Browsing by Subject "Los Angeles"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Automatic street widening: Evidence from a highway dedication law
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2017) Manville, Michael
    Cities often require developers to widen streets or make other transportation improvements to account for the traffic impacts of new building. This article examines one parcel-level traffic mitigation law in depth—the highway dedication ordinance of the city of Los Angeles. I first show that the law emerged from a combination of happenstance and political and fiscal constraints, not from persuasive evidence it would be effective. I then show that the traffic predictions underlying the law are often inaccurate, and that, in fact, the standards the law is based on are in some ways unverifiable. Thus the law likely does little to reduce congestion and probably impedes housing development. Finally, I argue that the law persists precisely because its desired outcome is hard to verify: Without measurable goals, planners fall back on a measurable process. Parcel-level traffic mitigation becomes an exercise not in reducing traffic but in ensuring that developers carry out mitigations, regardless of whether those mitigations are effective.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Cannabis Spaces, Relationships, and Relajos: Queer and Trans Chicanx Feminisms Grounding Cannabis Histories and Futures
    (2024) Ordonez, Magaly
    Cannabis Spaces, Relationships, and Relajos prioritizes the experiences of Chicanx and Latinx LGBTQ+ communities that have made current legal cannabis spaces possible. The dissertation examines historical and contemporary cannabis culture in Los Angeles (L.A.), California, to understand how queer of color cannabis histories, relations, and spaces refuse subversion to a capitalist cannabis industry by centering care, cannabis education, and political advocacy. It hypothesizes that Chicanx/Latinx communities across L.A. foster landscapes of political and cultural resistance within and beyond the limits of cannabis legality. By analyzing cannabis spaces and relationships through queer Chicanx feminist archival, ethnographic, and autoethnographic methodologies, my emphasis on gender and racial cultural cannabis histories in current discussions of cannabis legality reveal how cannabis policies are used to oppress racialized, gendered, and queer communities, even in states trying to repair the harm caused by the criminalization of cannabis. This dissertation addresses the historically ingrained racism and homophobia while also proposing alternative ways of imagining cannabis culture. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary approach contributes to the emerging field of Critical Cannabis Studies that has largely focused on privileged white heterosexual men. Joining Critical Cannabis Studies, Queer of Color Feminisms, and Chicanx Studies, my dissertation illustrates that 1) cannabis spaces are complex social, cultural, and political instances created by people who engage with cannabis, 2) LGBTQ+ cannabis relationships give insight to the ways legality and criminality impact everyday queer communities of color, and 3) racialized communities resist state oppression by creating alternative cannabis relationships and spaces, which can inform more equitable cannabis policies and urban futures.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Changing Face of Wall Space: Graffiti-murals in the context of neighborhood change in Los Angeles
    (2012-05) Bloch, Stefano
    In this historical geography of the changing appearance of wall space in and around the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, I show how the proliferation of graffiti-murals indicates the rise of a new form of practice in the production of urban aesthetics. I rely on data gathered through empirical and qualitative research—specifically, ethnographic methods that include archival image analysis, original photography, personal and participant observation, and extensive formal and open-ended interviews with members of the graffiti and mural communities. Throughout this dissertation I discuss the production and destruction of murals and graffiti-murals in the context of over 70 years of socio-spatial neighborhood change. I rely on the writings of geographers, sociologists, urban theorists, and art theorists who understand the production of alternative urban aesthetics as necessarily political, participatory, and place-based.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Intrapersonal day-to-day travel variability and duration of household travel surveys: Moving beyond the one-day convention
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2018) Li, Wei; Houston, Douglas; Boarnet, Marlon G.; Park, Han
