Words About Photographs
The First Seven Years of the Gallery
Frontmen, ILWU Local 13, Unhooking Cargo (plywood from Malaya) at the
Port of Los Angeles
School of Policy, Planning, and Development,
Ralph and Goldy Lewis Hall
University of Southern California
Words About Pictures
Introduction
In the last seven years the School of Policy, Planning, and Development has
exhibited a wide variety of document-photographs in its Gallery. The
accompanying texts were meant to put those images into a research and
scholarly context. Many were written by the photographers themselves, others
were written by the curator. We present them here to remind ourselves of the
range of concerns and interests of our School.
The School of Policy, Planning, and Development focuses on innovative
governance and place-based solutions for communities worldwide. We view Los
Angeles and Southern California as an archive and a laboratory. As a research
university, USC encourages its undergraduates to make actual research
experience a part of their education, and many of these projects were done by
undergraduates.
We have been grateful for the support we have received from the deans of
the School, the Archive Research Center and the Office of the Provost, and,
externally, the International Council for Shopping Centers Research Foundation,
the Pew Charitable Trusts through USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture,
and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. We are also
grateful for the cooperation of the University Libraries in arranging for the
archiving of these materials.
In the last year or two we have been fortunate to display some of the earlier
exhibits in the gallery in the lobby of the Applied Social Sciences Library at
USC. We thank Patricia Davis for this opportunity.
Martin H. Krieger
Curator of the Gallery
Professor of Planning
School of Policy, Planning, and Development
University of Southern California
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Table of Contents [Photographer Listed in Brackets]
1. Southern California as a Microcosm of the World (January 2000)
[Martin Krieger]
2. All the Malls of Southern California (Spring 2000) [Mitchell Glaser]
3. People Live Here: Every Place within Hoover-Jefferson-Vermont-Adams
(Part of Census Tracts 2218 and 2219) (Fall 2000) [Fernando Samayoa]
4. Living in Huntington Park (Spring 2001) [Pablo Garcia and Maya
Konieczny]
5. Union Pacific Avenue: An Industrial Neighborhood in Los Angeles (Fall
2001) [MK]
6. Medical Tijuana: Healthcare Entrepreneurship in a Border City (Winter
2001-2) [Mark Elliot]
7. Broadway Melodies: Harmonies and Counterpoints in the Line of
Industrial Transformation (Spring 2002) [Sonia Rivas]
8. Electricity in Brick, Concrete, and Stone: Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power Electricity Distribution Stations Nos. 1-20 (Summer
2002) [MK]
9. What Does Sustainability Look Like? (Winter 2002-3) [Krista
Sloniowski]
10. Sacred Transformation: Armenian Churches in Los Angeles (Spring
2003) [Yeghig Keshishian]
11. The Other Side of the River: Some Industrial Blocks on the East Side of
the Los Angeles River (Summer 2003) [MK]
12. Images of Berlin at the End of History (Fall 2003) [Berlin Laboratory]
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13. Artifacts and Replacements: How Communities are Transformed
(Boyle Heights) (Winter 2004) [Natalie Golnazarians and Jack Lam]
14. The Indoor Landscape of Los Angeles Manufacturing and Industry
(Summer 2004) [MK]
15. Documenting the Urban Sensorium: East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue &
Breed Street (Fall 2004-Winter 2005) [Eduardo Arenas and Junhan Tan]
16. The Place of Memory: Memorials and Roadside Shrines in Los Angeles
and in America (Spring 2005) [David Charles Sloane and Beverlie Conant
Sloane]
17. Displaying Ethnic Los Angeles: Small Business Owners & Vernacular
Visual Merchandising (Summer 2005) [Peter Reiss and MK]
18. Working at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach: Infrastructure as
a Choreography of Machinery, People, and Goods (Fall 2005-Winter 2006)
[MK]
19. Images of Development: Tanzania and Beijing, China (Spring 2006)
[USC Faculty, and the Beijing Lab]
20. Infrastructure: The Interstices of Los Angeles Innervated by Water,
Power, Agriculture, & Transport (Fall 2006) [MK]
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1. Southern California as a Microcosm of the World (January 2000)
Over the last several years, I have been photographically documenting some of
everyday urban life in Los Angeles. I want to develop an archive of images and
Super-8 films useful for longer-term comparative work on the continuing
transformations of a city. My goal is to be reasonably comprehensive, rather
than accumulating a select and perhaps idiosyncratic set of images.
I am concerned with the infrastructure for life. The phenomena include
commercial life (dry cleaners, nail parlors, trendy and not-so-trendy districts)
and urban redevelopment (tear-downs in wealthy neighborhoods and the
subsequent building of mansionettes). My idea is to cover a wide variety of
similar types of phenomena—say, 100 or more mansionettes or 25 fabric stores
in LA's fashion district. I focus on the façade of each building, in effect how
people advertise themselves to the world. What is remarkable is the variety of
each type, as well as the shared features of all the various representatives. I am
especially interested in the detailed way in which each representative makes up
the urban fabric. Often many of one type are agglomerated in a small area or
district; other times, they are sprinkled everywhere. My theme is that what is
everyday and ubiquitous is also particular and distinctive and local.
In every case, whether it be mansionettes or fabric stores or storefront
churches, these places are marked by ethnic, national, or linguistic signs, some
readily discerned by all, others rather more esoterically coded.
Buildings, their signage, and their context are strikingly informative,
even if they are not Gothic cathedrals with the Bible writ large in their statues
and structure. Yet they are as well modular, each one almost replaceable by its
kin.
I began my photodocumentation project in order to get hold of the rapidly
changing urban fabric of Los Angeles, because of vigorous and pulse-like
economic development, and because of substantial flows of new immigrant
groups over short periods of time, and earthquake and social unrest.
Rather than studying a small number of mega-projects, with their long
and precarious histories, I wanted to attend to the informal and the smaller scale,
and to the multiplicity and frequency of these changes, in their ubiquity and
their variety. Attending to the vernacular and everyday, one discovers how
urban redevelopment often takes place in this more disaggregated uncoordinated
fashion, again marked by particular ethnic, national, and linguistic signs.
Why photographs? Since I focus on façades, the images are literally
superficial. Photographs can provide a very high level of information—the
writing on the walls and the signs, the design, the color, the real estate. My goal
here is clear documentation, not fine art, not photojournalism, not the
documentary tradition in photography. [MK]
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2. All the Malls of Southern California (Spring 2000)
My name is Mitchell Glaser. I am a junior at the University of Southern
California, in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. In the spring
semester of my sophomore year, I took one of the required courses in the
Planning and Development major, "Design of the Good," with Professor Martin
Krieger. As part of this course, each student was to work on a project related to
design and tailored to his or her individual interests.
I have been fascinated with all aspects of urban development for as long as
I can remember, but shopping centers have always been of particular interest to
me. I remember the excitement I felt as a boy growing up in Phoenix whenever
my family went to Metrocenter, the largest mall in Arizona. The mammoth
building was impressive inside and out, with five department stores, over two
hundred smaller stores, restaurants, banks, movie theatres, and an ice rink. Not
only was it a major retail development, it was an institution in the Salt River
Valley, a social center, a "downtown" in a city that lacked most of the traditional
institutions of city life. This mixture of commerce, consumerism, and
community fixed the shopping mall in my mind as a unique and essential part of
our modern city and our modern society.
So when it came to develop the concept for this design project, I
immediately thought to do something involving malls. After some discussion,
Professor Krieger and I agreed that a visual documentation project on all of the
malls in the Los Angeles area would be interesting and worthwhile. So I set out
to catalogue the fifty-seven malls in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, and San
Bernardino counties, inside and out, in order to get a clear view of what malls
are—how they look, how they operate, and how they interact with nature, the
rest of the built environment, and the community. Over the course of eleven
days in the months of February, March, and April 1999, I drove around the
region and shot about 525 photos on twenty-one rolls of film. I think the end
result is an accurate portrayal of the mall and mall culture in contemporary
America.
Southern California is an appropriate place for this survey, with its
reputation of being a center of car culture, suburban culture, and consumer
culture—all the components of our post-war American lifestyle that made the
mall what it is today. Despite its reputation, L.A. was not an innovator in this
field. It was home to the nation's first major integrated shopping center
managed by one party (Crenshaw Center in 1947), but it lagged in development
of centers built around pedestrian malls (Seattle's Northgate in 1950) and in
enclosed, climate-controlled centers (Minneapolis' Southdale in 1956). But
malls have flourished here, and what one could say about malls here could be
said about malls anywhere.
What these photos show is how the mall is not only a mechanism for
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selling consumer goods but also a consumer good itself. In 50 years, the basic
concepts of mall development have not changed, but malls themselves are in a
constant evolution. Consumer tastes and opinions, expressed in both sales
volume and market surveys, determine what works and what doesn't, and where
malls are headed. Changes in population, demographics, and competition have
caused once-mighty malls to fall, with larger, more modern centers taking their
place. There are several types of centers geared towards different market
segments, their design and tenant mix unmistakably different. Furthermore,
there is the ongoing addition, renovation, and remerchandising that remake the
mall's image as times and tastes change.
But there is more to the mall than the business of retail. Malls are
community centers, one of the few places in the city where people from every
background come together. The mall is a controlled environment, an airconditioned "Main Street" that has become an essential part of the suburban
landscape and lifestyle. Its design and amenities are appreciated by the
community and many feel a close relation to it. When a mall closes, not only is
it a commercial failure, but it has also failed the community it served. The
"downtown" is gone, and so is that unique sense of community. [Mitchell
Glaser, Planning Undergraduate, USC]
I teach an undergraduate upper-division course, “Design of the Good,” about
how value is embedded in designed things, programs, places, and institutions.
The original impulse came from my reading Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790),
in which it is argued that the aesthetic and the ethical have a similar logical or
formal structure, although there is no applicable law (such as the golden rule) to
aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste, neither
immediate nor lawlike, but judgments where we demand of others that they
agree with our judgments—even though they often disagree with us, and
demand that we agree with them. As we go along in our discussion, we learn to
point out features of the work that ought to allow someone else to see with their
own eyes why a work is the way we claim it is.
