The city of Los Angeles is converting its streetlights from orange-gold sodium vapor technology to cold, white light-emitting diodes. It’s a transition that will change the color of the city at night, in a place with a long history of experimentation with artificial lighting technology. That means not only that the city will appear different, but it will no longer correspond to memories of its coloration, or to its depictions in famous films.

With Brittney Silva’s tragic May 2014 death fresh in everyone’s memory, the city of San Leandro began collaboration efforts between them and University of California, Berkeley to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. A course was developed at UC Berkeley called Sensing Cityscapes, offered Fall 2015, aiming to collect data about human activities too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the class aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture, but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, art, public health, and performance studies, bringing students together from each field. We now are bringing the installation back to the streets of San Leandro with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant for a project called San Leandro Lights. Transferring the project from the lab back to the street, we hope that the positive effect for individuals we observed in the lab will remain, and that responsive lighting will create a dynamic culture of attention.

This essay is an exploration of cognitive principles of the liminal in photography as seen through the work of Dutch photographer Marie-José Jongerius and her images of California and the American West.

This essay looks at the tension between pristine natural beauty and industry and how they have informed, and been represented in, California landscape painting and photography. Amy Scott argues that the influence of the traditional California landscape in art has evolved, thanks to a flexible understanding of the concept of the sublime, which draws upon ideas of nature to respond to external changes—including developments in technology. These changes have shaped the ways in which we imagine both the natural and the built environment in relation to ourselves. Scott traces this evolution through Albert Bierstadt’s mid-nineteenth century painting On the Merced River and through twentieth century works by James Doolin, Ed Ruscha, Karen Halverson, and Michael Light.

This essay explores the ways we talk about water and fire in California, how that discussion is shaped by larger ecological and economic concerns, and how those concerns in turn shape exurban development in the state.

The work of artist and former East L.A. gang member Fabian Debora highlights the religiosity of Los Angeles' myriad immigrant communities. Debora paints within the Chicano tradition but, like many young contemporary Chicano artists, looks beyond the movement's historic focus on political activism and Chicano identity. Debora draws inspiration from his immigrant-rich Boyle Heights neighborhood, where religious institutions such as Debora's Delores Mission Catholic parish form part of an immense citywide immigrant religious infrastructure. Debora's work suggests that L.A.'s current role as America's immigration capital has spiritual as well as cultural and political ramifications.

The bicycle was at the heart of a strong citizens' movement for Good Roads in the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, it had re-emerged as a signifier for a new, ecologically based urban radicalism. Critical Mass bike rides, starting in San Francisco in 1992, spread throughout the world and anchored a new renaissance of bicycling and bicycling politics.