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.

This essay considers the fluid lines between history, nature, and the urban realm. Beginning with land cultivated by the Bixby family near Long Beach, California from 1878 into the mid-twentieth century, Waldie discusses how the landscape has changed by the Bixbys and those who came before and since. He then turns his attention to his own suburban neighborhood and California more broadly, and the way a sense of place, history, community, and nature are bound up in them.

Young likens camping to a pilgrimage to nature but notes that, after more than a century of increasing popularity, the number of campers is declining. Although camping remains among the top five outdoor recreations in the United States, the rate of participation by Americans sixteen and older is down from its peak in the late 1990s. Automobile, trailer, and motorhome camping at developed locations and at primitive”locations has decreased approximately 7 percent overall. He argues this is due to modern camping, with its gadgets and more comfortable accommodations, not offering a meaningful break from everyday life, and also to efforts to rewild cities so that urban dwellers no longer need to escape to find nature.

This article tells the story of artist Todd Gilens' "Endangered Species" project, where four municipal buses in San Francisco were each wrapped with a photograph of a different animal in danger of extinction: a Mission Blue Butterfly; a Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse; a Brown Pelican; and a Pacific Coho Salmon. Besides alerting passersby to environmental degradation, this art project, which ran throughout 2011, reverses the customary tactics of outdoor advertising. Outdoor ads promote products and block our sense of place. By contrast, wrapping images of California's troubled animal habitats on moving buses promotes a complex environmental and historical message: the urban development all around us sits atop what had been the original skin of the earth. In telling the story of the animal-wrapped buses within the greater history of outdoor advertising and mass transit, I connect the fates of endangered natural ecosystems with their cultural counterparts such as the city's bus system.

The habits of 19th century Californians framed what becoming Californian would mean. Bitterly for Californians today, those habits did not come with a moral compass. The California Dream had been limitless in its promise of health, wealth, and happiness in the sunshine. Today’s Californians dream differently. As California becomes less exceptional, how will we describe California when it’s not exactly “Californian” anymore? The insights of critical regionalism and Foucault’s notion of “a particular, local, regional knowledge” may provide a guide.

Dana Gioia provides his accounting of his work as California’s tenth Poet Laureate. Originally delivered to the California Senate Rules Committee, this interview accounts for Gioia’s understanding of how poetry and the arts can connect with ordinary Californians in collaborative ways. Additionally, Gioia’s poem, “A California Requiem,” accompanies the interview.

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.

An interview with California’s unofficial state historian, exploring Starr’s rationale for his work, along with his understanding of the nature of California values, and what it means to be a Californian. From here to Starr’s recent book, Continental Ambitions , and the many figures and features that have influenced Starr’s understanding of California, this interview moves forward in Starr’s characteristic polymathic style, covering encyclopedic terrain. Additionally, it explores the role that religion and especially Roman Catholicism have played in California’s narrative, and in Starr’s own understanding of California and its place in the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

From 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.

Water system infrastructure and the monuments that commemorate it in California and Mexico are evidence of similarities in their cultures’ water regimes. Mexico’s Lerma Waterworks site argues the importance of reliable water provision for Mexico City’s modern identity. The mid-20th c. architecture and the murals designed by Diego Rivera, entitled “ Agua, Origen de la Vida ,” narrate the journey of water as it flows continuously from the indigenous past and into the modern present. Along the way, Rivera represents water as bridging distinct locations, cultures, and social classes. This mythic rendering, however, does not account for today’s disparity in water access in the city today.

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.

Boom’s quarterly guide to new books to read, places to visit, and things to do this spring in California

The author tells of how he once loved the Case Study houses, commissioned from several modern architects by Arts & Architecture magazine in the years after World War II with the goal of developing a new style of housing in southern California, and why he eventually came to see those houses as part of what holds Los Angeles and other Californian cities back from classically urban levels of density and functionality. He argues that the “house culture” instilled by the Case Study houses and other single-use, single-family-house-oriented forms of residential architecture have caused more problems for the Californian city than even its oft-criticized “car culture.”

This article examines the history and future of freeway design, tracking its evolution from early parkways to the Interstate Highway System to the potential freeways to come. A mix of infrastructure, architecture and landscape, freeways have had an indelible impact on urban development throughout California and beyond. By understanding the development and design of freeways over the decades, we can better determine what we want this infrastructure to become in the near future.