Northeast Los Angeles Placemaking Competition: Wayfinding System

Northeast Los Angeles Placemaking Competition: Wayfinding System

Northeast Los Angeles Placemaking Competition: Wayfinding System

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Project submitted by studio Performativo
Project designed for entire NELA area

Project Summary and Scale
This "NELA-wide" wayfinding project proposes to enhance the visibility, mobility, and programmatic activities of the NELA riverfront by developing and implementing a shared identity for the NELA LA Riverfront. Our "Find-Your-Way" placemaking modules reinforce the uniqueness of each of the five neighborhoods and simultaneously create this shared identity for NELA through signage, furniture, sculptures, and other wayfinding strategies.

Why are you committed to this project?
We are committed to creating spaces that bring people together, not as tourists, but as community members engaged in their built environment. Our planning process demands engaging in community-wide conversations that takes into consideration the challenges and obstacles unique to each neighborhood and asks them to strive towards greater connectivity.

What are the most relevant characteristics of project site and scale?
As the NELA LA River front becomes more and more popular and becomes a destination place for Angelinos and tourists, the challenge will be, as it is now, to create connectivity between the five neighborhoods, while at the same time "branding" the NELA riverfront as a whole. This is especially difficult because each neighborhood have different levels of accessibility and connectivity to the riverfront and to each other.

Describe how this project will reinforce a sense of place or enhance the built environment.
The "Find-Your-Way" placemaking modules have flexible designs that can be implemented across three scales: pedestrian/bicyclist, vehicular, and area-wide.
For instance, as signage, our "Find-Your-Way" modules will add-color and flare to the experience of those walking or bicycling along the riverfront. They are designed to create memorable imprints of the entry-points, cultural and natural landmarks, programmatic events, and exit points into the other NELA neighborhoods.
We believe that this will activate people's imagination of what other connections exist within and outside of the LA River: "what new experience there may be, if I continue to find my way through NELA."

Provide a description of the project's necessary planning activities.
The following outlines our Community Planning Process
· Neighborhood Meetings--To introduce "Find-You-Way" modules, identify wayfinding needs and strategies, identify stakeholders, and resources.
· Community Design Meetings--To develop the functional capacity of the "Find-Your-Way" modules (Does a neighborhood need bike racks? Signage? Trash receptacles? A sculpture? How would these look like? Where would they be located?).
· NELA-wide Meetings--To present on each neighborhood's projects and engage in a conversation about each others challenges, obstacles, and resources.
· Implementation

What is a rough estimate of your project budget?
The budget is content and context dependent. We estimate one (1) 18" x 18" box frame of aluminum tube and connectors to cost approximately $50.00 - $100.00. But the material and amount will vary depending on the resources and contributions of each neighborhood.

How does this project leverage existing resources and efforts?
Since this project is intended to enhance and promote neighborhood connectivity, the community planning process is key to identifying the needs of each neighborhood, and how and where "Find-Your-Way" modules get implemented.
For instance, we would be curious to find how residents of Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park would connect the newly proposed "Bicycle Friendly Business District" to the LA Riverfront or how bicyclist would want to find strategies to navigate to it. Would these be based thought existing bike lanes? Because of safety? Convenience?
Our planning process would also identify community resources needed to implement our project. Are there manufacturers or metal artists that could contribute material and time to build a given configuration of a "Find-Your-Way" module?

What community need is your project serving?
The specific community wayfinding needs will be identified through our community process. From a design and NELA-wide perspective, our project creates and promotes a more equitable visibility program. We believe that by creating a shared identity of the NELA Riverfront, we will highlight the challenges and obstacles that each neighborhood face as well as the many opportunities that exist throughout NELA.

If your project is realized, what does success look like?
The goal is to create an experience of the Los Angeles that is uniquely NELA, that the riverfront becomes understood not as a green open space destination, but as a diverse community composed of many parts that are unique in their own.
Success will be a NELA riverfront that is not only a destination, but also a vehicle to navigate and explore what Atwater Village, Cypress Park, Elysian Valley, Glassell Park, and Lincoln heights have to offer to each other, and as a whole to the City of Los Angeles.

Guest Post: My Timeline for Vacant Lots

Guest Post: My Timeline for Vacant Lots

As part of a regular series featured on this website, LA Open Acres will be asking people across a variety of backgrounds, interests, and neighborhoods about vacant land. We’ll explore the impact that these spaces have on neighborhoods, what we can do about it, and how LA Open Acres can serve as a resource. For our first post, Gary Garcia discusses how his own personal history with an intersection in South LA made him dedicate a Graduate School project many years later. If you have something to say about vacant lots, and would like it featured on this blog, please let us know!

My youth in South LA is divided into two distinct phases: the ten years from 1983-1992, and from 1992 until 2000, when my family moved away. I remember the early years as a vibrant and active childhood when my family and I walked to the local stores, had lunch, and met friends and family along the way. This was a time when I could ride my bicycle, take karate classes, and play with my friends all day. Fatigue was the only limit to how active I could be in my community.

