The art world has been linked to gentrification. Such art is associated with a modernist aesthetics based on abstraction, individual experience, and exchange value. This chapter identifies a different kind of art based on an aesthetics of engagement in the historic immigrant neighbourhoods of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. This aesthetics is linked to ethics, collective interaction, and the participatory community development of specific places. Furthermore, gentrification is often only understood as an economic process. The concept of cultural gentrification is presented to demonstrate how transformations in the symbolic sphere can trigger a loss of belonging. Art that is borne from the specific culture of a place, however, can open up new potential in combating gentrification.

The strip mall is a ubiquitous urban design type formed by a strip of commercial establishments on a single parcel of land that surround an open, street-facing parking lot. We hypothesize that they are important sites for ethnic and immigrant businesses in LA and, in particular, that their relatively low rents, location, and design (including site layout, unit size, and structure quality) are particularly conducive for ethnic cultural placemaking. Using data about the built environment, real estate market, and our own original "EthniCITY" spatial database of race/ethnicity placemaking patterns in Los Angeles, we use mapping and spatial analysis, descriptive statistics, a hedonic price model, and groundtruthing fieldwork to find that small and medium-sized strip malls are important ethnic places in Los Angeles, hosting the most ethnic commercial establishments amongst all commercial building types. We also find that half of all small strip malls are located within ethnic cultural hubs. Our findings suggest that physical urban design matters in shaping the cultural life of cities and the geographic opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurship.

The arts and historic preservation are well-established as strategies that can underpin urban planning and development. Although there is documented alignment between the arts and preservation, they are not typically formally integrated in city planning and existing research tends to address one or other, but not their integration. We fill this gap through an exploration of the intersection of the arts and historic preservation. We focus on who employs these strategies and why, the synergies and tensions between these practices, and how the arts and preservation relate to contemporary urban development in terms of gentrification, community control, and placemaking.

This article describes urban humanities, a mode of research, teaching, learning, and scholarly practice for those “inside the school,” who collaborate with people “in the community” such as activists, non-profit organizations, or community groups from around the globe. Urban humanities is defined by its studio-based orientation which allows for shared creative practices that span disciplines, and provide action-oriented insights not only into past histories and present conditions, but also more just futures. Two such experimental practices which have emerged include thick mapping and filmic sensing, and additional valuable practices may yet be developed with increased use of urban humanities.

Planning has historically been used as a tool to regulate queer people in urban space and parades have long been a vibrant, yet overlooked, practice for resisting such municipal regulation—although parades themselves require spatial planning practices. We analyze the 50-year history of the Los Angeles Pride parade through archival materials, asking to what extent and how the historical planning of LA Pride demonstrates a radical planning praxis, especially in relation to policing. We find that LA Pride was initially (a) a ritual of remembrance and (b) a political organizing device. In contrast to heteronormative readings of Pride as an opportunity to “come out” and transform the “straight state,” we argue that the early years of Pride demonstrated intersectional and insurgent planning wherein heterogeneous queer people claimed agency through collectively expressing joy as an act of resistance to municipal governance. Based on theories of Black joy and the feminist killjoy, we conceptualize this experience as a “spatialized queer joy.” This concept is particularly germane given ongoing debates regarding the relationship between queer and BIPOC urban life and policing. We suggest that spatialized queer joy complicates conventional readings of Pride and queer urban space, offering instead powerful tools for radical queer planning praxis.

Climate change and the urban heat island (UHI) effect are increasing extreme heat risk in cities across the world, and have already made extreme heat the top weather-related cause of death in the United States. Despite this, understanding of viable strategies to address extreme heat is still limited, for both decision-makers and the public. Using a design-based research methodology, we developed an interactive educational game, Chill City, which teaches players about possible heat planning strategies and their tradeoffs. We surveyed adult, non-expert players to understand the game’s reception and impacts. Players expressed that they enjoyed the game and that it helped them better understand heat planning strategies and the environmental, social, and economic tradeoffs associated with them. We argue that environmental games offer educational potential for adult learners on issues of extreme heat and climate change that should be further explored to inform effective approaches and designs.

“Who Is the We in Diaspora?” is episode2, season two of Digital Salon, an experimental podcast begun at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Produced by coauthor Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, the “DJ,” it meditates on the Atlanta shootings of six Asian spa workers on March6 2021. The transcript of this episode is presented anew, paired with “liner notes” that are a collaboration between the DJ and his “critical listener,” Jacqueline Barrios, coauthor of this piece and co-producer of Digital Salon, through textual “accompaniments” on the episode and its afterlife to stage the work’s claim to its own futurity.