So a second impulse comes out of criticism of works of art or literature,
where particular details as well as architectonic and formal analysis are
employed to point out what is going on in a work, its meanings, and the quality
it may possess. In fact, such particulars and structures are never sufficient to
decide if a work is of particularly high quality, because it is possible to confect a
work that fulfills all the given details and structures, yet which is manifestly
awful.
A third impulse comes from more general considerations of the nature of
design, in particular the Argument from Design for the existence of God world
is manifestly orderly, such order could not have happened by chance, and hence
there must have been a Supreme Architect, or so it has been argued. Hume
pointed out that the world could have been made by a group of craftsmen, who
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botched and bungled it until they got it to work at all.
When we went around the room in my class last year, each student
indicating what they might study for its design, meaning, and quality, Mitchell
Glaser mentioned "shopping centers." He was deadly serious, and as he
testifies, he has been fascinated by shopping centers, and shopping malls in
particular, since he was a toddler. We talked a bit more, and almost as a lark I
suggested that he visit all the malls of Southern California. He took up the
challenge, and this exhibition is the product of his traveling to all the "missions"
of the late twentieth century.
What we hope to do in teaching is to convert our students' interests,
fascinations, and obsessions into understanding and critical insight. In what way
has this place been designed, what values are embedded in the design, and how
might it be otherwise? What is wonderful here is to have all the malls in one
place, to see them as expressions of commerce and fantasy. [MK]
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3. People Live Here: Every Place within Hoover-Jefferson-Vermont-Adams
(Part of Census Tracts 2218 and 2219) (Fall 2000)
I have been interested in photographically documenting everyday, ordinary Los
Angeles life, parts and aspects of Los Angeles that make up its fabric but which
are taken for granted. Fernando Samayoa ('00), a Planning and Development
major, and a student from several of my classes, walked in one day and
suggested that he photograph all the housing within a substantial area around
campus. With the aid of Christopher Williamson, of the Geographic Information
Systems Laboratory of USC, he settled on the area bounded by Hoover,
Jefferson, Vermont, and Adams. And then, over the next few months during
Spring semester of 2000, Fernando went out and photographed (almost) every
place (home, business, sometimes alleys) in the area, more than 600 images.
This is not a mechanical endeavor, since there are houses behind houses, there
are streets within streets, there is life beyond the sidewalk. So in doing such a
survey, not only is your eye educated to look and see what is ordinarily not
noticed, your knowledge of urban planning and development allows you to see
what is there and to see it as in part exemplifying what you learned in classes
and studios. You will want to photograph some places from several aspects, so
as to get hold of more of the complexities of a place.
To take photographs you have to slow down. For you are not on your way,
walking briskly to someplace else in the neighborhood. You are here, right now,
trying to figure out what is in front of you—and often that is not so clear as it
might seem on first thought or even at first sight. Often, there are multiple layers
and multiple uses. And, notably, you are on the particular streets within this
area, not driving by on one of the main streets that bound it. For you could work
at USC and drive by this area for twenty years, and never enter within this area
except to shop in University Village.
But, of course, people live their lives here: Lots of students, lots of ordinary
families, churches, businesses, even parts of USC. I wrote "almost" above
because we are not sure we have photographed every place. There are those
streets within streets and houses behind houses. So if you find you have been
left out, please let us know. And, of course, neighborhoods are dynamic. If our
time scale is decades, change is quite rapid. There is filtering, with housing
becoming less well kept; maintenance, housing kept in good repair; and
upgrading and gentrification, when housing stock is renovated and made "better"
than new. Religious institutions settle in, perhaps grow or move, or decline. One
of the purposes of this project is to document what is there, right now. For in ten
years we can do another snapshot of the area to discover, by comparison and
contrast, what has changed, what has persevered, and what has disappeared.
Hence, it is vital that visual documentation not only be well annotated, but that it
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be archived in a place where it will not be forgotten or misplaced or destroyed.
[MK]
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4. Living in Huntington Park (Spring 2001)
Demographic transition, waves of immigration, and geographic segregation are
again transforming Los Angeles, revitalizing and reforming its urban fabric.
Huntington Park, neighboring South Los Angeles, is part of a network of small
cities that in the past twenty years have redefined their place within the
metropolis. Neither a danger zone nor lost space, Huntington Park is vital, rich
with multi-generational family life, and exhibits remarkable inventiveness and
self-reliance. Maya Konieczny and Pablo Garcia, seniors in the School of
Architecture, have photographically documented the streetscape and who is on
the street at what times of day, the entrepreneurial innovations and informal
commercial activity, and the ways people use formerly neglected spaces,
whether they be streets, alleys, or garages—so regenerating and enlivening a
community.
Ms. Konieczny and Mr. Garcia wanted to understand better how architects can
contribute to working class communities, communities unlikely to commission
designers to develop, say, "a multiple dwelling unit housing several immigrant
families." They realized that they first needed to make a close study of how
people actually live their lives in a particular place. My course on
photodocumentation in planning provided them with the occasion to actually do
such a study.
Going out and photographing a place surely forces one to see more of what is
going on there. What is perhaps even more striking are the actual photographs
themselves, where one begins to see more systematically phenomena that are
pervasive and significant. And so one makes discoveries about city life and
culture. Just who is in the pictures at what time of day?—women shopping in
the morning. Why are there recurrent images of Guadalupe on many of the walls
and signs?—to ward off graffiti. Why are these particular storefront churches,
with these theologies, so prevalent?—they are the dominant churches in the
places where many of the immigrant residents used to live. Why are all these
people surrounding a lunch truck in a parking lot of a closed-for-the-day
furniture store well after the sun has set?—this is an improptu yet established
outdoor restaurant. And, if you create a linear montage of photographs of the
main commercial street, Pacific Avenue, you begin to appreciate what makes up
a vibrant street life in a place. For you have all of it there in front of you, at one
time, and you can look again and again to find out more what is going on.
The achievement here is actually doing the work, going out and looking and
seeing and photographing, and going back again and again to a place. For then,
you begin to see more, your initial intuitions and guesses either confirmed or
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revised by the concrete specificity of a place. The history of photography and
the history of urban planning and design have been intimately intertwined,
whether it be Charles Marville's photographs of Paris before and after
Haussmann's reconstruction, or Jacob Riis's and Lewis Hine's photographs of
New York's poor and working class life. [MK]
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5. Union Pacific Avenue: An Industrial Neighborhood in Los Angeles (Fall
2001)
Los Angeles is the leading industrial center in the United States. “Industry” is a
very broad classification, and it includes resources, services, construction,
manufacturing, agriculture, mining, transportation, and communication. More
specifically, for Los Angeles it surely includes aircraft, aerospace,
entertainment, the port, petroleum, clothing, computers and tools and scientific
instruments, furniture, rubber and plastics, chemicals, fabricated metal products
and iron and steel, and printing and publishing. On the street, some industry
looks generic, housed in large rectangular boxes—especially in industrial parks
and industrial cities. Other industry looks quite specific, with tanks and pipes
and smokestacks, or with large piles of sand or garbage or scrap. The detail and
complexity, seen merely from the street and through open doors, demand a
knowledge of industrial processes. Industrial documentary allows us to begin to
ask, What is this?, Why is it here?, What was this once?, How does it work?
I came upon Union Pacific Avenue in the course of an earlier project
documenting storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles. Sure enough, to the
north especially, there is a residential neighborhood (and hence the churches).
But on the Avenue, and mostly toward the south and the railroad yard, there is a
wonderfully rich and compact industrial neighborhood threaded through by
well-used railroad tracks. And in places the residential and the industrial are
interdigitated, reflecting historical precedent and changing usage and zoning,
creating a remarkable urban fabric. [MK]
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6. Medical Tijuana: Healthcare Entrepreneurship in a Border City (Winter
2001-2)
I arrived in Tijuana in the summer of 2000 with three other Sustainable Cities
doctoral students for a one-month residency. We worked on a city park project
administered by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, our host institution. Ecoparque,
an innovative wastewater reclamation facility perched on a hillside, offered a
fine view of the redeveloped tourist district, Zona Rio. Yet I was hardly tempted
to stroll its wide boulevards punctuated by didactic monuments. Instead, every
day I grabbed a taxi to Zona Centro, the historic center of Tijuana. Though the
monumental planning of Zona Rio seemed forlorn in its emptiness, Zona Centro
percolated with energy. Immediately, I noticed the concentration of healthcare
facilities in Zona Centro.
While clinicas are abundant in Los Angeles, they remain relatively
decentralized. In Zona Centro, however, providers cluster tightly to remain
accessible to clients arriving from throughout the city by taxi. But there also
exists US-based demand for affordable health care, and so providers choose to
locate near to the crossing to service clients traveling from the United States.
Though clinicas are sometimes located near the colonias which surround
Tijuana, Zona Centro remains the preferred location for healthcare providers.
From colonias near and far, people converge in Zona Centro via those
ubiquitous Country Squire station wagon taxis recycled from Southern
California suburban family service. They buy clothes and daily necessities from
the work-a-day shops, food stands, and bakeries, and they gather together in the
city’s main plaza on Sundays.
In the confines of Zona Centro, however, competition should thin the ranks of
providers, yet large and small they jockey for advantage by using various
strategies to attract business. Providers, in fact, may not even be physicians; the
designation “doctor” is perhaps more culturally than legally defined in this
healthcare landscape – a situation far different from that in Los Angeles. Zona
Centro is urban; there is centrality and vitality. While back in Los Angeles, only
Broadway can claim the sort of spirit and Brownian motion that characterizes
Zona Centro.
