2006 Campus-Community Partnerships

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Remapping LA - engaging the preset <-> revitalizing community

Abstract:

REMAP and the William C. Velasquez Institute will partner in a long term community process promoting and facilitating community participation in dialogue, decision making and actual implementation of the Los Angeles State Historic Park interpretative framework and the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan articulation. This community partnership and the project emerge from a belief that the city's present and these two historical projects offer a unique opportunity for an engaged dialogue about history, memory, identity, urban design and how they impact community empowerment. The project proposes the creation of a Cultural Civic Computing system bringing together interpretative databases, imaging tools, wireless mobile devices, and sensor networks as tools for community investigation of the city, articulation of memory, and engagement in urban decision making. The key specifications of this system are: Participatory Design, Context Awareness, Tangibility. The system is structurally decentralized and its interface physical and locative. The work with the community will be broken into four stages:

1. Engaging Conceptual Urban Imagery (the self, the community, the city).
2. Memory and Identity (participatory database design).
3. Experiences and Threads (relating the local with the general).
4. Expression (the park and its interpretative system).