The Boom Interview

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Bon
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
American West ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
Moral Economic ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

Lauren Bon is a transformative figure. Through her work with the Metabolic Studio and as a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation, she examines a handful of enormous and intersecting questions about Los Angeles, the American West, the way we think about landscapes, our water and where it comes from, what we owe the land and communities, and our moral, economic, and political relationships. In this interview she discusses her work, including recent and forthcoming projects such as Not A Cornfield, 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Bending the River Back into the City—the waterwheel she plans to build for a spur of the Los Angeles River that will sit adjacent to her studio on the edge of Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

Borderlands Fortress

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-289
Author(s):  
Maxwell Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
World War I ◽  
American West ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Focusing on the World War I era, this article examines Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times and William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. It argues that these two rival newspapers urged a particular urban identity for Los Angeles during World War I. If Los Angeles was to become the capital of the American West, the papers demanded that real and rhetorical barriers be constructed to protect the city from a dual Japanese-Mexican menace. While federal officials viewed the border as a line to be maintained, Chandler and Hearst feared it. Los Angeles needed to be a borderlands fortress. After the war, the two newspapers ably transitioned into an editorial style that privileged progress over preparedness. This paper reveals that the contested narrative of progress, based in transnational concerns, was crucial to the city’s early and ultimate development.

Water quality improvement by implementation of Proposition O in the Los Angeles river watershed, California

2008 ◽  
Vol 58 (12) ◽  
pp. 2271-2278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi-Hyun Park ◽  
Stephanie Pincetl ◽  
Michael K. Stenstrom
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Total Maximum Daily Load ◽  
Water Quality Standards ◽  
River Watershed ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
The City ◽  
Total Maximum ◽  
Daily Load

Proposition O was created to help the City of Los Angeles comply with the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) requirements under the Clean Water Act. In this study, the effectiveness of the Proposition O projects in Los Angeles River watershed was examined to show whether it achieves the goal of meeting water quality standards. Our analysis shows the most effective single project will remove at most 2% of pollutant loads from Los Angeles River Watershed and will not achieve TMDL compliance, although several projects can make important contributions to achieve compliance. The ranking results show that the projects that treat the runoff from the largest drainage area have the greatest impact on the water quality of Los Angeles river.

scholarly journals The Boom Interview

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
The City ◽  
New Buildings

This interview with Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne was conducted by Boom editor Jon Christensen and Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture, urban design, and urban planning, and director of cityLAB at UCLA. Hawthrone is charged with covering new developments in architecture and urban design in Los Angeles and the United States, and thinking and writing about new buildings and how they might-or might not-change the way we live. More broadly, his subject is not just buildings, but the city itself, and how we understand it and ourselves. Hawthorne calls his big project “The Third Los Angeles.” Like no other critic in the land, Hawthorne has grasped the challenge of telling the story of a great city-its past, present, and future-while playing a prominent role in shaping the city's vision of itself, intellectually, creatively, and pragmatically. Hawthorne discusses the evolution of public and private space in Los Angeles, competing plans for the future of the Los Angeles River, freeways, housing, climate, and much more.

Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110473
Author(s):  
Sayd Randle
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The Us ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Resource Storage ◽  
Scalar Politics ◽  
The City ◽  
Us West ◽  
Vital Resource

In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as a key moment within circulation, a dynamic, constitutive stillness that conditions flows. Three early-stage subterranean water stockpiling projects connected to the City of Los Angeles are explored, and used to demonstrate how the pursuit of storage is remaking material and political relationships within and between urban jurisdictions, while complicating long-fraught urban–rural relations within the region's waterscape. These shifts suggest the value of reorienting the notion of the urbanization of nature to better attend to the geographies of resource storage, in addition to those of resource flows and circulations.

Resisting Dispossession: Performative Spatial Irruptions and the LA Poverty Department

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chantal Welch
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
City Council ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Skid Row ◽  
Community Organizer ◽  
Formerly Homeless ◽  
The City ◽  
Neighborhood Council ◽  
The Way

I was so unimpressed with the city council. … They had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because Kevin [Michael Key] was running for councilman and everything. So, they wanted IDs … [The person tabling] asked me, “Well I need some id. Do you have any ID?” And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any id. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible. He was just going through the motions of making the sound. But he didn't know he was dealing with R-C-B. So when I dropped my passport, and I do mean dropped my passport on the table, that's when I got respect.—RCB, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

Water Use, Ethnic Conflict, and Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID S. TORRES-ROUFF
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Water Use ◽  
City Government ◽  
European American ◽  
Waste Waters ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
Environmental Inequality ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
The City