Documenting this urban pastiche of doctors, dentists, homeopaths, optometrists,
hypnotists, and faith healers of every kind (including tarot card readers), and the
radiologists, laboratories, and pharmacies which support them, is the first phase
in an ongoing study of transnational entrepreneurship in a border city. [Mark
Elliot, Doctoral Student in Urban Planning, USC]
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7. Broadway Melodies: Harmonies and Counterpoints in the Line of
Industrial Transformation (Spring 2002)
In the past year or so, Sonia Rivas has photographed along downtown Broadway
in Los Angeles. Rivas lives on Broadway, and noticed how rapidly the area was
changing. By displaying matched series of strip photographs, each strip taken a
half year apart, the transformations might be highlighted.
Cities constantly transform themselves. Areas that were once thought to be
moribund come back to life. Streets catering to one class become meccas for
another. And, of course, much of the city remains the same for long periods of
time. What is remarkable are those moments when transformation is nascent,
perhaps to succeed or not.
There is a history of visual recording of street life. We might think of Charles
Marville’s and Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris’s built environment,
impressionist paintings of Paris life, or Walker Evans’s photographs of America
from the 1930s on. In their making artworks, Ed Ruscha and Robbert Flick have
made strip photographs of Los Angeles streets, as have the location scouts for
the motion picture industry.
The School’s interest in photographic documentation is twofold. Going out to
photograph, students learn to see the city in new ways, and learn to pay attention
to what they ordinarily ignore. And, with the assistance of the University’s
Archive Research Center, we are developing an archive of photographs of
contemporary Los Angeles, valuable for future research and inquiry. The
university, with its very long institutional perspective, is the ideal place to retain
and preserve these materials, and to develop means of finding them when they
are needed decades hence.
For the moment, it still appears that ordinary photographic film and prints are
the best way to archive images if we are concerned with the long term (say, a
century or more). Digital means are still too much in flux to be sure that the
needed legacy equipment will be readily available on this time scale. [MK]\
Living On Broadway Street
As a little 5 year old girl, I remember crossing over the Rio Grande at the
Matamoros, Tamaulipas US/Mexico border in Texas. I would see the highschool girls dressed up in their school uniforms—plaid skirts, white shirts and
socks—walking to and from school. Sometimes the girls were hanging out in the
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evenings talking with the boys, or grouped with other girls having what
appeared to be a great time. To me, these girls were independent, free-spirited
and grown up…I wanted to be just like them. Independence and urban living
went together. From my first memory, I knew that the city was where I wanted
to live someday.
I’ve lived at the Grand Central Square Apartments at the corner of 3rd Street and
Broadway for 2 years. Finding this place was a dream come true. As an urban
planning student, this was the icing on the cake. Not only was I able to take bus
line #81 directly to school and back, I could walk the seven blocks to work. I
was determined to know my neighborhood.
Although I don’t know every nook and cranny, or know everyone’s names on
the street as I had vowed to do, I have seen much of the activity and many
changes. Some merchants have come and gone in less than a month, others have
been here for decades. I’ve seen how the street peddlers work and how they stay
off each other’s turf; the mentally ill dancing man ride away on his bike at the
end of the day; the silent young black man who stands at the same location all
day and always looks south as if waiting for something or someone. Then
there’s the boy with the giant feet (elephantiasis) who sometimes sits, loitering,
outside Taco Bell. He went to Guiness Book of World Records to register
himself as the person with the largest feet. If he wins, he is awarded $75,000.
Thoughts of policy implications cross my mind as I see social capital among the
street people; vendors as they struggle in competition, peeling the mangos to
make that extra dollar—watching the police or the BID ambassadors take away
their livelihoods. This street is full of entrepreneurs who seem to have a different
set of business rules and regulatory constraints. The informal sector sells leather
belts, watches, turtles, roses, bus tokens, batteries, and one lady even sells
toothpaste and gum. The food vendors sell bacon-wrapped jalapeño hotdogs,
donuts, yellow cherries, fruit doused in chili power and lime, and coffee, and my
favorite—the corn vendor. Several new newsstands have take up shop on the
sidewalks. I find it interesting that here, adult-oriented magazines are visible and
within reach of anyone and everyone including children as opposed to the local
7-11 where the magazines are enclosed in opaque wrapping and behind the
counter.
When I first moved in, the street was under construction and noisy. One day, the
construction crew had removed the street surface and exposed the rail tracks that
once guided the Red Cars during Broadway’s earlier and livelier economic
times. What a privilege! Unfortunately, this is a sample of the kinds of stories
you will not know about simply by viewing the street on this wall. Downtown
[Broadway] has gone through a number of changes the last several years and
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will continue to do so for several more. As a student and future city planner this
is my contribution to USC, the community, previous Broadway shoppers and
future generations to use for research, reminiscence, or just curiosity.
There is so much to see. After two and a half years of walking up and down the
street, I still find myself finding new discoveries. Oftentimes the discoveries
were there all along, but for some reason, that day the detail caught my
attention. There are changes every day on the street. I welcome you to look and
discover on your own the obvious and not so obvious. I enjoyed documenting
the street and hope that you will appreciate the resulting images as much as I do.
[Sonia Rivas, Master of Planning student, USC]
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8. Electricity in Brick, Concrete, and Stone: Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power Electricity Distribution Stations Nos. 1-20 (Summer
2002)
Initially, electricity was generated not far from where it was used to power
industry and to light businesses and homes. In time, economies of scale,
improvements in the capacity to transmit electrical energy over long distances at
high voltages, and so the possibility of generating electricity close to energy
sources (coal, hydropower), led to the separation of generation and
consumption. That high voltage electricity needed to be received from
elsewhere, converted to lower voltages, and distributed locally to users. Within
two or three decades of the introduction of electrical lighting in cities, there was
a network of electrical receiving and distribution stations throughout the city.
A complex and sophisticated and mostly-hidden technology allows us to treat
electricity as a utility. But that technology also produced signs of its presence: in
overhead wires and insulators, and in the buildings that contained the
transformers that converted electricity to lower voltages. What is remarkable is
that in Los Angeles, at least, the distribution stations were temples and
monuments within otherwise unremarkable commercial and residential areas.
Some were below ground or made to fit inconspicuously into the neighborhood.
But for the most part they towered over adjacent structures, in their size and
their significant form.
When I started to notice the Department of Water and Power’s electrical
distribution stations, after having encountered more than a few in my previous
project documenting storefront churches, I discovered that they were not much
noted or noticed other than as ordinary unremarkable parts of the landscape.
Eventually, I resolved to see them all. There are about 135 stations. I have
photographed just about all of them. Their dispersed locations provide an
effective way of seeing more of Los Angeles more systematically. They are
often the only monuments in their neighborhoods.
In my various projects, I try to defamiliarize what is ordinarily taken as “just
there.” Now, I have yet to go inside one of the stations. My interest is how they
mark the streetscape. If I were in the sixth or fifth grade, we might arrange a
tour of a station. (There is even a Magic Schoolbus book about electrical
generation.) In any case, often you can see transformers on the roof, or in the
backyard of a station. [MK]
(For more on electrification, see T. P. Hughes, Networks of Power, as well as
biographies of Thomas Edison. Francis Ponge has written a paean to electricity,
commissioned by the French electricity company, to encourage architects to
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make provision in their designs for electrical outlets, etc. And, of course, there is
J. Cole’s The Magic Schoolbus and the Electric Field Trip.)
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9. What Does Sustainability Look Like? (Winter 2002-3)
As an Urban Planning student with a background in ecology and alternative
technology, I have always been interested in how human communities interact
with and affect their surrounding natural environment. Historically, that impact
has been an afterthought or side issue. As environmental well-being becomes
more of a problem affecting the overall quality of our communities, more of our
buildings, infrastructure and open spaces may be designed so that they are
integrated with the functional needs of the surrounding ecosystems.
It would appear that sustainable development design does not follow
any specific form. But in each case I have examined, the form was designed to
include environmental function. This quality is essential to their success within
the community and within their environment.
Most people have a general concept of sustainable development, even if they
cannot provide you with an actual example or with some model of what it would
look like. For what makes something sustainable is its function, not its style.
But we are likely to identify and understands something through its image. So it
is natural to wonder if there is an emerging form that follows the sustainable
function. Is there some kind of consistent style or image for the sustainable
urban landscape? It is very hard to imagine that an idea that promises to
transform all developed space, and society’s relationship to nature, wouldn’t
look like anything specific and generic. I decided to find examples of
sustainable development in the Los Angeles area and document what they
looked like, whatever that turned out to be.
I soon realized that this would not be very easy. Sustainability is a very
popular idea. But its application is so broad and ambiguous it is used to describe
almost anything that could somehow be considered natural or “green.” This
includes anything from botanical shampoo to green glass pebbles used as lawn
art. There is a lot of discussion and coverage of sustainability programs, as well
as of activities in distant third world countries that are supported by a variety of
local California environmental groups. But programs are not physical
developments, and the efforts in far away places do not exist in our built
environment here. I kept looking and finally found some examples of
sustainable development in Southern California that met more stringent criteria:
A design that intentionally integrates the project with the surrounding ecosystem
processes; one that reduces the environmental impacts of the project and its
waste products as much as possible; and that serves as many purposes as
possible in order to get the greatest amount of utility out of a single development
project.
All of the examples I found were built under different circumstances
for different reasons. They have different degrees of sustainability. Some are
very proactive and thoroughly integrated with their environment in a number of
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ways, while others have a few sustainable components that serve a particularly
critical environmental purpose. But in every case the idea of sustaining the
larger environmental system was part of their purpose and design. The projects
pictured here are the Ballona Wetlands Restoration, Village Green (Sylmar),
Sepulveda Flood Control Basin, the Center for Regenerative Studies (California
State Polytechnic University at Pomona, and the Southern California Gas
Company (Downey). [Krista Sloniowski, Master of Planning student, USC]
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10. Sacred Transformation: Armenian Churches in Los Angeles (Spring
2003)
There are thirty-six Armenian churches in the Los Angeles basin, with
concentrations in Glendale, Hollywood, Pasadena, and Montebello. There are
twenty Armenian Protestant churches, the majority of which adhere to the
Evangelical Church; thirteen Armenian Apostolics (five under the jurisdiction of
the Catholicos of Antelias (Cilicia), eight under the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin);
and two Armenian Catholic churches.
