKoning Eizenberg ArchitectureLADGLehrer ArchitectsMarbletectureMia Lehrer + AssociatesNAC ArchitectsNishkian ChamberlainNOUS EngineeringMonica NouwensShimoda Design GroupSuisman Urban DesignThornton TomasettiUrban Architecture LabValerio ArchitectsVantage Design Group

Astrid Sykes is a Senior Associate at Mia Lehrer + Associates and a board member of the L.A. Forum. She’s a French trained Architect and Landscape designer.

Christopher Torres is founding Partner at Superjacent, an urban design and landscape architecture studio. He's also a board member of the L.A. Forum.

Rudy Espinoza is the Executive Director of Leadership for Urban Renewal Network (LURN), a community development laboratory.

Ashley Hand is the Co-founder of CityFi, a smart city consulting venture. She was previously the Transportation Technology Strategist for the City of Los Angeles, Department of Transportation.

Gunnar Hand leads SOM’s City Design Practice in Los Angeles. He was previously Senior Regional Planner at the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning.

Sean Deyoe is a graphic designer and the co-founder of The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time.

Kat Superfisky leads ecological design projects at Mia Lehrer + Associates, and is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Grown in L.A.

Lauren Bon is the founder of Metabolic Studio, a studio practice that investigates platforms, transforming resources into energy, actions and outcomes.

Julia Meltzer is a video artist, director and the founder and director of the non-profit arts organization called Clockshop located in Los Angeles.

Betty Avila has focused her career on the intersection of the arts and social justice. She is the Associate Director of Self Help Graphics.

This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

07 ↓CONTRIBUTORS & COLOPHON

↑E S S AYTHE ALLURE OF THE URBAN WILDKat Superfi sky

E S S AYWE CIRCLE THE NIGHTSean Deyoe↓

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←E S S AYPUBLIC INFORMATION AGEHow Data Creates a New Public SpaceAshley Z. Hand and Gunnar Hand

C O N V E R S AT I O Nwith Lauren Bon, Julia Meltzer, and Betty Avila↓

←CONTRIBUTORS & COLOPHON

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2017 Board of DirectorsPresident

Roberto SheinbergVice President

Geoffrey von OeyenVice President of Information

Amelia Taylor-HochbergCo-Vice President of Development

Andrea DietzCo-Vice President of Development

Christopher TorresVice-President of Operations

Eric NulmanTreasurer

Astrid Sykes Orhan AyyüceKhristeen DecastroJessica FleischmannAnthony FontenotWendy GilmartinElla HazardLiz MahlowJennifer MarmonAaron NeubertKatrin TerstegenAaron Vaden-Youmans

2017 Advisory BoardHitoshi AbeAaron BetskyGail Peter BordenPamela BurtonJoe DayTim DurfeeFrank EscherHsin Ming FungMargaret GriffinSarah LorenzenJason KerwinAlice KimmJanet Sager KnottMark LeeKimberli MeyerMerry NorrisLinda PollariMichael PintoMohamed SharifWarren TechentinPatrick TigheIngalill Wahlroos-Ritter

Administrative AssistantsMark MontielPatricia Bacalao

L.A. Forum Board

L.A. ForumPO Box 291774Los Angeles, CA 90029–laforum.orginfo@lafurom.org

Editors Astrid Sykes and Christopher Torres

DesignRobyn Baker

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is an independent nonprofit organization that instigates dialogues on design and the built environment through public programming, exhibitions, and publications. L.A. is a catalytic place for architecture and design, offering lessons that extend globally. Our curatorial stance frames and challenges what architecture means in an evolving city.

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Now we present back to you, the LA Forum Community, these reflections on public space, with the hope that we will all take on the responsibility of being advocates for the public realm — protecting it and expanding it in perpetuity.

M.D.