Very excited to launch Insuring the City at the Institute Library (founded 1826) in New Haven on Monday 10th December. You’re invited!
Insuring the City at the Institute Library
Reply
urban studies event at yale
UPDATE: We got a nice write-up in the Yale Daily News, check it out: Urban Planning Democratized.
Very excited to host James Rojas in New Haven on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. I first learned about Mr. Rojas through his essay “The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles” in a collection co-edited by my advisor at Berkeley, Paul Groth. He also published a great piece with John Chase – another inspiring writer on vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes – called “The Painted Sign Pictures of Latino Los Angeles” in Everyday Urbanism. At Yale, James with take participants through a model-making exercise that is intended to spur conversations about urban futures. You can come, too, just let me know.
The California Garden Apartment
After threatening to do so for many years, I am finally finishing my essay on the California Garden Apartment of the 1960s, a building type that is known by many observers of the L.A. scene (and by devotees of Reyner Banham) as the “Dingbat.”
Above is a picture taken by Scott Bonds, circa 1963, of the courtyard of his garden apartment built at 1201 Lexington Street in Albany, California. Bonds built many impressive California Garden Apartments in the East Bay in the 1950s and 60s. They were high-quality constructions and many of them continue to be successfully rented today.
elihu.info
Something has gone awry with my indexhibit site, elihu.info, so i’ve directed that URL here and am in the process of migrating my key professional information to this site. Indexhibit geniuses, please contact me. Thanks!
Catch My Drift?
Couldn’t be happier to report that my essay, “Catch My Drift? Situationist Dérive and Urban Pedagogy” has just been published in the Fall 2012 issue of the Radical History Review, edited by Robyn Autry and Daniel J. Walkowitz, on the theme of “Walkers, Voyeurs, and the Politics of Urban Space.” I’m proud to have my essay included and I thank all my students who participated in the urban drift assignment!
Comments on the Crossing
Planners and a developer want to put a building over the Route 34 Connector in New Haven and the city has broader plans for new surface streets and a Downtown Crossing over the 1950′s highway. I spoke with Kenneth Gosselin of the Hartford Courant about the project and he’s put together a great piece for that paper’s business section. I read it here:
paper because
Very interested to find this advertisement at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times business section on June 18, 2012. The ad shows two hikers in the countryside who have eschewed their mobile phones with their GPS mapping systems for a paper map. The text reads, “Paper because a lot of places worth going to don’t get a signal, and hopefully never will.”
The sponsor, Domtar, bills itself as a sustainable paper company and has launched an extensive “Paper Because” campaign that champions the material as an immediate, authentic, and, ultimately, recyclable part of our daily lives. On the Domtar website, one tag line makes the case, “Paper because underneath all our wireless, streaming, hands-free technology, we’re still people.”
The campaign hits the right manipulative marks in a digital age of loose connections. I love books and archives and letters and good stationery marked by letter press or typewriter. Though I hope to see the paper worth keeping preserved and not recycled.
