Anti-gentrification Campaigns and the Fight for Local Control in California Cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy H. Kwak

Abstract Gentrification is integral to the functioning of global cities: international developers raze old housing and renovate industrial lofts for elite service workers seeking central-city accommodations. In the process, local real estate markets heat up and working-class residents find themselves priced out, displaced more often than not to peripheral sites of the global metropolis. In Californian communities in downtown and the east side of Los Angeles, the Mission in San Francisco, and Barrio Logan in San Diego, however, residents rejected this process of involuntary movement, instead arguing for the value of historically rich, rooted communities. In what appeared to be a wave of anti-global activism beginning in the 1980s, residents worked to regain control over their local communities through a variety of strategies including the deliberate deployment of local culture and arts, and the increasingly savvy use of media and public relations. With these tools, anti-gentrifiers asserted ownership without property titles, housing rights without mortgages, and community buy-in without cash deposits. Anti-gentrification movements thus constituted a direct challenge to the workings of the global city while also feeding into a global movement to restore political power to the grassroots.

Author(s):  
Isabel Wünsche

Die Blaue Vier [The Blue Four] was founded in Weimar in March 1924 at the initiative of Galka E. Scheyer, who became the American representative of the four artists Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Although implying a direct link with and a continuation of the spiritual orientation of Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider], the association was essentially a public relations effort—an attempt to put the works of the four artists under a common name in order to exhibit and sell their works successfully in the United States. Between 1925 and 1944, Scheyer organized Blue Four exhibitions in New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, Mexico City, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Northampton, and Honolulu. In the 1930s, Scheyer, believing that she could better present the artists’ work in a suitably arranged private setting, built a small gallery house on Blue Heights Drive in Hollywood. Scheyer’s personal collection of works by the Blue Four is now a part of the permanent collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


In 1871, the city of Chicago was almost entirely destroyed by what became known as The Great Fire. Thirty-five years later, San Francisco lay in smoldering ruins after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. Or consider the case of the Jerusalem, the greatest site of physical destruction and renewal in history, which, over three millennia, has suffered wars, earthquakes, fires, twenty sieges, eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religious faith to another. Yet this ancient city has regenerated itself time and again, and still endures. Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Viewing a wide array of urban disasters in global historical perspective, The Resilient City traces the aftermath of such cataclysms as: --the British invasion of Washington in 1814 --the devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during World War II --the late-20th century earthquakes that shattered Mexico City and the Chinese city of Tangshan --Los Angeles after the 1992 riots --the Oklahoma City bombing --the destruction of the World Trade Center Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.


Author(s):  
Timothy D. Taylor

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the independent (indie) rock scene in the east side Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. There is very little money derived from music circulating in this scene (musicians are routinely paid only about $35–40 for a show), and musicians, indie label owners, and others attach symbolic values to certain amounts of money, which are viewed in terms of what they can help the musicians purchase, such as gas for the band’s van. People in the scene also produce and exchange value in a number of ways that aren’t capitalist, from generalized reciprocity to several forms of patronage. This article ultimately argues that scenes such as this are simultaneously maintained and destroyed by capitalism: maintained because capitalism needs a reserve army of those who operate outside of it but destroyed because such scenes are deprived of their ability to reproduce themselves given how little money circulates.


2021 ◽  
pp. 251512742199780
Author(s):  
Marlene M. Reed ◽  
Les Palich

This case is about Aaron Caddel, an entrepreneur, who owned several coffee houses and bakeries in San Francisco and Los Angeles and had to rethink his businesses during the Covid 19 pandemic in early 2020. Aaron pulled the plug on his operations on March18, operated as a grocery store until March 21. With no knowledge of e-commerce but possessing a staff of skilled bakers and a 4,200 square foot warehouse, Aaron believed he could pivot his business and keep his workers employed. His concern was the steps he should take to support a business that would help him keep his workers employed during the pandemic.


SLEEP ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. A86-A86
Author(s):  
Michael Grandner ◽  
Naghmeh Rezaei

Abstract Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in societal-level changes to sleep and other behavioral patterns. Objective, longitudinal data would allow for a greater understanding of sleep-related changes at the population level. Methods N= 163,524 deidentified active Fitbit users from 6 major US cities contributed data, representing areas particularly hard-hit by the pandemic (Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Miami). Sleep variables extracted include nightly and weekly mean sleep duration and bedtime, variability (standard deviation) of sleep duration and bedtime, and estimated arousals and sleep stages. Deviation from similar timeframes in 2019 were examined. All analyses were performed in Python. Results These data detail how sleep duration and timing changed longitudinally, stratified by age group and gender, relative to previous years’ data. Overall, 2020 represented a significant departure for all age groups and both men and women (P<0.00001). Mean sleep duration increased in nearly all groups (P<0.00001) by 5-11 minutes, compared to a mean decrease of 5-8 minutes seen over the same period in 2019. Categorically, sleep duration increased for some and decreased for others, but more extended than restricted. Sleep phase shifted later for nearly all groups (p<0.00001). Categorically, bedtime was delayed for some and advanced for others, though more delayed than advanced. Duration and bedtime variability decreased, owing largely to decreased weekday-weekend differences. WASO increased, REM% increased, and Deep% decreased. Additional analyses show stratified, longitudinal changes to sleep duration and timing mean and variability distributions by month, as well as effect sizes and correlations to other outcomes. Conclusion The pandemic was associated with increased sleep duration on average, in contrast to 2019 when sleep decreased. The increase was most profound among younger adults, especially women. The youngest adults also experienced the greatest bedtime delay, in line with extensive school-start-times and chronotype data. When given the opportunity, the difference between weekdays and weekends became smaller, with occupational implications. Sleep staging data showed that slightly extending sleep minimally impacted deep sleep but resulted in a proportional increase in REM. Wakefulness during the night also increased, suggesting increased arousal despite greater sleep duration. Support (if any) This research was supported by Fitbit, Inc.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1856 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Skabardonis ◽  
Pravin Varaiya ◽  
Karl F. Petty

A methodology and its application to measure total, recurrent, and nonrecurrent (incident related) delay on urban freeways are described. The methodology used data from loop detectors and calculated the average and the probability distribution of delays. Application of the methodology to two real-life freeway corridors in Los Angeles, California, and one in the San Francisco, California, Bay Area, indicated that reliable measurement of congestion also should provide measures of uncertainty in congestion. In the three applications, incident-related delay was found to be 13% to 30% of the total congestion delay during peak periods. The methodology also quantified the congestion impacts on travel time and travel time variability.


2005 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-61
Author(s):  
Kevin Nelson
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document