Beyond Peak Juice Bar

This essay discusses the connection between land use, cars, and housing affordability, looking first at the way freeways affected Los Angeles neighborhoods, and then at the ways changing technologies might remake them once again. She argues that cleaner, quieter, self-driving cars coupled with plans to cap freeways and build parks over them could make underused land alongside busy roadways attractive for new housing.

The Battle of the Bulb

Albany Bulb, a former landfill, is a thirty-one-acre battleground for the Bay Area’s competing progressive movements for social justice, environmental conservation, and politically engaged art. Street protest, lawsuits, regulatory jockeying, anarchist camp-ins, and art have all been deployed in the name of saving this oddball spit of land from and for its users of many species. Drawing from information collected over sixteen years of visits to the Bulb, including scores of hours of interviews beginning in 2013, this essay brings together work from an interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley students and Bulb residents to apply techniques of ethnography, contemporary archaeology, oral history, participatory mapping, mobile apps, botany, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to the study of the Bulb.

From the Green of Vietnam to Toes Painted with Nirvana

Thousands of women who survived the Vietnam War, whose husbands were sent to reeducation camps after working with American military, now live in the US, where nail salons anchor almost every strip mall and flourish inside luxury malls as well. The history of how Vietnamese women came to work in the nail industry and how Americans became accustomed to manicures and pedicures is entwined with the loss of home and landscape.

Reprogramming Blank Spaces in the City

There are acres and acres of unused land in cities, sitting derelict because of tax reasons or lack of funds. This article looks at the many initiatives that seek to add vitality to urban living by transforming vacant lots within the greater Los Angeles area.

Let There Be a Firmament in the Midst of the Waters

Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay was created to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, a World’s Fair, in 1939-40. The fair was an expression of an idealized order of both design and international relations. Neither survived much longer than the fair itself. The author considers the creation and re-creation of Treasure Island and the problem of building for an uncertain, ultimately unknowable future. This article is a critical appreciation of Andrew Shanken’s Into the Void Pacific, a design history of the fair.

A Vast Strangeness

This series of photographs illustrates both the scale and the vast strangeness of California’s Prison Industrial Complex. The prisons are photographed at night from a distance so that the lights from the prison illuminate the landscape. The light that controls the prison population stands as an indicator of state control. The visual effect references the images from the test sites of nuclear bombs, an enormous display of technocratic power reflecting a truly destructive invasion into otherwise peaceful pastoral settings.