Fast-forward to the civil unrest in South Los Angeles in May 1992, when everything changed. Limitations were imposed on me. Having experienced the riots myself, I understood why limits were placed on me by my parents. The freedom to move through space was taken away from me, and this created a disconnect from my immediate surroundings. After the riots, the active commercial center and its pedestrian-friendly streets were vacated by businesses and civic investment, and became vacant spaces in ruin. The lack of direct access to resources for everyday items in my own neighborhood produced communities where no one walked. I was confined to the corners of my street. I never walked because there was nothing to walk to. My family drove 20-40 minutes to surrounding neighborhoods of LA to make everyday household purchases. This established an everyday life outside of South LA. I attended school, worked, and held all my social activities outside of my own community.

Vacant lots at Vermont & Manchester, South LA

In the years since I left South LA, I have come to realize that perhaps the most challenging issue about vacant lots is that they transcend physical space, becoming embedded into the cultural and social identity of a community and its residents. As a result of the 1992 civil unrest, the presence of vacant lots continuously recalls images of crime, violence and poverty. This causes a negative impact on generations of South LA residents. While vacant lots produce unhealthy environments through a lack of resources and lack of economic investment, they are also opportunities for an urban catalyst to produce meaningful places that areas like South LA deserve.

Figure 1 – Versatile Markets Master Plan

I made vacant lots the focus of my directed design research for my graduate studies at the University of Southern California. I chose the intersection of Vermont and Manchester and its immediate context not only for its urgent and critical issue in urban design, but because it is a place that I call home and part of my identity. It is a place that I never forgotten, where I strive to create awareness so that the quality of life in South LA can improve.

Figure 2 – Bird’s-Eye View, Intersection of Vermont and Manchester

Versatile Markets is an urban infill design strategy that creates an Urban Marketplace made up of open spaces and public and private facilities (commercial center, public transportation hub, green open space), that when overlaid generate habitable spaces that share a common goal of redeveloping South LA.

Figure 3 – Recreational Activites

This strategic design avoids the outdated redevelopment process models that favor strip malls or large box retailing giants with additional vacant parking lots. This design reinvents commercial centers like the ones that existed prior to 1992: a place where the streets are pedestrian-oriented, ensuring that pedestrians can move through the space and shape their own experiences. The retail environment adjacent to public facilities is aimed at ensuring the longevity of a successful redevelopment strategy, which brings both private and public resources that are part of everyday living.

Figure 4 – Public and Pedestrian Circulation

Within the social, cultural and economic context of South LA, the Versatile Markets research and design becomes a testing ground to address the spectrum of vacant lots which fill our urban environments. The proposal explores unconventional urban design strategies as a means of producing unprecedented experiences in the scale of community, producing an eventful and continuous self-relevance landscape that no generation has experienced yet.

Figure 5 – Landscape Systems

This design proposal is the conclusion of approximately one year of research. During my directed design research, I faced a challenge while gathering data for the area surrounding the intersection of Vermont and Manchester. This particular intersection is at a junction of political boundaries. As a result, the immediate context is governed by city, state and federal law. This disconnection and loss of information resulted in an extended time in collecting data for an area that is less than a quarter mile in radius. In additional to political disconnection, I also encountered the same issue when approaching nonprofit organizations in the area which aimed at rebuilding South LA. The organizations lacked a consistent base on which to develop their grassroots strategies.

As my academic research becomes professional ambition, I am looking forward to LA Open Acres’ initiative of bringing healthy, walkable, active spaces to Los Angeles. Projects like LA Open Acres will empower our communities with resources to take charge and be part of this new movement.

USC Landscape Architecture Program & Landscape Morphologies Lab

The USC Landscape Architecture Program & Landscape Morphologies Lab Exhibits New Design Research on the LA River and the Los Angeles Region.

Under the direction of Robert Harris, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the accredited USC Landscape Architecture Program offers three curricula within its Master of Landscape Architecture degree. The focus of the program is landscape architecture as a natural and urban phenomenon that is integral to the quality of human experience, essential for reclaiming degraded places and cities throughout the world and necessary for sustaining nature. For more information, visit http://arch.usc.edu/programs/master-landscape-architecture

The exhibition is supported by the City of Los Angeles and the USC School of Architecture Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture.

Re-Imagining Empty Space: Innovations for an Active South LA

Re-Imagining Empty Space: Innovations for an Active South LA

Coalition for an Active South LA meeting on April 19, 2011 from 10AM to Noon. As you may recall, on March 12, 2011 over 130 South LA residents and health advocates gathered to tour unique open space projects on vacant lots and street space. Three days later we reconvened to explore additional strategies to transforming empty space to activespace. If you missed parts of either day, related press coverage and YouTube videos are listed below. We witnessed many possibilities and innovations over the course of two days and now it is time to make them happen!