Arts-based community development practices have received newfound prominence over the past decade under the auspices of "creative placemaking." In 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published a white paper titled "Creative Placemaking" and launched a new granting program focused on this practice called Our Town. Today, creative placemaking is burgeoning yet its precise definition remains fuzzy. This article uses content analysis to systematically analyze the 569 Our Town grants awarded by the NEA since the program's inception to inductively define creative placemaking based on the values embedded into project proposals, comparing these values with the NEA's stated Our Town goals. I find that creative placemaking, at least as funded in the U.S. through Our Town, can be defined as public or community-based art that includes values of place-specificity, collaboration, and participation, and which results in three forms of community development outcomes: economic development, bolstering social capital and participation, and improved cultural infrastructure. As creative placemaking evolves, equity is increasingly a concern, shifting focus toward the latter two outcomes as more measurable and desirable.

Co-creation has been adopted by some as a new paradigm for collaborative and participatory planning, especially through the introduction of creative and artistic practices which can disrupt the problematic power relationships latent within urban projects and knowledge creation. Co-creation research, however, has often focused on practices which connect empow-ered institutional actors, such as city planning officials, from the top down to less empowered grassroots and community actors. Co-creation can take myriad forms, however, and I use evidence from the Los Angeles community of Little Tokyo to, first, model grassroots-driven co-creation. Second, this example shows how empowered actors can practice "listening"as defined within public spheres literature to better respond to grassroots-driven co-creation. Third, Little Tokyo has also been the site of another promising form of co-creation practice: horizontal co-creation across multiple grassroots actors. In sum, I argue that co-creation practices which emanate from the grassroots can provide valuable insights, further a more just and inclusive city, and deserve more attention.

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

Traditional urban planning projects require considerable time, political buy-in, and capital. Conversely, small-scale urban interventions can be executed quickly and inexpensively. However, the terms used to describe these projects—such as tactical, pop-up, temporary, or insurgent urbanism—are numerous and overlapping, making them hard to distinguish from each other. We suggest that a single unifying term, punctual urbanism, can capture these different urbanisms. To justify this choice, we provide definitions and examples, as well as an overarching framework for understanding these urbanisms on the basis of two dimensions: who is implementing them and what is their temporal scale.

Los Angeles has recently been the site of two notable cases of guerrilla urbanism. In one, street vendors formed advocacy groups and a coalition with allies that lobbied city council and overturned a citywide ban on their activity. In another, several Boyle Heights community organizations deployed confrontational tactics to close art events, galleries, and coffee shops to counter gentrification and displacement. This article compares these two cases to find the key role that urban aesthetics and design play in rewriting the dominant spatial order under contemporary conditions of immigrant urbanism. We propose that property outlaw theory from property rights law literature helps us understand the potentially productive role of guerrilla urbanism and its implications for urban design practice. Additionally, spatial and temporal parochialism, and defining the boundaries of what constitutes "the community" are important factors in the efficacy of guerrilla urbanism practice. These cases' insights can help equip designers to more mindfully practice urban design, knowing the important role that aesthetics play in a larger property rights regime reconstruction project.

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies.Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field.Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim?Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles?with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote ?literary justice? in Los Angeles.

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

The concept and the application of the smart city are increasingly being critiqued for their underlying neoliberal ideology, which privileges efficiency in capital accumulation and management over the subjectivity and necessities of everyday human life. There are similar concerns being expressed about smart games' 'invisible hand', controlling rather than creating felicity and salubrity. In this chapter, we unpack these underlying and interlocking ideologies where they converge: in gamified smart city technologies. We are especially interested in the ways such technologies are used to solicit public participation or instead to create tokenised and disempowered forms of cooperation rather than foster deep democratic engagement. We argue for an appreciation of the 'stupid' in cities, games and politics, a prizing of the slow, the reflective and the critical as essential components of a just, humane and enjoyable world.

This article develops a grounded theory of contingent placemaking based on three micro histories from the urban development of the historically Japanese American community of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. These narratives suggest that places – and especially ethnic and immigrant places – are made through continual negotiation between disastrous forces, accidental actions, and grassroots responses to those things. Communities with cultures of participation, engagement, and creativity can at times channel these forces into placemaking, demonstrating a form of resilience based on social capital more than physical interventions such as infrastructure. Additionally, beneath all of these processes is the place’s governing property rights regime, which communities must also navigate and engage. This theory of placemaking is especially useful for considering the current challenges that communities face, most notably pressures of gentrification.