Shade is a crucial yet criminalized resource in Los Angeles. City sidewalks, parks, bus stops, freeway underpasses, and the LA River are all sites in which the presence of shade is problematized and often explicitly made illegal. Motivations for criminalizing shade range from bureaucratic mismanagement to surveillance to issues of profit and beyond. More often than not, however, the lack of shade is a situational consequence with serious repercussions. Facing rising temperatures and impending heat waves, LA residents don't have many options for escaping the deadly heat. The lack of shade affects so many of us — walkers, bikers, and runners; children playing in parks; city transit takers; residents who are housed and those experiencing homelessness — and yet by no means does the illegalization of shade affect us all equally. Join us for six stories about shade and its criminalization in Los Angeles. Moderated by Sam Bloch, this session will address the complications of heat and shade through the topics of homelessness, the LA River, street vending, tree canopies, and public transportation. Speakers include Genevieve Liang from SELAH, Mark Vallianantos from LA Metro, Jessica Henson from LA River Project, and Lyric Kelkar from Inclusive Action, among others.
SPEAKERS
Sam Bloch is a journalist in New York. A staff writer at The Counter, a nonprofit newsroom, he has also written for The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Art in America, CityLab, Artnet News and others. He is currently at work on his first book, a work of narrative nonfiction for Random House that expands upon his Places Journal article "Shade." The book will be a surprising, urgent exploration of this underappreciated natural resource, which reveals deep inequalities in society and just might hold the key to mitigating climate change and make living with it bearable in the meantime. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, he used to live in one of Los Angeles’s shadiest neighborhoods.
Genevieve Liang is a clean technology strategist whose primary work focuses on decarbonizing the primary industrial sectors contributing to climate change. Three and half years ago, she began a deep dive into the homeless services ecosystem in Los Angeles via volunteer roles as executive director of Cardborigami, an emergency shelter product nonprofit; serving on the board of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition; and as a co-chair of her neighborhood council's housing and homelessness committee. Along the same vein as the community-scale, distributed energy resource projects that she has led commercial teams in realizing, she believes that geographically distributed and locally originated resources need to be intentionally integrated into the framework of local social services delivery.
Jessica Henson is a landscape architect at OLIN where she is currently the project manager for the 2020 Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. At OLIN she has developed numerous planning and design projects that seek to create socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure including the LA River Index and the Rio Hondo Confluence Area Project. Jessica’s other significant projects include the SELA Cultural Center, Chicago’s Vista and Willis Towers, a new residential precinct at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the new U.S. Embassies in London and Brasilia. Jessica teaches at the University of Southern California and is the co-editor of the recent book Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.
John Yi is the Executive Director of Los Angeles Walks. Prior to joining LA Walks in 2019, John was the Advocacy Director for the American Lung Association in California, where he worked on strong tobacco control and air quality policies. At the Lung Association, John also served as a lead organizer by training tobacco control coalitions throughout the state. He helped bring smoke-free ordinances to over a dozen different cities, fighting back against secondhand smoke and Big Tobacco's efforts to target low-income and communities of color. John also served as the interim National Director for Parent Revolution, an education and social justice non-profit. In this role he led parent organizing campaigns in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Ohio. He received his master's degree at Georgetown University and his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan. He is a brother of Pi Alpha Phi, speaks Korean and Russian, and loves to cook.
Kara Holekamp is a landscape designer and project manager at Terremoto. She earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from The University of Texas at Austin and has a background in Geography. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has had the opportunity to work on a variety of project types, including high-end residential, commercial, and office spaces. As part of the Terremoto team, she has taken on several adventurous projects and is inspired daily by her radically talented team. Terremoto is a ‘formally and conceptually ambitious’ landscape architecture studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
Lyric Kelkar is a Senior Associate of Policy and Research at Inclusive Action for the City, where she leads policy advocacy for better access to government systems and protections for underserved communities across LA. Her current projects include moving work forward for the LA Street Vendor Campaign, Healthy LA Coalition, and SPARCC LA table. Pulling from her Masters in Design and Urban Ecologies, she applies a design-thinking approach to research social challenges in the built environment and drives equitable policy and community development solutions to counteract exclusion within the field of urban planning.
Mark Vallianatos is Executive Officer in the Office of Extraordinary Innovation at LA Metro, where he works to implement the agency's strategic plan and staffs its COVID-19 recovery task force. Mark previously taught urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, co-founded Abundant Housing LA, and serves on the City of LA's zoning advisory committee. He is interested in the policy history of LA 'building blocks' like food trucks, single-family houses and low-rise apartments. Mark is the co-author of The Next Los Angeles: the Struggle for a Livable City. He received his BA and JD from the University of Virginia.
Registration for this Event is Closed. Check out the recording of the session below!
Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck