Magnetic Los Angeles


Book Description

Suburban development is often considered synonymous with enhanced personal mobility, single-family housing, and life cycle homogeneity. According to this view, individual suburbs are residence-only enclaves, isolated commuter-sheds for a managerial and mercantile elite. Magnetic Los Angeles challenges this common vision of the expanding, twentieth-century city as the sprawling product of dispersion without planning, lacking any discernable order.




Building Downtown Los Angeles


Book Description

From the 1970s on, Los Angeles was transformed into a center for entertainment, consumption, and commerce for the affluent. Mirroring the urban development trend across the nation, new construction led to the displacement of low-income and working-class racial minorities, as city officials targeted these neighborhoods for demolition in order to spur economic growth and bring in affluent residents. Responding to the displacement, there emerged a coalition of unions, community organizers, and faith-based groups advocating for policy change. In Building Downtown Los Angeles Leland Saito traces these two parallel trends through specific construction projects and the backlash they provoked. He uses these events to theorize the past and present processes of racial formation and the racialization of place, drawing new insights on the relationships between race, place, and policy. Saito brings to bear the importance of historical events on contemporary processes of gentrification and integrates the fluidity of racial categories into his analysis. He explores these forces in action, as buyers and entrepreneurs meet in the real estate marketplace, carrying with them a fraught history of exclusion and vast disparities in wealth among racial groups.




Los Angeles and the Summer Olympic Games


Book Description

This open access book describes the three planning approaches and legacy impacts for the Olympic Games in one locale: the city of Los Angeles, USA. The author critically compares the similarities and differences of the LA Olympics by reviewing the 1932 and 1984 Olympics and by analyzing the concurrent planning process for the 2028 Olympics. The author unravels the conditions that make (or do not make) LA28’s argument “we have staged the Games before, we can do it again” compelling. Setting the bid’s promises into the contemporary local and global mega-event contexts, the author analyzes why LA won the bids, how those wins allowed LA to negotiate concessions with the IOC and NOC, and how legacies were planned, executed, and ultimately evolved. The author concludes with a prediction which 2028 legacy promises might and might not be fulfilled given the local and international Olympic contexts.




Eden by Design


Book Description

"Eden by Design is a compelling and fascinating description of a possible Los Angeles that never came to be. Greg Hise and William Deverell have resurrected the Olmsted Brothers' 1930 plan for Los Angeles County, and then, in a wonderful introduction, put the plan in context so that to read it now is to see not only what seemed dangerous and possible in 1930 but also how and why one route to the present was chosen over others. In their hands, the plan acts like a ghost of Los Angeles, reminding us about a vanished past, lost possibilities, and the secrets that our present masks."—Richard White, author of The Organic Machine "The Report is not only a vital document in the history of Los Angeles . . . but a lost classic of a neglected golden age of city planning and landscape architecture. . . . It embodies a truly regional perspective; an ecological perspective; a long-range vision; an integration of design with finance and administration; and a truly grand interpretation of public space. It deserves to be known to every serious student of the American planning tradition."—Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia "An essential document for understanding the history of the West's largest city. Los Angeles had the opportunity to become an extraordinarily beautiful environment, a Paris in the desert. The editors make clear why, sadly, it did not; but also they hold out hope that portions of this brilliant but neglected plan might still be recovered."—Donald Worster, author of Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas "A welcome addition to the literature of American urban planning history."—Roger Montgomery, Professor of Architecture Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley




Planning Los Angeles


Book Description

Los Angeles isn’t planned; it just happens. Right? Not so fast! Despite the city’s reputation for spontaneous evolution, a deliberate planning process shapes the way Los Angeles looks and lives. Editor David C. Sloane, a planning professor at the University of Southern California, has enlisted 30 essayists for a lively, richly illustrated view of this vibrant metropolis. Planning Los Angeles launches a new series from APA Planners Press. Each year Planners Press will bring out a new study on a major American city. Natives, newcomers, and out-of-towners will get insiders’ views of today’s hot-button issues and a sneak peek at the city to come.




The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution


Book Description

Turner Publishing proudly presents a fully-updated edition of The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution FINALIST, Ben Franklin Awards, Independent Book Publishers Association, Business Category The world changes continuously and rapidly. It’s foolhardy to believe that strategies should not do so as well. Nonprofit leaders already know this, but traditional strategic planning has locked them into a process that’s divorced from today’s reality. That’s why plans sit on the shelf and why smart executives are always seeking workarounds in between planning periods. The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution offers a nimble and powerful alternative. In this groundbreaking book, strategy expert David La Piana introduces “Real-Time Strategic Planning,” a fluid, organic process that engages staff and board in a program of systematic readiness and continuous responsiveness. With it, your nonprofit will be able to identify, understand, and act on challenges and opportunities as they arise. At the heart of this practical book is the Real-Time Strategic Planning Cycle. Based on four years of research and testing with a variety of nonprofits, this proven process guides you through the steps to sound strategy. You’ll find tools for clarifying your competitive advantage; generating a strategy screen—criteria for evaluating strategies to be able to respond quickly; handling big questions; developing and testing strategies; and implementing and adapting strategies. This useful guide also includes exhibits and case examples showing how concepts play out in real-life; a total of 27 tools—10 of which are essential for forming strategies; Theory to Action sidebars telling you which tool to use for a given task; and a link to downloadable content with all the tools and interactive worksheets you’ll need, as well as a Facilitator’s Guide to Real-Time Strategic Planning that gives you everything you need: the day’s agenda, instructions for preparing flip charts, prework to be done, handouts, and worksheets. Use The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution and get the clarity and direction you need for maximum mission success.







Global Cities


Book Description

How Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China deal with such urban environmental issues as ports, goods movement, air pollution, water quality, transportation, and public space. Over the past four decades, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and key urban regions of China have emerged as global cities—in financial, political, cultural, environmental, and demographic terms. In this book, Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng trace the global emergence of these urban areas and compare their responses to a set of six urban environmental issues. These cities have different patterns of development: Los Angeles has been the quintessential horizontal city, the capital of sprawl; Hong Kong is dense and vertical; China's new megacities in the Pearl River Delta, created by an explosion in industrial development and a vast migration from rural to urban areas, combine the vertical and the horizontal. All three have experienced major environmental changes in a relatively short period of time. Gottlieb and Ng document how each has dealt with challenges posed by ports and the movement of goods, air pollution (Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and urban China are all notorious for their hazardous air quality), water supply (all three places are dependent on massive transfers of water) and water quality, the food system (from seed to table), transportation, and public and private space. Finally they discuss the possibility of change brought about by policy initiatives and social movements.