In their design, the church buildings are a syncretism of traditional
Armenian design and twentieth-century California architecture. It is that
transformation from tradition and Armenia to modernity and Southern
California that is most striking.
Armenia is a country with a more than two- thousand year history. Christianity
became the state religion in 301 CE, Armenia being the first state to adopt
Christianity. Distinctively, the Armenian Apostolic Church accepted only the
earliest Christian doctrines. In the nineteenth century, European and American
missionizing led to the formation of the Armenian Protestant Church and the
Armenian Catholic Church. Throughout the history of Armenia, when it was
controlled by external forces (often under the auspices of Islam) and without a
state, and in the Diaspora communities, the Armenian Apostolic Church became
the enduring symbol of the distinctive Armenian people and their land.
More than a hundred years ago, Armenians came to Southern California, at first
to Fresno, and then to Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were migrants who
had settled first on the East Coast, and only later moved to the West Coast. More
recently, many Armenians came directly from the Soviet Union.
In building churches in the Diaspora, Armenians wanted to recall the
ancient edifices in Armenia, yet those churches were adapted to the styles and
realities of their new homes. Those ancient edifices were based on a Roman
ground plan and the Greek basilica. The church should be oriented toward the
East, it almost always has a pointed pyramidal dome resting on arches extending
above the roof, and its proportions and guidelines are set by past Armenian
examples.
Church architecture is always the presence of the sacred in the everyday world.
For the Armenians, the Church is as well a sign of their survival and endurance.
[Yeghig L. Keshishian, Undergraduate Student, USC]
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11. The Other Side of the River: Some Industrial Blocks on the East Side of
the Los Angeles River (Summer 2003)
When I started photographing in what is called the Pico-Aliso district, I did not
know much about it at all. I was attracted to an industrial area on the flats below
Boyle Heights, just across the river from Downtown. (I cannot recall just what
had put that area in mind, except perhaps for a Mapquest aerial that showed
there would be industrial buildings there.) I got off the 10 Freeway at 4th Street,
went West down the hill and made the first right. That was Clarence Street.
There was a new-looking housing development on one side of the street, and
sure enough there was industry on the other. Parking my car on Clarence, I went
around the block counter-clockwise, photographing continuously. I went in and
out of “indented” streets, and eventually I came back to where I started.
I knew nothing about the neighborhood. Eventually, using
www.google.com, I discovered through some articles in the LA Weekly that I
had been in gang country, that the Pico-Aliso name referred to two housing
projects in the area, that the Moon Market was an important landmark, and that
sure enough there had been several notable homicides in the last few years. My
only protection is that I am often photographing at 9 in the morning, when the
only people who are out are mothers, schoolchildren, and people who work in
the area.
Further study of Mapquest aerials revealed the housing projects, nearby
single-family homes, and more industrial blocks. I found the other industrial
areas on the East side of the Los Angeles River, and decided to visit them all.
This exhibit is the result of my northward trek. I am now in the process of going
southward. The photographing is part of a larger project (in part supported by
the Haynes Foundation), to document industrial neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
And what is characteristic of these neighborhoods is the nearby residential areas,
often interdigitating with the industrial, a theme in Greg Hise’s work.
Manifestly, my format is taken from the work of Robbert Flick and Ed
Ruscha, and various surveys of the built city. The enlarged proof sheets help me
see the continuity of the blocks, the varieties of buildings and uses—all in one
glance. The paper is Fuji Crystal Archive paper, known for its long term
stability (60+ years). Most of my work is done with Kodachrome 64, a
transparency film known for its long term stability (200+ years). For this exhibit
I tried a variety of color negative films, since my laboratory could make such
enlarged proof sheets only from negative film (the particular enlarger is attached
to a particular processing machine). I tried Fuji NPS, a comparatively lowcontrast film meant for weddings (the bride’s white and the groom’s black), a
film that also has very good flesh tones and accurate colors. Fuji NPC is a more
contrasty version of the same film. And Fuji’s Reala is said to be a bit perkier
still. [By the way, Kodak has comparable films in the Portra series.] All of these
films have quite fine grain. Kodak Gold or Fuji Superia consumer films are
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rather more contrasty and the colors are punchier, what most people prefer for
their family pictures—they provide more “color.” I use a Leica R-8 single-lens
reflex camera since its viewfinder is particularly bright and works well for
eyeglass wearers. The lens is a Schneider Super-Angulon PC (perspective
control) lens. It allows me to shift the image on the film quite substantially and
so be able to take in tall buildings close up without tilting the lens and getting
converging verticals—much as a view camera is employed by architectural
photographers. [MK]
When Los Angeles is the topic of conversation people invariably talk about
either sunshine, citrus, and surf or freeways, sprawl, air pollution, and
immigration. Industry, production, and ancillary activities such as warehousing
do not figure prominently in our conception of the city. Yet manufacturing has
been essential to Southern California’s growth from the late nineteenth century
to the present. Initial production was in vinticulture, citriculture and then
corporate agriculture with its attendant boxes and cans, cold storage, and pipes
for irrigation, all of which was produced locally. Agriculture was first
supplemented and eventually surpassed by extractive industries such as oil and
its refining (with associated storage and transshipment), automobile assembly
(and the production of tires, glass, and a host of components), cinema, aviation
(and after the Second World War, aerospace), and consumer products (such as
garments and specialty foods). As this chronology suggests, greater Los
Angeles has had and continues to have one of the more diverse manufacturing
economies in the United States. The federal census of manufactures has ranked
the region second to fifth in a host of industrial sectors from the 1920s forward.
Today Los Angeles leads the nation in the number of manufacturing
jobs and greater Los Angeles is the production center for the world’s sixth
largest economy, the state of California. You would never know this from
histories of industrial development or from studies of industrial architecture and
industrial landscapes. These accounts are fixed in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh,
Chicago, and New York. Think of Henry Ford’s assembly line (and Charles
Sheeler’s photographs of River Rouge), Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time-andmotion studies (an analysis of photographic evidence), and the rise of
corporations (with their skyscraping headquarters dominating images of a
Central Business District). In Los Angeles, industry for local markets and for
export has been largely invisible to residents and tourists and has remained
largely invisible to the present. When, every decade or so, manufacturing has
been included in the Southern California scene, it is presented as a revelation
rather than as a historical formation.
Martin Krieger has set out to change the way we think and talk about
Los Angeles. His photographs of the city’s industrial districts reveal the
complexity of a landscape developed over time; the layering of property
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ownership, investment capital, building construction, and land use policies; the
cycling through of firms, workers, and goods. His images allow us to study
places we pass by each day yet rarely stop to analyze. There are blocks like
Clarence, Anderson, Lamar, and Lacy on both sides of the Los Angeles River
and throughout the city and Krieger is documenting these industrial
neighborhoods systematically. At first glance there may be little of interest in
the seemingly modest blocks “On the Other Side of the River.” However, as we
make our way around the blocks represented in these photographs we come to
recognize their typicality. It dawns on us then just how ubiquitous these places
are. By the final panel we come to see industrial neighborhoods as the basic
building block for twentieth century Los Angeles. At that moment we begin to
consider the city’s development in an utterly new way. [Greg Hise, Associate
Professor of Urban History, USC]
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12. Images of Berlin at the End of History (Fall 2003)
In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just a
perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
–– F. Fukuyama, The End of History
The devastation of Berlin’s urban form and social systems in the 20th century,
and subsequent deconstruction of it history, have been so total and so
devastating that redeeming the city’s wholeness is a monumental challenge for
urban planning. Even if Fukuyama is right about history having ended with the
collapse of the Berlin Wall, the conscience of history will continue to foment in
Berlin for some time to come.
In March of 2003, sixteen graduate students from the School of Policy, Planning
and Development visited Berlin as part of an international development and
planning laboratory/workshop (led by Professor Tridib Banerjee), to collaborate
with students from the Technische Universitat Berlin on the redevelopment of
Berlin’s Templehof Airport. Although we were researching context for a
specific project, it was not long before our collective documentation began to
reveal the city’s contradictions, historical ironies and startling transformation
beneath the development juggernaut.
For the foreseeable future, it is almost certain that Berlin will have no respite for
the “caretaking” of its “museum of history.” Rather, as these photographs and
maps attest, the story of Berlin’s torment and subsequent redevelopment has
given birth to an entirely new host of tensions: between the banality of shopping
malls and the artifice of reconstructed monuments; between the ghosts of
nationalism and the quest for authenticity; between globalization and cultural
continuity; between condemnation and redemption.
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13. Artifacts and Replacements: How Communities are Transformed
(Boyle Heights) (Winter 2004)
Cities can change dramatically over short periods of time. Yet what was once
there may still leave its signs and material artifacts. Or, it may be effaced: by
new institutional structures such as parks and schools; by inadvertent repainting;
or by neglect.
Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, used to be known in the 1920s through the
1940s as a Jewish neighborhood. Just now it is mainly Latino/a. (Of course,
there were and are other significant ethnic groups.) What was once Brooklyn
Avenue (New York Jewish) is now Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Yet, the
businesses on East Cesar E. Chavez are much like those that were on Brooklyn.
The adjacent City Terrace industrial area (the City Industrial Tract) still has
some Jewish-owned businesses, including a unique casket factory.
Jack Lam and Natalie Golnazarians have photographed some of what is left
of the Jewish community in Boyle Heights, and what has replaced it. The
artifacts are just that, and the replacements often echo the original uses of the
built environment. Synagogues and businesses become churches and similar
sorts of businesses. Storefront shuls (shtieblach, little places) become retail
stores again; home synagogues become just homes.
The Boyle Heights area is changing still, and is likely to be subject to urban
renewal in the next two decades. Material artifacts that have withstood the
neighborhood’s ethnic changes may well be destroyed. So it is valuable to have
a systematic photographic record of some of the area’s heritages. (Here, think of
Charles Marville’s photographically documenting Napoleon III’s Paris before it
was eviscerated by Baron Haussmann. Such photographic evidence is surely
partial, but useful nonetheless.)