    By analyzing seven-day travel logs from Los Angeles during 2011–2013, we contribute to the understanding of intrapersonal day-to-day travel variability (IDTV) in relation to socio-demographic and land-use characteristics and the implication of travel survey duration for travel parameter estimates. Our main sample included 2,395 person-days from 352 individual participants in 219 households. Our analytical methods included linear regressions and random sampling experiments. Our Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) regression models revealed that many factors significantly influenced IDTV, such as gender, age, income, and household type. However, the observed socio-demographic and land-use characteristics could only explain a small portion of IDTV. The random sampling experiments enabled us to contrast travel variables measured from the seven-day master sample with those from subsamples of a shorter period (one to six days). The “optimal” duration for a travel survey may depend on the specific travel variables measured, and we provide evidence that studies of transit and non-motorized travel will require longer surveys than studies of car travel. In conclusion, the conventional one-day approach is likely to produce imprecise parameter estimates due to the intrapersonal day-to-day travel variability. We recommend that transportation professionals and policy makers consider shifting from the conventional one-day approach toward a multi-day approach. Surveys that focus on the modes of walking, biking, and transit should consider data collection for at least seven days.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Korean American Creations and Discontents: Korean American Cultural Productions, Los Angeles, and Post-1992
    (2020-12) Chang, Michelle
    Korean American Creations and Discontents looks at Korean American subjectivity in Los Angeles after the 1992 Riots/Uprisings. This project begins with the LAPD beating of Rodney King and ends with the fatal Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. This dissertation is necessarily rooted in 1992 and 2020. Using Korean American cultural producers, this project examines the figure of the Korean American entrepreneur and Korean American subjectivity within the boundaries of model minority narratives, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and post-racial rhetoric. Situated in Los Angeles, this project is grounded in the Riots/Uprisings as an event that shaped, transformed, and reified new cultural, racial, economic, and gendered assumptions of multiple categories, identities, and bodies. While some events leading up to the Riots/Uprisings are covered, this project looks more specifically at media representation and the consequences of a media-constructed Black-Korean conflict. Moreover, while this project shifts away from the Riots/Uprisings, it remains rooted in them as a spectral haunting, influencing racial dynamics in the contemporary moment, as well as Korean American cultural productions. I look at how 1992 was a pivotal moment that influenced and continues to inform how Korean American cultural producers view themselves and their work, whether consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, my own perspective as a 2nd generation Korean American instrumentally informs my work, appearing most explicitly in personal anecdotes and vignettes, inserted throughout the dissertation. Chapter one takes a broader look at the shifting Asian American figure, looking at how Asian American representation has shifted between yellow peril and model minority narratives, given the historical moment and events that are unfolding. Taking a contemporary look at the increase of Asian American representation in popular culture, I situate this idea of representation as a paradox. Chapter two then looks at the history of Korean immigrants/Americans in Los Angeles, and how generalized tropes of Asian Americans impacted Korean American figures. The second part of this dissertation takes a look at 1.5 or 2nd generation Korean American cultural producers, Justin Chon and his 2017 film Gook, Roy Choi, the creator of the Kogi Truck and the Korean BBQ taco, and Dumbfoundead, a Koreatown-based rapper and media creator. Chapter three looks at Justin Chon and Gook, alongside the 1992 Riots/Uprisings, news media representations, and the media-constructed Black-Korean conflict. Chapter four and five examine Roy Choi’s Korean BBQ taco and the Kogi truck and Dumbfoundead, respectiviely, within the context of rising multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and post-racial rhetoric.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    L.A., Berlin, and Beyond: Decentering German Film History
    (2016-11) Neuman, Nichole
    “L.A., Berlin, and Beyond: Decentering German Film History,” investigates different cinematic communities, questioning where German cinema occurs and what cinematic objects comprise German film history. This research focuses on the transatlantic migrations of a collection of German language Heimat films (the “LA-Sammlung”) in order to recast how national cinema is defined. In examining sites of German cinema outside its generic and geo-political borders, I call for a broad inclusion of Germanness in defining German cinema and cinema history. This work looks at German/-American Los Angeles in the mid 20th century and utilizes the theoretical framework of prosthetic memory to posit that the postwar Angeleno media (including the German theater, La Tosca) cultivated a West German identity, despite a heterogeneous German-speaking audience. It further examines the German film archive’s own institutional politics to illustrate both the restrictions and possibilities of a nationally based cinema. The final section looks at the postwar, West German Heimat genre’s influence on and presence in other national screen cultures, e.g., in Bollywood, to suggest that this so-called domestic genre has global reach.