Get Involved with Los Angeles Walks to Help Make the City More Walkable
- Alissa Walker wrote in Walking, Los Angeles and Urban Design
Walking is a “magic app” that builds a healthier, safer, more vibrant city. Plus, walking connects us to our communities, puts us in contact with our neighbors, builds social capital and raises civic awareness. Plus, it’s fun.
We’re organizing a campaign to get more Angelenos walking and make L.A. more walkable. If you sign up on our site at losangeleswalks.org, you can join walks and community events around L.A. throughout the year! Get involved with us and start walking!
In 1988, the LA Times Magazine published a 25-year look ahead to 2013
- Renee Solorzano posted in Los Angeles, Technology and Future
See what’s accurate and what’s far off.
Coding for GOOD: The Results are In, Meet Our Winner
- GOOD Partnerships wrote in Education Los Angeles and Hack A Thon
Last October, GOOD and Apollo Group announced the launch of Coding for GOOD, an opportunity to gain skills in coding and, for one lucky participant, a chance to work with us here at GOOD. The program is our effort to bridge the skills gap through real-world application.
Participants had eight weeks to take sixteen free coding lessons and submit a final project using the skills they learned. This past weekend the top three finalists were flown to Los Angeles for a hack-a-thon at the Google offices.
And now, after months of learning lessons and a busy weekend of developing, we are happy to announce that the Coding for GOOD winner is…
Infographic: Reimagining Downtown L.A.’s Historic Seventh Street
- GOOD/Corps and Bijan Berahimi contributed in Cities and Los Angeles
What would it look like if 7th and Spring–an iconic downtown intersection–was reshaped to embody the neighborhood’s increasing vitality?
Urban Air: Los Angeles Artist Transforms Billboards Into Floating Gardens - Liz Dwyer
Imagine sitting in traffic during your daily commute and instead of seeing the clutter of countless billboard advertisements you see gardens floating in the sky. That’s the kind of green experience Los Angeles-based artist Stephen Glassman wants us to have as we travel through our urban landscape. His Urban Air project hopes to transform the steel and wood frames that hold billboard advertising into suspended bamboo gardens.
Glassman’s been creating large-scale bamboo installations across Los Angeles since the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. He came up with Urban Air because—like many of us who live in congested cities—he saw a need for more fresh, green space, and a greater connection to humanity. The idea won the 2011 London International Creativity Award and proved so inspiring that Summit Media, a billboard company based in Los Angeles actually offered to donate billboards along major streets and freeways.
As you can see in the video above, to create the garden billboards, Glassman and his team simply remove the commercial facade and modify the existing structure by installing planters, filling them with live bamboo, hooking up a water misting system and connecting them to a wifi network that monitors the environment. Then, says Glassman, “when people are stuck in traffic” on the 10 Freeway instead of seeing advertisements, they “look up and they see an open space of fresh air.”
The project’s hoping to raise $100,000 through Kickstarter to structurally retrofit the first prototype billboard, secure licenses, permits, and insurance, and pay for cranes to help install everything. They hope to spread the idea across the globe so they’re also producing “a system ‘kit’ that enables any standard billboard to be easily transformed to a green, linked, urban forest.” While it can be argued that that’s a hefty sum for just one billboard and a toolkit, seeing a beautiful garden suspended in air sure beats having to look at another advertisement, right?
Photographer David Yoon narrows existing streets of Los Angeles to see the effects on the city.
Thanks for the find, Katie!
Can’t wait to see this!
Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts. (via The Geffen Contemporary Museum at MOCA)
Rodney King and America’s Stalled Conversation About Race
Sunday afternoon a 20-something white guy in a Ramones t-shirt standing in front of me in line at my local coffee shop remarked to the young white woman he was with, “Hey, did you hear Rodney King died?” She didn’t look up from her iPhone as she replied, “Who’s Rodney King?”
Leave it to a real-talking editor to put into words (and gifs) what we’re already thinking.
Join us tonight at our Issue 027 launch party. Details and tickets here: http://goodmigration.eventbrite.com/
(via editorrealtalk)
I always wondered why it was so difficult for drivers to just pay attention and not be assholes. Then I moved to Los Angeles and got a car. Here, we do not operate our vehicles so much as we hang out in them. Hunkered in my sedan, I’m now comfortable juggling an iced coffee and the radio dial while “courtesy” honking the car in front of me. Only when I jump back on my bicycle do I become a little bit scared about the person that I become when I’m behind the wheel.
What Drivers Really Think About Bikers: The History and Psychology of Sharing the Road
Our friends at dublab, the nonprofit web radio collective, are having their annual “Creative Cultivation” fundraiser dinner this Thursday. It promises to be a blast, so if you’re in Los Angeles, consider picking up a ticket (they’re $100 each, but well worth it). You can listen to dublab no matter where you are, of course.
How Taking Photos Made Me Love My Adopted Hometown
Taking thousands of photos hasn’t made me learn the city any faster—if it takes 10 years to become a real New Yorker, as former mayor Ed Koch insists, it must require at least 15 to turn into an Angeleno, camera or not. But in a city full of secret worlds, my lens captures details I might have otherwise missed. Too often, people reserve photography for when they’re traveling—we don’t expect to be surprised in our own hometowns, whether we’ve lived there for one year or 30. But when I’ve got a camera in my hand, I can use that same spirit of exploration that guides a trip abroad to keep things exciting at home.
360° panorama: What the Occupy L.A. camp looked like this morning. Click through for the full interactive.
The skeleton of the Occupy L.A. encampment after being cleared out by police last night. More than 200 people were arrested.
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