Beginning in 1873, Los Angeles replaced zanjas, or open canals, with pipes for irrigation and sewage. From the city's founding, the zanjas had carried irrigation and waste waters between the Los Angeles River and the citizens. Whereas Mexican public philosophy supported maintaining the zanjas for open access and maximal use, European American newcomers championed enclosed pipes as a means to improve sanitation and enhance opportunities for revenue. Yet city governors did not distribute sewer services equally, denying sewerage to Mexican and Chinese Angelenos. In doing so, they established new relationships of institutional,infrastructural, and environmental inequality between brown residents and the city government.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
American West ◽  
Global City ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

This introduction outlines how, following the Civil War, Los Angeles city boosters and capitalists built what would become the American West’s most important city by tying their region to the exploitation of Mexican labor and Mexican natural resources. They followed a template often used by urban boosters, particularly in cities in the American West, who turned to the surrounding countryside with investment schemes to fuel personal fortunes and municipal growth. At the heart of these plans were cities or urban cores. Urban elites considered the corpus that surrounded them as their hinterland or periphery. In Los Angeles, these plans for growth also assumed imperial and transnational dimensions. Urban promoters argued for “taking in” territories in neighboring Mexico. In foregrounding international urban development in the American West and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter argues for understanding Los Angeles as a city-empire. Similar to what geographers and urbanists describe as “global city-regions” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century functioned as a node of concentrated wealth and power in the borderlands economy and operated at an alternative scale to the nation-state. Ultimately, the city would function as the vanguard of an American commercial or “informal” empire in Mexico.

Flavors of Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Thai Americans ◽  
The Way

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research and rich oral histories to explore the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with the U.S. Cold War intervention in Thailand, he traces how the informal U.S. empire allowed Americans to discover Thai food and introduce it to adventurous eaters back home. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai cuisine in various ways to meet its rising popularity in urban and suburban spaces. America's fascination with Thai cuisine resulted in Thais having to remake themselves over the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the perceived exoticness and sensuousness of Thai food. Padoongpatt argues that this remaking produced "Thai Americans"—not a cultural identity rooted in ethnic difference but a social and political relationship defined by U.S. empire, liberal multiculturalism, and racial geography of Los Angeles. He also contends that while food brought Thais together, provided a sense of pride and visibility, and allowed Thai Americans to lay claims to their place in the city, it also led to divisions within the community and created barriers to collective mobilization for social justice. Padoongpatt deftly handles the history, politics, and tastes of Thai food, all while demonstrating the way racial projects emerge in seemingly mundane and unexpected places in an era of multiculturalism.

Map Room

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-5
Author(s):  
Natale Zappia
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Complex Series ◽  
Santa Monica ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
Before And After ◽  
West Los Angeles ◽  
The City

In the minds of Californians, then, Mulholland’s aqueduct represents a historical pivot; a before-and-after event when farmers lost and the city won; a moment when Los Angeles began to soak the desert with water and populate it with people. The idea that the city is an actual desert disguised by uninhibited water theft has permeated the minds of policy makers and popular culture (i.e. “Chinatown”) for so long that it is hard to rectify the map above with the “genesis myth” of the Owens River Aqueduct. Yet, in the minds of engineers in 1888 (when the population of Los Angeles stood at around 50,000—roughly half the size of Santa Monica today), Los Angeles—particularly West Los Angeles, was anything but a parched landscape. This map, in fact, reveals an incredibly complex series of patchworks containing irrigation lines (both newly constructed and older Rancho era Zanjas), “moist areas,” pipelines, washes, creeks, streams, swamps, rivers, canals, wells, and of course, the large and still wild Los Angeles River.

Utopian Visions in United States Urbanism

Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 164) (4) ◽  
pp. 157-186
Author(s):  
James M. McCutcheon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
New World ◽  
New Technology ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Oneida Community ◽  
The City

America’s appeal to Utopian visionaries is best illustrated by the Oneida Community, and by Etienne Cabet’s experiment (Moreana 31/215 f and 43/71 f). A Messianic spirit was a determinant in the Puritans’ crossing the Atlantic. The Edenic appeal of the vast lands in a New World to migrants in a crowded Europe is obvious. This article documents the ambition of urbanists to preserve that rural quality after the mushrooming of towns: the largest proved exemplary in bringing the country into the city. New York’s Central Park was emulated by the open spaces on the grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The garden-cities surrounding London also provided inspiration, as did the avenues by which Georges Haussmann made Paris into a tourist mecca, and Pierre L’Enfant’s designs for the nation’s capital. The author concentrates on two growing cities of the twentieth century, Los Angeles and Honolulu. His detailed analysis shows politicians often slow to implement the bold and costly plans of designers whose ambition was to use the new technology in order to vie with the splendor of the natural sites and create the “City Beautiful.” Some titles in the bibliography show the hopes of those dreamers to have been tempered by fears of “supersize” or similar drawbacks.

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