Eduardo Arenas has been systematically documenting the events and
actions that are precursors to the next likely transformation of Boyle Heights.
On an “active” map, he has plotted, much as on a weather map, the
displacements, the political actions, and the crucial events in this process. In
further work on the Pico-Aliso district adjacent to Boyle Heights, he has
developed an analytical chronology of its transformations over the past decades.
A personal note: In the end, you have got to go look and see what’s actually
there. Photographing is a powerful way of doing so. So has been my experience
of fieldwork. All the photographs, all the aerials on www.mapquest.com, all the
multi-aspect images as in Pictometry and www.wanadoo.fr, do not displace
actual bodily experience, the things themselves. Only then did I realize that the
Bonnie Beach Place I photographed in the City Industrial Tract must be the
same street (a street that goes North-South through East Los Angeles) as the
Bonnie Beach Place I encountered in the Metropolitan Warehouse District on
Union Pacific Avenue. The Jewish cemeteries on South Downey Road are just a
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few blocks from the factories on Union Pacific Avenue, albeit now separated by
a freeway. Only then did I realize that the hundreds of storefront churches I once
photographed are likely to be no more enduring than the storefront synagogues
of Boyle Heights (and hence my photographing is inherently elegiac). And only
then did I realize that the Department of Water and Power electrical distribution
station Number 23, on Indiana St—one of 150 such sites I photographed
throughout Los Angeles—was right in the middle of Boyle Heights. I “should
have” known all this before I did my fieldwork. But I did not. Places are
abstractions until they have been explored through their streets and their
functions and their typologies. The city has an integrity in its layers and in its
interdigitated parts. [MK]
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14. The Indoor Landscape of Los Angeles Manufacturing and Industry
(Summer 2004)
Things are made by people using tools and machines, in places called factories,
workshops, and industrial districts. Ordinarily, we do not see these manufactures
in action, at best being aware of them by noise, smoke, and traffic. Still, we can
walk the streets of most industrial neighborhoods; often, they are adjacent to or a
part of residential areas. In Southern California, a mild climate and good
weather allows for many open bays and windows, so one can see what is going
on inside without being invited in. And sometimes I am invited in to look and
photograph and talk. How is something made? How is this workplace or
manufacturing process organized? I am fascinated by these processes and sites,
as a whole, as landscapes of labor and production. For the most part, I have
focused on unobtrusive photographs in smaller light industrial firms housed in
repurposed buildings, rather than formal compositions of larger heavy industries
in purpose-built structures.
A characteristic feature of landscapes, as images, is that the people in them
are comparatively small, so you can just figure out what they are doing, the
details of their physiognomy marginally available. Although the lighting is
usually fairly uniform in landscapes, sometimes the lighting is variegated,
clouds and shadows allowing for vastly different luminances on the ground. In a
factory, lighting is often local and specific to each process, with overall light
coming from skylights. My indoor landscapes show the scene of production, the
system, the factory—of a building filled with machinery, materials, people, and
social organization. (This is just what industrial archaeologists would like to
have for earlier times.) In effect, I combine the documentary and the landscape
traditions. Early industrial photographs often showed workers posing,
sometimes proudly, with their products and processes and machines. Mine allow
people to go about their work, although they are surely aware that I am
photographing.
All the photographs were taken with a wide-angle lens, comparatively close
in, whether I am looking-in, surveying an indoor landscape, or portraying people
at work. Kodachrome film still provides the most archival color images and I
used it most of the time.
My industrial photography shows what people do and where they do it—as
part of a system or a collective enterprise. I want to show what’s there, what’s
ordinary, repeated in varied particular ways in the factories and industrial sites
of Los Angeles. Yet these scenes are impermanent, and photographs offer us one
way of preserving them. If one were to listen to the working people speaking, as
well as many of the proprietors, you would hear Spanish as the lingua franca.
Also, there is, in fact, a long tradition of Spanish-speaking residents (namely,
Mexican-Americans) in many of these areas.
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At Valerie Trading, they sort and eventually resell used clothing collected by
charities. At Farmhouse Furniture they make a distinctive line of furniture. At
Plastopan they make the plastic containers used for to-be-shredded documents
(and hence the containers have locks on them). At a one-room cabinetmaker,
they make chairs and other finely turned wooden items. And, at All American
Manufacturing, out of metal they make whatever you need. All are
comparatively small firms, in older repurposed buildings, whether they be
warehouses, shops, or factories.
Often, the things that are manufactured or distributed are sold locally, especially
if the business is small and caters to the particular needs of each customer
(caskets, machined parts). Or, the business is part of a network of coordinated
businesses that process intermediary things for each other, and they are
relatively closeby each other. Such businesses may well have sufficient past
assets and savings (again, older repurposed buildings, machinery, land, skilled
labor, networks of customers and suppliers), and sufficiently specific market
niches, so that they thrive even when they are apparently not economic and
ought to be replaced by “foreign” lower-cost manufacturers whose cost of
transportation remains modest. And some businesses, such as auto repair and
body shops, are apparently, at least for now, inherently local. Hence, there will
be surprises for the economist or the globalizer, since some modes of production
may continue well after they ought to have been replaced by distant “lower cost”
businesses. The industrial districts that concern me would seem to have many
such enterprises. Put differently, generic larger historical and economic forces
and equilibria are often defied by specific facts, locales, and markets, and by
lags in the equilibrating process.
The work that interests me is not office work or pink-collar work or service
work. It has comparatively little to do with bits, bytes, or information. (Note that
the Department of Labor, following the NAICS classification, rather than the
SIC codes, now classes publishing as “information,” not manufacturing. And the
Council of Economic Advisors wonders if McDonald’s is a manufacturing
industry rather than a service industry.) I am concerned with material culture,
where by “material” I mean wood, cloth, metal, oil and chemicals, railroads,
trucks, etc. In a material culture, Everything is made somewhere out of things
from somewhere (else), used someplace, and disposed of elsewhere, and
perhaps recycled—and transported between those places.
All this work would seem to involve craftsmanship and skill and devotion, even
if some of the work is “menial” or “unskilled.” The work may not always be
interesting or deeply satisfying, but if it is to be done properly, the laborers must
be committed to the craft. I want to show what it is like inside this world of
work, what’s there. [MK]
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From the Inside Out
For seven years Martin Krieger has been documenting Los Angeles' vernacular
landscapes photographically. In the process of creating this visual record he has
developed an image archive. Now and in the future, researchers will study these
photographs for their investigations into everyday urban life. His focus on the
ubiquitous built environment of religion, of power transmission, of
infrastructure, and of manufacturing reveals aspects of Los Angeles most
scholars, residents, and visitors pass without notice. Krieger's photographs
invite us to stop and to view these sites. When we do, we see the complexity of
place as it develops over time; the layering of property ownership, investment
capital, building construction, and land use policies; the cycling through of
businesses, people, and goods.
Now Krieger has turned his attention to, and focused his camera on, the
interior landscapes of work. The photographs in this exhibit document the
working life of Angelenos both native-born and immigrant. Seen in a shop, a
plant, or a warehouse; whether engaged in discrete tasks or collective processes;
employed in apparel, furniture, or the metal trades; these workers, their labor,
and their everyday pursuits encourage us to rethink tidy, universalizing theories
regarding the decline of manufacturing in Southern California (and the nation),
the triumph of a post-industrial economy, the emergence of a service society and
the like. Just as critical, these photographs allow us a glimpse of people's
experience on the shop floor and of the nature and condition of work in
particular sectors of the region's economy.
What Krieger's images reveal is a Los Angeles that continues to be a
center for manufacturing. The so-called "old economy," the one that clothes,
shelters, feeds, and transports Californians has not gone away. Surveys, whether
photographic or quantitative, remind us that much of the manufacturing plant in
the region remains in use. When firms that had been producing tires and glass
or fabricating steel moved out, light industry, of the type Krieger is recording,
moved in. Lost in this transition were skilled and semi-skilled jobs, positions
that paid well and included benefits. The world Krieger has opened up to view
makes concrete and particular issues such as workers’ compensation, health
care, and a living wage that are often talked about as abstractions. Improving
working conditions and living conditions requires careful attention to actual
conditions. Such objectives are only good intentions if workers remain outside
our field of vision, absent agents in a discourse about post-industrial society and
post-modern cities. Through the medium of photography, through a systematic
documentation of place, Krieger makes the relationship between policy,
planning, and development tangible, transparent, and real. [Greg Hise,
Associate Professor of Urban History, USC]
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Cloth Los Angeles and Chicago are neck and neck in manufacturing
employment. Throughout the City of Los Angeles, the main manufacturing
industries are: apparel (100,000 workers), transportation equipment (65,000),
electronics (50,000), fabricated metals, printing and publishing, and food. In the
Metro Los Angeles area apparel dominates. However, in the City as a whole it is
dwarfed as an industry by construction, warehousing, and goods movement.
About 2/5 of the apparel workers are sewing machine operators. Others operate
dye machines, knitting and weaving machines, or are hand sewers and pattern
makers.
The City of Los Angeles divides its industrial districts into six areas: West
Valley, North Valley, Central Valley, West Los Angeles, Metro Los Angeles,
and Harbor. These areas are nicely delineated by railroad lines, reflecting the
past and to some extent the present of goods movement in Los Angeles and of
industrial zoning. I have photographed in almost all these areas (and in other
parts of the County of Los Angeles, such as Vernon). The photographs for this
exhibit come mainly from Metro Los Angeles and Vernon.
Wood The Furniture and Decorative Arts District in the Downtown
Metro/South Los Angeles District extends as far south as Florence Avenue with
Central Avenue on the East, although there is important furniture manufacturing
in other areas. Now, everyone will tell you that most manufacturing is shifting to
China and India. Even if furniture is a small part of manufacturing in Los
Angeles, like many other industries it is concentrated in particular areas and so
there is lots to see in these areas. For example, consider the area defined by
Slauson Avenue, Central Avenue, Florence Avenue, and Avalon Boulevard. It
was delineated by railroad lines and spurs coming off Slauson, and developed
from the 1920s on as an industrial tract. In time, it was surrounded by residential
development, so connecting employment opportunities with where people lived.
