Episode 121: Love and Squalor

With Michael on vacation, Jessica is joined by Alissa Walker, the urbanism editor of Curbed. She has lived in Los Angeles for almost 20 years but only recently has begun to see a new kind of homelessness, with people going to jobs during the day and returning to tents or RVs at night.

Jessica, meanwhile, sees L.A. with fresh eyes:

The parks are so beautiful. The flowers are always in bloom. When you see dirt and when you see homelessness, it’s really catastrophic against the backdrop of so much idealized perfection.

Also mentioned this week:

Frieze Week in LA
Artnet, Barbara Kruger on Why She’s Plastering LA’s Buildings With Questions About What It Means to Live Another Day
Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project
Destination Crenshaw
Elijah Chiland, Curbed, Agency responsible for housing LA’s homeless discovers 3,000 units it ‘didn’t know about’
Nithya Raman, Nithya for the City
YouTube Movies, Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Urban Confluence Silicon Valley video
Alissa Walker and Alexandra Lange, Curbed, Design competitions won’t solve your city’s problem
Alexandra Lange, Design Observer, Against Kickstarter Urbanism (2012)
Travel Film Archive, Flight to California 1952
Rosa Lyster, The Outline, We will never find dignity in air travel
Molly Young, The Cut, Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?

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Posted in: Arts + Culture, The Observatory

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

Alissa Walker connects people with where they live through writing, speaking, and walking. As the urbanism editor at Curbed, she authors the column Word on the Street, highlighting the pioneering transit, clever civic design, and game-changing policy affecting our cities. For her writing on design and urbanism, Alissa has been named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and Journalist of the Year by Streetsblog Los Angeles. In 2012 her project Good Ideas for Cities was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2015 she received the Design Advocate award from the LA chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She is also the co-founder of design east of La Brea, a nonprofit that has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants supporting its LA design events.

Jobs | November 14