This article examines the cultural politics and labor of the 818 Session, a krump and street dancing collective that appropriates and repurposes a North Hollywood parking lot for dance sessions on Wednesday nights. In the face of the general culture of spatial domination and regulation in Los Angeles, most especially regarding the experiences of youth of color, the 818 Session promotes a culture of dance and play that collectively reshapes their environment and challenges much of what constitutes public space in Los Angeles. Here, in an empty Ralphs grocery store parking lot late-at-night, krump dancers interact with space, identifying interstices to produce racial and spatial formations anew.

This excerpt offers a collection of the myth and truth—often indistinguishable—behind The Royal Chicano Air Force, an artist collective that played a key role in the Chicano civil rights movement. Playing with ideas about the preservation of history and its perceived truth, the archives – a series of original artist books - blend Pre-Columbian and Western record-keeping practices with running historical references to make real the ongoing mythologizing of the group, and to offer alternative readings of California history and public space.

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.

Maps have power. They can make the illegible legible and the invisible visible. They can make the obvious even more obvious and the impossible seem possible, as a map published in 2012 did when it mapped the routes of the private buses that ferry techies between their homes in San Francisco and their jobs in Silicon Valley. It shows that tech companies, in their libertarian, do-it-yourself way, have solved the transit problem for themselves, not waiting for a potentially time-consuming, representative political process to do the job. That, the author argues, shows a failure of belief in the city as a commons, a city that supports existing residents and new arrivals by integrating them into the collective spaces and systems perhaps best represented by public transportation. That there are entire networks of free transit options available to only some of the city’s wealthiest residents cannot help but create tension, especially against a background of skyrocketing housing costs and a wave of no-fault evictions.

The late 20 th and 21 st century tech boom-related gentrification of San Francisco has rapidly and violently displaced longtime city residents, particularly in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of the Mission District. While some may characterize this gentrification as more economically than racially consequential, the negligible overlap between Latino and techie demographics means that the possible disappearance of Latino San Francisco is very real. This essay uses the famed murals of the Mission District as the lens through which we can see Latinos’ complex and historical presence in this California city, and then interrogate how they can continue to play a part in its future.

This autobiopic piece chronicles Scheper-Hughes’s early voluntary service with the Peace Corp in Brazil, followed by her early academic career and coming to Berkeley, and then her ongoing engagement and activism in standing up for, and standing with, others. This welled up into community activism and advocacy for the homeless together with Berkeley Catholic Workers, eventually resulting in a café inside of Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1989, providing rationale for Scheper-Hughes’s own well-known applied anthropology and activism, which has made her famous as one of today’s leading anthropologists.

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

A Boyle Heights children’s storytelling hour resulted from a collaboration between six UCLA researchers and Libros Schmibros, an independent bookstore and lending library in Boyle Heights, which took place over four months in 2016. The project explored how small-scale staged literary interventions like a storytelling hour could have a productive impact on a community. The initiative came about as a way to promote something called “literary justice,” which is premised on the idea of a culture that embraces stories as a part of life as part of a community-building effort. It is achieved when all members of a community have equal access to books and stories, stemming from numerous studies that demonstrate that a person’s access to literature is a strong indicator for a host of quality-of-life measures. This effort in Boyle Heights aimed to show what happens when, instead of going to a public library to make use of it, here the public library comes to the people.

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

Chronicler of the California dark side and LA’s underbelly, proclaiming a troubling, menacing reality beneath the bright and sunny facade, Mike Davis is one of California’s most significant contemporary writers. His most controversial books led critics to label him anything from a left-wing lunatic to a prophet of gloom and peddler of “the pornography of despair.” Yet much of his personal story and evolution are intimately touched by his experience and close reading of deeply California realities: life as part of the working class, the struggle for better working conditions, and a genuine connection to the difficulties here. His most well known books, City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear are unsparing in their assessments of those difficulties. He invited architectural educator and Director of UCLA’s cityLAB, Dana Cuff, and Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, Jennifer Wolch, into his San Diego home to discuss his career, his writings, and his erstwhile and ongoing efforts to understand Los Angeles.

On 26 September 2014, forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared from Iguala, a city in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Two students’ bodies have been recovered, while forty-one students remain missing. In Los Angeles, mourning for the students has taken the form of what we call “anti-memorialization,” where traditional forms of memorialization are upended through informality, ephemerality, art, and the digital in order to politicize and bring attention to an injustice. While informal memorials have existed as long or longer than their formal counterparts, anti-memorialization moves these informal memorials into the contemporary reality of a digitally networked world, pushing private mourning to public activism. Among these informal efforts reflecting ongoing calls for justice, one piece, part of an exhibit sponsored by Boyle Heights-based arts organization Self Help Graphics and Art, was entitled 43: From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson. The exhibition anti-memorializes not just the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa, but victims of police brutality in the United States as well, linking the two social movements across national borders.