Much of my photographing has been in this tract and its surroundings.
Metal Although metal fabrication and finishing is a small part of manufacturing
in Los Angeles, it, too, is concentrated in a number of neighborhoods and areas.
Moreover, metal-finishing and metal-plating shops can be found in the most
remarkable places, often nearby residential or commercial districts, displaying
the diamond-shaped blue-red-yellow signs of health threat, flammability, and
chemical reactivity. Like the cloth and wood industries, the metal industries are
linked in a network of suppliers and manufacturers, and so warehouses, metal
fabrication, and metal-finishing firms are often not far from each other. This
facilitates just-in-time manufacturing processes. The metal trades include
machinists, tool and die makers, and welders. [MK]
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15. Documenting the Urban Sensorium: East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue &
Breed Street (Fall 2004-Winter 2005)
For a century, East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, near North Soto Street, in Boyle
Heights, has been an intense and lively street, ethnically rich, commercially
vibrant, important symbolically. The east side of Los Angeles, the (Boyle)
Heights, was the place for immigrant and newcomer growth. It was above the
miasma of the Los Angeles River, and so was thought to be healthful. Once
known as Brooklyn Avenue, reflecting the Jewish and New York origins of
many of its residents, it became Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in the mid 1990s.
This project is a speculative experiment, a chance to extend documentary work
into the realm of multimedia and installation--a medium much employed in the
fine arts in the last fifty years. It is an attempt to learn more of what is possible
when the interests of documentation, archival long-lastingness (this is a serious
constraint, since many environmental art pieces and the like do not archive
readily), and social-science understanding of cities are combined with what we
know about the capacities of cinema and audio recording. We are not trying for
a documentary or a narrative film. Rather, we want a multimedia that conveys
an actual experience of a particular street at a particular time, a set of sensations-hence the reference to the “urban sensorium.”
Eduardo Arenas and Junhan Tan are undergraduate majors in Planning.
Each used his earlier experience in recording live music and video, respectively,
while bringing to bear what he has learned about cities and the people who live
in them. The problem was to both record and display the urban sensorium so
that the viewer/listener would have some semblance of the experience.
Some of the time we sat in one place, the camera or microphone more
or less fixed in place, and in effect did surveillance. Other times, we followed
the flow of people. In general, what we present here has not been much edited
after recording, if at all. It is a serious theoretical and practical question whether
these techniques do convey the ambiance and the sensations (the sensorium),
and so this project is an experiment.
In earlier photodocumentary work we (with Natalie Golnazarians, a Planning
undergraduate) discovered how difficult it was to convey the ambiance and
flavor and experience of walking down one of the main streets of Boyle Heights,
East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue around Soto Street, now a Hispanic street.
Photographs would not be adequate to the experience, and we found how very
difficult it is to do effective audio documentation. We gained new respect for
radio documentarians. Previous work by undergraduates tried to convey the
intensity and complexity of downtown Broadway (Sonia Rivas) and of Pacific
Boulevard in Huntington Park (Pablo Garcia and Maya Konieczny). (These, too,
are Hispanic neighborhoods.) Each used single photographs and montaged strips
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of images of the street (as in Ed Ruscha’s and Robbert Flick’s artistic work).
Their goals were more extensive spatially than the current project. Here, we are
aiming for an intensive documentation of experience in one locale.
Rather than try for an immersive environment, characteristic of much
work in media and engineering, we might try to use traditional cinematic
devices (that is, narrative and formal means), as well as audio and sound
devices, to convey the actual ambiance and experience in something like an
installation. Perhaps we can also learn from literature, in which the city and the
experience of the city, and how to convey that, has been an important concern
for about 150 years. There is also work in cultural studies on the acoustic
environment that may be helpful, such as an account of the acoustic life in
Shakespeare’s time or of bells in nineteenth-century French cities. The Canadian
composer and acoustic ecologist Murray Shafer’s work is fundamental.
Much of the work in acoustic recording serves artistic purposes (for
example, the sounds of a New York building’s elevators and HVAC system)
rather than those of documentation. The same is true for the tradition of street
photography. Exceptionally, there is W. H. Whyte’s work on using 16mm film
to document people’s behavior in the streets of New York, leading to design
recommendations for more livable cities. Phil Ethington’s work at USC in
History is exciting and suggestive, as well.
The University is rich with possibilities for learning to use multimedia, and we
encourage both undergraduates and graduate students to make multimedia part
of their research and documentation. [MK]
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16. The Place of Memory: Memorials and Roadside Shrines in Los Angeles
and in America (Spring 2005)
David Sloane was brought up in a cemetery, his father being its
superintendent. His first book was a pioneering history of the American
cemetery as a cultural landscape. He has been engaged in a series of studies of
the cultural landscape, from birth to death, most recently a study of the
children’s hospital in Southern California. Beverlie Conant Sloane has worked
in health education, and was one of the early leaders in AIDS education for
college students. She is also a photographer. Together, David and Beverlie have
spent a great deal of time visiting, photographing, and analyzing places of
memory, whether it be the AIDS quilt, the Vietnam and World War II
memorials, or roadside shrines to lost loved ones. The deep and abiding idea
here is that our intimate and small and personal shrines tell us a great deal about
how society deals with memorialization and memory, and they are the
foundation for the larger and more formal monumental memorials. What is
striking is how interdisciplinary interest in the visual, memory, health, death,
and urban life--words often bantered about among academics these days--now
become concrete and specific and poignantly touching, transforming those
words into concretely meaningful notions.
People die in war, environmental disaster, epidemic, and in the ordinary
course of getting older. But, perhaps the most awful kind of death, the kind that
we have no good account for, are “accidents,” with automobile accidents being
ubiquitous. Each death is unique, for the place and moment--this is true for all
death--but here there is no obvious overarching redemptive story to be told.
Families and friends create such a story in roadside memorials, marking our
highways in tragic terms. They employ intimate objects, flowers and candles,
and religious symbols, to make an accident a meaningful moment by making a
place meaningful, rather than its being just one more mile of asphalt or concrete.
Memorials to those who have died in war or in disaster are abstractions,
unless we go to cemeteries close to battlegrounds or disaster sites. Those
abstractions try to give meaning to deaths that we dearly wished could have
been avoided, and also give legitimacy to public actions and governments.
Those persons did not die in vain, it is said.
What makes the AIDS Memorial Quilt so powerful is that it combines the
intimate and the monumental. Each death counts individually and concretely, yet
it is a quilt, a linking together of individual panels into a covering of our whole
beings. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does much the same, allowing persons
their own place on the wall.
We make enormous demands on the design of memorials, in part because
the visual and the concrete have to some extent displaced the oral and the
ceremonial. In ancient times, a funeral oration was a standard form. The
Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most famous of modern orations, and we
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know that such an oral event can be remembered and touch us deeply. Museums
make use of oral and visual recordings to bring us back to those moments. And
so we might expect that media will enhance future roadside shrines as well as
formal memorials.
Historically, cities have been organized around memorials (Trafalgar
Square, Lincoln Memorial, . . . ) and cemeteries. As our urban life has become
more dispersed, so too have the memorials. Moreover, as more individuals have
been able to make their distinctive mark on the landscape, they have taken the
initiative to mark that landscape with memorials. [MK]
A small group gathers along the roadside; a friend has been lost, memories
are all that remain. They want to express their grief, the pain of their loss, the
suffering of those who survive. In the past, they would have waited for the
church service. But the need to act is imperative, so they fashion a cross, light a
candle, open a beer, and sit and talk about their friend. When they leave, a small
shrine remains, the memories brought to life along the roadside.
This exhibit is about a new era of the American memorialization. Those
young friends who erected a small shrine on the roadside are representative of a
new participation in memory. The older woman who stops and places a flower
pot along the “Wall” in Washington, DC, the three adolescents who meet at the
site of their friend’s car crash to have a beer and remember, and the families
who flout cemetery rules, to raise a Santa Claus inflatable on a plot in a
Southern California cemetery, are each challenging the modernist traditions of
memorialization. They are subverting older routines by rejecting reliance on
authority, refusing to reflect only passively and somberly on the past. These
mourners demand that the memorial embody the deceased’s life, irreverent
moments as well as conventional memories, in evocative symbolic language.
Maya Lin’s sleek, abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its wall of
names immediately became a revered poster board, littered with letters, medals,
flowers, and remembrances. The black granite wall was transformed from cold
and distant stone to a vibrant and living memorial. Soon after, Cleve Jones and
the NAMES Project provided another distinctive model in the AIDS Quilt. The
Quilt was a flexible medium through which panel makers could express love,
anger, grief, and a wide range of other emotions, elevating private memories to
the public realm.
Princess Diana’s death, with the mounds of flowers and other tributes
spontaneously placed in front of Kensington Palace by the public, forced the
family as well as the international press to reconsider the public’s role in
memorialization. In the US, at John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s death, Americans felt a
similar need to express the loss by laying a flower at his brownstone’s steps or
on the land near the crash.
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Focusing on large public memorials and famous celebrities misses the true
significance of this cultural shift. Along deserted roadsides and amid the
crowded streets of the city, the true extent of the change is evident. The elements
of the new shrines are a simple cross, a card table filled with candles,
photographs, and teddy bears and other personal items. They memorialize a car
accident victim, a kidnapped child, or a friend lost to a terrible disease. Our
newspapers are now repeatedly showing flowers near the home of the murdered
adolescent, and the friends and neighbors congregating around a memorial as
they await news of a missing person.
These kinds of shrines are hardly new. Flowers were left on the roadside in
Dallas in 1963, outside the Dakota in 1980, and near the rubble in Oklahoma
City in 1995. But, our ordinary landscape has never been so filled with such
widespread commemoration. It may be result of cultural hybridity, reflecting the
influence of Catholic cultures to the northeast in Quebec and southwest in
Mexico; a broader return to emotionalism in American culture in the postVietnam age of evangelical religion; and, the continuing egalitarian desire of
Americans, who want everyone to be rich yet to remain ordinary along the way.
