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

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

This poetic environmentalist account traces the history of the Glendale Narrows reach of the Los Angeles River, the one section where its movie-set-famous channelization is thwarted by the power of the river itself. This archival retrieval considers the relationship between humans and the river across cycles of drought and flood and lays out the shifting currents of environmentalist attitudes towards California’s waterways.

This essay by historian Matthew Klingle compares the work of Carleton Watkins, a pioneer in early photography, and Michael Kolster, a contemporary photographer. Like his predecessor, Kolster uses the wet-plate photographic process to create ambrotypes: handmade images made on glass. Watkins’s images, made in the late-nineteenth century, helped to sell scenic, monumental California and the West to the nation. In contrast, Kolster’s photographs of the Los Angeles River, a degraded and often ignored urban waterway, suggest how older photographic techniques might be employed to create new aesthetics of place freed from the confines of purity and beauty.

This timeline details the economic, social, and environmental impact that the Los Angeles Aqueduct had on the Owens Valley. It begins in the 19th century with the Paiute who lived in the valley, and covers local opposition to the aqueduct and attempts to sabotage it in the 1920s, controversial land sales, depletion of the valley water table, dust at the dry Owens Lake bed, the impact of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on the region, the second aqueduct and Mono Lake, the 1991 long-term water agreement, and mitigation efforts including dust control at Owens Lake and the Lower Owens River Project. The material is drawn from Stringfellow's There It Is—Take It! project.

The incalculable volume of minerals extracted from California’s mountaintops and riverbeds formed the very infrastructure that fueled California’s unabated growth beginning in 1849—and permanently altered its look. Detritus washed downstream by disastrous hydraulic-mining operations during the Gold Rush was used to build Sacramento, San Francisco, and the levee system in the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Limestone mined by the Monolith Cement Company in what is now Tehachapi built the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The brutality of the landscapes captured in this photo essay is at odds with the popular conception of California landscapes. But, as the photographer discovered through the project, they are in fact quintessentially Californian.

Creative practices are needed to address the range of issues that confront contemporary cities—issues of social justice, economic development, and environmental quality. Urban humanities emphasize innovative methods and practices, which evolve along with shifting epistemologies in multidisciplinary confluence, standing in contrast to a current dominant narrative that contemporary cities depend upon attracting a creative group of citizens. Recent efforts the LA River, driven by a motley crew of people set out to reimagine new possibilities for the river, illustrating that the city as an object of study intrinsically carries implications about action and about the future. This manifesto offers a call to action for scholars to become engaged, creative urban practitioners.

Moving back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco, this essay travels back in time to an imported experience of African American culture that came to the West Coast. Part of a familial culture, which converged with this place amidst the streets, and trees, and family heirlooms, this essay explores what it is about California that makes it a place of such incredible placemaking. Journeying through George’s own California and how to understand this place amidst the interruptions and ways of being here, the essay concludes acknowledging California’s existence between myth and reality, wherein passes California.

Novelist Alex Espinoza examines ways in which memory and place are tied to specific geographic sites of knowledge throughout his life as a Californian. His journey from the factory-lined streets and avenues of the San Gabriel Valley and the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area to the fields and farms of the Central Valley provide the author a change to examine what is lost and gained when patters of migration and movement give rise to new opportunities that both challenge and affirm our vast and complex identities as Californians

Exploring a way of seeing expansive meaning in the juxtaposition of important buildings and sculptures, by centering on Alexis Smith’s "Snake Path" sculpture at UC San Diego and her reputation as an "assemblage" or "collage" artist, this article puts the iconic university library designed by William Pereira in relation with other buildings and sculptures to show that a type of religious geoglyph is inscribed into a coastal ridge in Southern California.

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

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

In 2014, architecture Professor Margaret Crawford and Associate Professor of Art Practice Anne Walsh taught the first University of California, Berkeley, Global Urban Humanities Initiative research studio course, called “No Cruising: Mobility and Identity in Los Angeles.” What occurred during the course had both varied and unexpected interpretations as ten students majoring in art practice, art history, architecture, and performance studies each selected a dimension of mobility they wished to identify on field trips to LA. One goal of these field trips, or research studios, was to get students out of their comfort zones to explore new approaches and methods. We encouraged students to draw on each others’ disciplines, so art students undertook archival research while architectural history students, like Noam Shoked, used interviews and photography to investigate contemporary conditions. The stories here are from Shoked as he comes to interpret and interact with the cyclist of LA.

Jonathan Crisman and Jason Sexton interview Karen Tei Yamashita about motivating and influential features behind her novels and plays, which are difficult to define by genre: they have been called science fiction, speculative fiction, postmodern, postcolonial, magic realist, and most certainly experimental. Between her transnational history, her role as a maker, and the strong spatiality of her writing, Yamashita’s insights have shaped the way urban humanities are practiced. Her landmark 1997 novel, Tropic of Orange , has become a key text and model for creative practice for urban humanists based in Los Angeles.

Traditional Protestant religious practice is on the wane in the United States of America. For various reasons, many of the institutions that formed centuries or even millennia ago are no longer fulfilling the yearnings of the current generation of seekers. Still, the news of religion’s imminent demise is premature. A search for self-transcendence, both through a commitment to some form of practice associated with the examined life and within a community of likeminded practitioners, has not withered away. This study of the diverse congregations in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz yields a complex—and dynamic—picture of the potential future of American religion.

Underlying so much of the economic and ecological turmoil unfolding in California and the rest of the world now is a slow collision between the operating systems of the resource-wasting, vertically managed twentieth century and the much more volatile ecological and economic conditions of the twenty-first century. This essay argues that California is leading the way in defining a new code to deal responsibly-and profitably-with climate change and its effects.

Non-Californians rarely refer to the Golden State as a sacred place or religious landscape. Yet, California fascinates, in part, due to its religious extravagance–think Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Harold Camping’s predicted end of the world, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, and then some. This essay looks at California as an epicenter of religious expression and a global microcosm for hybrid religions, new religions, and experimental religious practices. The essay analyzes migration, the California/Mexico border, genders/sexualities, race/ethnicity, commercialization, embodiment/disembodiment, and the natural world as lenses on California’s religious landscape.

In this extended interview, Peter Kareiva, the former chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and new head of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, talks about the connections between conservation science and cities. Among other topics, Kareiva discusses the importance of communications and creating shared values to help the public understand the urgency and potential of conservation and science.

The Santa Ana River, running through three of the largest counties in America, has a long, often overlooked history from Native American settlement to the contemporary industrial corridor, but always riparian and beautiful. This essay and accompanying photographs explore the middle section of the river, which runs through San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, the Native American settlement of Agua Mansa, the exploration of de Anza, and the current landscape of homeless residents in an emerging post-industrial landscape.