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.

Urban Humanities is emerging as a set of academic programs, scholarly approaches, and research agendas. Employing the conceptual tool “immanent speculation” this essay sets forth a proposal for practicing an inherently unknowable future in order to create the conditions for that future to unfold. In contrast to theory-laden speculative philosophy, or to the incrementalism of design in the built environment, or even to the extreme opposite of ungrounded utopianism, immanent speculation rigorously extracts latent alternative realities embedded in a place through the method of making. It does so with the consequence that these other worlds—whether fully realized or not—expand our notion of what could be, and aims to decolonize the future from the forward march of time, from the imperfect conditions of the present, freeing it to become something just beyond what we imagine as possible while pulling from sites and places where we live, requiring ongoing work at all levels of society.

From their origins, the University of California, Berkeley and The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) were established in different geographical, cultural, and political contexts. In a course sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, artist, designer and Landscape Architecture Professor Walter Hood asks students to examine the museum and its neighborhoods in order to come up with proposals for change. He works on projects ranging from city-scale master plans to site plans to art installations and is known for his focus on the human element in design. UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design, Shannon Jackson, recently spoke with Walter Hood at his Oakland studio about how the arts and humanities and design can work together to illuminate urban experience. This is the accounting of the conversation.

Founded in 1919, UCLA is nearing its first centenary, but the university builds on humanistic and liberal arts traditions that are many centuries long and globally diffused. The core disciplines that we recognize today as comprising the Humanities have deep roots in these institutional, cultural, and technological histories. But yet, for all its grand ambitions for reckoning with the world, the university has remained by and large an isolated institution, walled in and often walled off from its surrounding community, accessible to a chosen few, stratified by economic, social, and racial differences, and perhaps too invested in the security of its storied past. The Urban Humanities initiative is an attempt both to apply conventional tools in unconventional ways and to invent new tools by respecting the fundamental virtue of bricks, namely their porous nature. Is it possible to decolonize knowledge? If so, the studio courses it develops will have profound implications for the role of the classroom, syllabus, and for rethinking and developing new knowledge and practices.

Efforts in the university that fly under the ‘‘urban humanities’’ flag represent larger phenomena that have emerged across humanistic disciplines for the past two decades. Hybrid initiatives have appeared alongside broad interdisciplinary efforts highlighting challenges involved in attempting to transform the knowledge and practices within stable institutional configurations. Yet our experience, where “place” comes into analytic focus, has shown that urban humanities produce superior understandings of the structure/agency connection by a self-conscious, simultaneous engagement with social theory, human experience, and social action.

Over the last four decades, comparative urbanism has flourished, triggered by a desire to identify, compare, contrast, or juxtapose parallel phenomena that happen in multiple sociospatial contexts and likely influence one another. Starting in the 1970s, a number of scholars began touting the need for comparative urban research that opens the eyes to broader urban phenomena that can be compared across municipal boundaries and national borders. Underlying comparative approaches carry the notion that urban imaginaries are “sites of encounters with other cities” mediated through travel, migration and the circulation of images, goods, and ideas. In more recent years, a transnational perspective has gained favor in urban studies, arising in response to criticism that comparative urbanism suffers from a static perception of the urban. Transnational approaches focus on interdependencies, movements, and flows across borders in regions and subregions, the goal being to understand urban settings and experiences, as composed by multiple regional, ethnic or institutional identities and forces. In other words, transnational urban studies wish to take down arbitrary divisions between entities so that both their interconnections as well as collisions become more apparent. There are three interrelated ways that urban humanities go beyond conventional comparative urban studies and contribute to our understanding of the urban. In this essay, the matter is fleshed out through a comparative study of Los Angeles and Mexico City.

In 1972, the black artist and writer Romare Bearden traveled from his home in New York to spend ten days in the capital of counterculture in Berkeley, California. He visited on an official commission from the city of Berkeley to create a new artwork for its City Council Chambers. The result was the monumental work Berkeley — The City and its People , which hung for decades until extensive seismic trouble plaguing City Hall forced its removal and relocation to a storage facility. Berkeley has changed dramatically since Bearden’s visit. The percentage of Berkeley’s black population has dropped from almost 25 percent in 1970 to less than 10 percent in 2010. Perhaps this demographic shift, coupled with the full mural’s removal from public view, has made it difficult to remember that Bearden’s Berkeley originated in a moment of racially charged civic conflict. Bearden’s Berkeley envisions how the California city is built from and on shifting histories of encounter and settlement by many groups with different backgrounds, interests, and beliefs, all needed to work together to build a better future.