In our photographs the grand expressions stand beside the daily tears, the
public memorials overshadowed by the spontaneous shrines. When a small
group gathers to remember their friend or relative, a neighbor or playmate, they
bring along candles to represent light, flowers to convey beauty, and
photographs and teddy bears to replace the lost person. Then, newcomers refresh
the site with new items or by writing their thoughts about the person. Together,
text and the visual construct a memory of experiences and emotions.
Transportation administrators have often worried about the negative effects
of roadside shrines, and some states are trying to find alternatives that are more
in line with standard signage and “appropriate” use of the roadway. However,
the spontaneous memorials are not simply obstructions disturbing the monotony
of the roadside. They are expressions of the public’s desire to mourn outside the
confines of the culturally acceptable locations, such as funeral homes and
cemeteries, and to bring their emotions into the lives of those, familiar and
stranger, who pass by. (David Charles Sloane and Beverlie Conant Sloane,
associate professors at USC)
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17. Displaying Ethnic Los Angeles: Small Business Owners & Vernacular
Visual Merchandising (Summer 2005)
Los Angeles is an ethnic society, the variety of ethnicities being very large,
often changing, and divided and sub-divided into smaller groups. These groups
are sometimes geographically concentrated, but even then several groups are
likely to live intermixed with each other in “their” neighborhood or community.
Ethnically specific stores may well have substantial patronage from others in the
neighborhood. And despite all the newspaper articles, most people seem to live
together in a neighborly way, acutely aware of the differences between groups
but also protective of “their” neighbors. The community becomes the glue that
holds people together as they in their diversity and difference compose that
community.
Peter Reiss’ posters featuring small business owners in three Districts in
Los Angeles, each meant to be displayed at bus-stop shelters within its own
District, celebrates the small, the everyday, the particular, the neighborly, and
the community. They are perhaps much like August Sander’s (1876-1964)
photographs of typical persons in a community, but here the specificity of each
person, his or her locatedness, is emphasized. Similarly, Martin Krieger’s
photographs of the outsides and the just-insides of a variety of small stores in
Los Angeles, mostly in ethnic neighborhoods, are located and specific. And the
goods are identifiably different and particular, the customers often as much so.
Notice just how the goods are arranged. Notice the orange boxes of Tide
detergent (a universal sign in the midst of particularity and specificity). What
kinds of everyday life fit into these arrangements of goods?
These photographic projects stand in a long tradition of photographs of small
businesses and their owners. In the first decades of the twentieth century,
Eugène Atget (1857-1927) photographed the outsides (and the in-front of the
store displays, the étalages) and the just-insides of stores in Paris, as part of a
larger project documenting ordinary life in the City and its suburbs.
Subsequently, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) and Walker Evans (1903-1975)
pursued Atget’s project in the United States, producing some of the signature
photographs of modern photography. August Sander’s People of the Twentieth
Century project (ca. 1929, but throughout his career) attempted to catalog the
varieties of German society: the Farmer, the Skilled Tradesman, the Woman,
Classes and Professions, the Artists, the City, the Last People. Many of these
people were businessmen and workers.
Although we now try to separate manufacturing and wholesaleing from
residential and commercial activities, historically they have all been
interdigitated within the city. While most of Reiss’s small business owners are
retailers, there will be owners of small workshops and factories as well.
As for retailing, “visual merchandising” is a discipline in itself, its purpose
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being to arrange goods in a store so that they are likely to be sold. For these
small businesses, there are no professional store designers, and except for
manufacturer-shipped displays, the arrangements are vernacular rather than
professional. (“Vernacular”=ordinary, everyday, amateur, characteristic of a
place or group.) However, the vernacular is likely to be influenced by mass
media, advertising, and fine art such as still-lifes.
Of course, the bazaar, and the marketplace, were places to display
one’s wares, and so the vernacular version of this discipline is very ancient
indeed. With the rise of urbanization, commercial agriculture, and mass
production, a consumer culture arose, and brands became a way of
distinguishing similar merchandise (as contrasted to the names of the growers or
craftsmen). Moreover, promenading and shopping became intertwined, and the
display of merchandise in store windows was intrinsic to marketing, not to speak
of displays within the stores themselves. (The stores’ plate glass fronts date back
to the 17th and 18th centuries. The mechanized manufacture of plate glass
begins in the 19th century.) Electrical lighting enhanced these possibilities.
Advertising, the mass illustrated newspaper press, and catalog merchandising
(Sears-Roebuck) further solidified the visual and mass character of
merchandising.
Sander’s images are meant to be archetypal of the societal transformation he
was witnessing. Atget captured these trends at their cusp, and Abbott and Evans
photographed them as they flowered yet retained a quaintness of earlier times.
The photographs here are in effect throwbacks or vestiges which retain their
own integrity. [MK]
Pride in the Community
Pride in the Community are large-scale posters made up of composites of
humanistic environmental photographic portraits and statements, reflecting what
it is like to be part of each community, from small business owners in various
Los Angeles Council Districts. They are hung for about a month in about ten
advertising panels of the LA Metro Bus Shelters in their Districts, on hightraffic routes for maximum viewership.
I have been struck by the way people in each area embrace creativity in
ways to make ends meet, support each other emotionally, and add to the
community in spite of much economic hardship. Pride in the Community
celebrates the everyday person rather than the celebrity in a space that is almost
always given over to advertising. I could reach a much larger, more diverse
audience than if this “art” were placed solely in traditional gallery space.
Another plus is the “Dusk-to-Dawn” illumination, which enhances the high
visibility and accessibility, 24/7. (The daily effective circulation for bus shelter
kiosks is about 22,700 viewers per shelter per day.)
Pride in the Community exemplifies people who are creating a positive
effect on their neighborhood. [Peter Reiss. This project was supported by the
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City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, Viacom Outdoor, and
Samy’s Camera Store.]
Vernacular Visual Merchandising
My ongoing project is to document industrial Los Angeles. The initial
stages of the project documented industrial streetscapes. When I looked up the
formal governmental definition of industry, I discovered that it surely included
retail establishments. In my earlier work on storefront houses of worship, I paid
attention to commercial strips (“taxpayer lots”) in which many of these churches
were located. In our project on formerly-Jewish sites in Boyle Heights we
encountered wonderful commercial strips on Wabash Avenue and City Terrace
Drive. Photographing those strips made me more aware than ever of the small,
often ethnic markets and stores that still thrive in these strips. These
observations, and my seeing a small exhibit of Atget’s works at The Getty, led
me to systematically photograph the fronts and the insides of these stores. In my
work for the current exhibit, I deliberately went to African-American,
Armenian, Hispanic, Jewish, Korean, and Russian areas, among others. I also
photographed in several large ethnic supermarkets, wonderfully rich
environments in themselves--more likely to be in the realm of professional
visual merchandising..
While I could photograph the fronts from the public street, I needed permission
to photograph from inside the stores--which I received about two-thirds of the
time. (Most of the photographs were taken with Provia 400F film, pushed one
stop, in a Hasselblad SWC/M, without tripod or flash.) [MK]
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18. Working at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach: Infrastructure as
a Choreography of Machinery, People, and Goods (Fall 2005-Winter 2006)
Infrastructure is not merely copper or aluminum cable, or glass fiber, or bridges
and roads, or concrete pipes and pumping stations, or electrical generating
stations, or the systems of these parts that form the lifeblood of cities. It is also
the people who build, maintain and operate these systems, and the stuff that is
moved along their pathways. These coordinated objects and motions and people-and they must be coordinated if such systems are to work well and not fail due
to congestion or breakdown--in effect enact a dance whose choreography is
what many of us study in our School of Policy, Planning, and Development.
Historically, and still today, one of the vital systems for cities has been
waterways, lakes and oceans, the fishing and whaling fleets, and the merchant
marine that moves goods and people from place to place. On the Waterfront
(1954), which starred Marlon Brando, Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1996), a book
of photographs and analysis, and Sebastião Salgado’s and Edward Burtynsky’s
photographs of shipbreaking, are a requiem, and a critique of the contemporary
infrastructure of shipping. Frank Stella’s series of artworks keyed to Moby Dick
(1986-1997) are effectively a celebration of a past infrastructure. The history of
the West Coast’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union (here, think of
Harry Bridges, its fabled leader) and the Pacific Maritime Association, and their
current events, are of international import. As I have been told again and again,
the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach move about two-fifths of the cargo
and an even greater percentage of the containerized cargo in the United States.
Most of the women and men pictured here are members of the ILWU,
stevedores working on the docks of Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach:
Local 13 of Longshoremen (including the Frontmen, UTR (Utility Truck)
Drivers, Forklift Operators, Lashers, Linesmen, and Spotters I refer to), Local 63
of Marine Clerks, and Local 94 of Foremen or Supervisors of Longshoremen .
Some are supervisory personnel (Superintendents) from the shipping or
stevedoring companies or are shipping agents. At the docks it is essential that
the Supercargo (the in-charge person from Local 63) and the Supervisor or
Superintendent work closely together to be sure that the ship is properly
unloaded and loaded. The dance is a complicated one, since an improperly
loaded ship will be subject to shifting and imbalance, and the unloading might
take much longer and be more inefficient than would otherwise be the case.
Years of experience (especially of the Longshoremen), careful coordination, and
modern information systems make the difference. Moreover, the right number of
men and women and the right sort of loading and unloading equipment must be
present at the right time. In part, this is coordinated by the Marine Exchange,
which keeps track of ships entering and leaving the Ports, and the shipping
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agents and stevedoring companies. In part, the ILWU Dispatching Hall makes
sure the people are at the right place at the right time.
I photographed at a break-bulk ship (for example, large coils of cable); a
refrigerated fresh fruit ship (from Chile); a container ship; a roll-on roll-off ship
(RO-RO) on which the cargo (for example, earth movers) is unloaded under its
own power or with forklifts; a bulk loader (for example, carrying petroleum
coke, a derivative of refining in the Southern California region, a black powder
pumped onto the ship into large holds); an automobile ship (holding perhaps
6,000 Nissan cars and trucks); and a cruise liner (the baggage’s location is coded
by animation characters). I also photographed at the Marine Exchange and the
ILWU Dispatch Hall.
Although not in this exhibit, I have photographed some of the systems of rail
and drayage (trucks), which are the means of moving goods to and from the
Ports to the hinterlands. Nowadays, they represent particularly significant links
in the larger networks.
As my colleague Professor Greg Hise says, “Uncovering a history of production
and industry in Los Angeles requires the reconstruction of a landscape that was
largely invisible to contemporaries and that has remained almost invisible up to
the present.” The Ports are seen from the freeways, sometimes visited for a
cruise, but are otherwise rarely visited or seen up-close by most of us. San Pedro
and Wilmington are at the periphery of the City of Los Angeles, although the
Port of Long Beach is adjacent to its downtown. Security concerns, which have
always been an issue when on the seas or where cargoes of high value are
docked, have become paramount. I am fortunate to have been able to photograph
Working at the Ports. [MK]
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19. Images of Development: Tanzania and Beijing, China (Spring 2006)
In May 2005, a group of USC faculty went to northeastern Tanzania to explore
the relationship of faith and community in the development practices of a
national office of a worldwide nonprofit organization, World Vision
International. It is a community-based effort by residents, staff, and experts to
provide improved services to underserved rural populations buffeted by
globalization and internal migration. The trip to Tanzania was the outcome of a
three-year working-group sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts through the
Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC.
Tanzania is an ethnically, religiously, and socially diverse society of over 36
million people situated below Kenya on the eastern coast of Africa. The nation
is still largely rural, yet the Arusha region, the site of this trip, exemplifies a
growing urban migration.
Arusha is a tourist center of roughly 280,000 people serving Mt.
Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti. Much of the city’s growth has been unplanned
and only loosely governed. In the surrounding rural areas, large settlements,
such as the mining village of Mererani with its estimated 90,000 residents, are
blurring the distinction between rural and urban.
Charitable groups play an important role in rural development. They
construct schools, clinics, water and sanitation facilities, and provide a wide
range of health and social programming. The central question of our research
was how the organization’s Christian faith shapes its development operations.
The role of faith was difficult to decipher. World Vision Tanzania staff
explicitly stated, and community residents reinforced, the inclusive nature of
their activities within the communities. The staff respected the different faiths of
traditional believers, such as the Masai, and of Muslims. However, when WVT
staff’s religion plays such an important role in their lives, it raises questions
about the role of faith in their activities and whether the development process is
about proselytizing.
The World Vision model functions as a complex community-based prioritysetting process. The community proposes projects, including how residents will
support the project. WVT raises support from nations such as Australia, Ireland,
and the United States, or occasionally inside Tanzania. Completed projects and
programs are proudly presented to us as products of the community, not just the
sponsors or WVT.
In the meetings that we held with the project councils, WVT leaders
repeatedly deferred to residents. Each council was mandated to be 50% female
in an effort to encourage women to become involved in community governance.
The WVT staff was also an equitable blend of men and women. And, WVT had
made female genital mutilation, or female circumcision, a major focus of their
activities.
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The knitting of the globe was evident in the Nike tee-shirts and the miners’
familiarity with the latest raps. Parents were focused on education as a means to
improving their children’s lives, willing to spend their time and energy to help
build a new school. The health care system was struggling to respond to the
ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through a combination of medicines and
health education, challenged to reach vulnerable populations such as the miners.
The economy was vibrant, but poverty was apparent throughout, as a largely
agricultural people transitioned to increasingly interconnected economies in a
growing urban society. [David C. Sloane, Richard Sundeen, and Michael
Moody]
II
These photographs capture Beijing’s transformation as the city, like China itself,
negotiates the slippery path of development. Every day Beijing becomes newer,
more modern, more hybridized, its landscape looking less like it was a day ago.
Beijing is home to more than fifteen million people and the seat of Chinese
government. The city reflects China’s unprecedented growth and modernization.
Sweeping change is affecting not only spatial, but also cultural and socioeconomic realms of life. Tradition is increasingly being viewed as a hurdle.
Modern architecture is rapidly replacing ancient courtyard houses, and roads
once traveled only by carts and bicycles are now congested with traffic. Cranes
and workers are rapidly erecting buildings. By 2008, an estimated 160 billion
dollars will be spent in Beijing to build office space equivalent to two
Manhattans, in anticipation of the Olympic Games.
Rapid development has created new challenges for the city planners and
policy makers. Planners, who enjoy an enviable position of privilege in Chinese
society, are beset with issues of overcrowding, transportation, air quality, land
rights, and citizen participation. The debate over the fate of Beijing’s traditional
courtyard homes (hutong housing) is symptomatic of the city’s contested
planning discourse.
Due to rapid migration from the countryside, once stately hutong housing is
now the first shelter for poor rural immigrants and often lacks basic amenities
including running water and toilets. About three million of these people, who are
not entitled to most government social services, illegally sublease the courtyard
houses. Up to seven families might dwell in a house built for one. Some citizens
view the hutong housing as “old slums” that should be destroyed to make way
for a brighter future. Others from local communities and academia are trying to
preserve the historically significant courtyard homes, and their associated way
of life, as a vital part of Beijing’s history and identity.
In May of 2005, thirty students from USC’s School of Policy, Planning, and
Development traveled to Beijing to study these issues, under the direction of
Professors Tridib Banerjee and Michael Woo and in collaboration with students
from the School of Government at Peking University. We studied the Xidan
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Beidajie area, located close to the city center. The district has mixed uses
including residential hutong housing, large-scale high-end retail, and a proposed
transit station. [Surajit Chakravarty, Todd Hutchins, Cecilia Kim, and Ian
Trivers, with Professor Tridib Banerjee]
20. Infrastructure: The Interstices of Los Angeles Innervated by Water,
Power, Agriculture, & Transport (Fall 2006)
“Creating infrastructure is a primary tool states have used to link space into
territory.” Greg Hise
Globalization and electronic communication and the Internet have not yet
dematerialized industry and its processes. We are still able to see and
photograph the city as an archive and an artifact of bureaucratic management
(high-rise buildings) and manufacture (often, low-rise large buildings), material
networks of goods movement, labor, and marketing. In effect, we have
localization. What makes localization possible are the systems and networks that
enweb the city: transport, electricity, communication, water, natural gas. And
what makes that network almost quaint is the not-very-bucolic agriculture that
thrives in the corridors defined by this system.
So, when you fly over Los Angeles in a helicopter at several hundred to a
thousand feet you actually see the nerveways and arterials of telephone wires
and poles, rail lines and freeways, powerline corridors, and waterways (rivers,
irrigation, and storm sewers). Such infrastructure seems to shape the
environment of Los Angeles. It would appear that the Los Angeles Basin is
insinuated by multi-lane paths or corridors, where on each path several of the
infrastructures are co-located: cable- and telephone- and power-lines, roads, and
waterways accompany each other, and under the powerlines or adjacent to them
are farms or nurseries. As arterials there are flows of materials and energy; as
nerveways there are flows of information.
Moreover, the Basin is quite variegated, a patchwork or harlequin of
industry cheek-by-jowl to residential to infrastructure to agriculture to
cemeteries to junkyards to military bases—much like a Petri dish of different
bacterial colonies growing to bump into and invade each other. (They may even
need each other for mutual nourishment.) There are leftovers and mismatches:
isolated extractive industries, such as gravel pits; or abandoned refineries; or
dairies now surrounded by very different uses--separated from their surrounds
by a street or wall or perhaps nothing much at all. And open space is in effect
mostly inadvertent, surely sometimes planned as parks or watersheds, but as
often yet-to-be-developed land, and sometimes a byproduct of school
playgrounds and fields, agriculture, or cemeteries. Most of Los Angeles is not
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vast sprawl, but a coordinated system of systems, industry and housing hanging
from a tree of infrastructure.
Often, these paths (arterials and nerveways) were developed well ahead
of housing, industry, and sometimes even large-scale agriculture. Now, the paths
are surrounded by homes, warehouses, and schools. It would appear that the
interstices are innervated by infrastructure, although the historical sequence is
most likely the reverse.
By the way, if we are flying over the Basin in a commercial airliner,
details are too small to be carefully studied, and if we are driving by we cannot
see the system and pattern of innervation. If the infrastructure is in our
backyards, we may be concerned with noise, or flooding, or electromagnetic
fields. But, again, we do not see the system.
The crucial rights-of-way might be shared: above-ground high-voltage electrical
transmission lines, buried natural gas pipelines, agriculture at ground level,
adjacent waterways and rail lines and freeways, and copper and glass-fibre cable
for communications. They need not interfere with each other. There is no
congestion. These co-incidences are often planned. And they are taken
advantage of by infrastructural latecomers such as telegraph or cable-TV.
Moreover, the now surrounding residential and industrial areas are meant to
grow up around such infrastructure, fruit hanging from that infrastructural tree.
Rail and telegraph and paved road were surely precursors.
Rights-of-way are parts of long-term development plans, later to be
ramified and articulated. Of course, the basic geomorphology of an area may
have influenced the paths of rivers, the lands that prove arable, and even the
location of important urban centers. So we might say that after the
geomorphology does its work, there comes the infrastructure, and then the
subsequently built environment modifies that geomorphology and the meaning
of the infrastructure.
Aerial archaeology photographs sites, often urban, so that their overall
patterns and hidden details are more readily discerned. In effect, the photographs
in this exhibit show the archaeological artifacts of the Second Industrial
Revolution and its making of Southern California.
These illustrative photographs were taken in the second half of 2005 while
Commander Chuck Street did his morning traffic reporting for KIIS-FM, in the
Pepsi Jet Ranger 1 Helicopter. I am grateful for the chance to ride along. [MK]
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