Urban Nature Projects

Urban Parks

Two new California State Park developments near downtown Los Angeles - Los Angeles State Historic Park (formerly known as the Cornfield) and Río de Los Angeles State Park (formerly a portion of Taylor Yard) - hold great promise. In a city marked by unequal and inadequate access to parkland and open space, these parks provide a rare opportunity for private, industrial land to be reclaimed and transformed into a public benefi t for adjacent communities and for all residents of Los Angeles and California. Inclusive planning, thoughtful design, and adequate maintenance of these parks are required for the parks to yield a wide variety of benefi ts. This report presents a synthesis of published literature on the benefits of parks and an evaluation of community perspectives from a series of interviews with key community residents and stakeholders. In addition, demographic information about the parks is paired with the other sources for an analysis of the issues and a series of recommendations for maximizing community benefits associated with the two new parks. In the published literature, parks have been shown to increase property values and increase access to open space for physical activity, an important benefit in helping address the current obesity epidemic. Parks can contribute to a neighborhood’s sense of place, environmental amenities and habitat, and psychological well-being. Despite the evidence about these benefits associated with parks, there are also negative factors that must be considered and mitigated to maximize benefits and minimize negative impacts. Gentrification, crime, and over-use of facilities have the potential to lessen the quality of life for people that currently reside near parks. Through literature reviews on the impacts and benefits of parks, open-ended interviews and participant observation of meetings, several major themes emerged as critical to a community and public benefi ts perspective on the two parks. These include: the need for access to the parks; safety and security; education and interpretation; connectivity of the parks to neighborhoods; transportation and other major linkages, notably the Los Angeles River; connecting the parks to the community; park usage; and community participation and input.

Read the Urban Parks report (PDF).

View Urban Parks presentation (PPT).

Arroyo Corridor

A heavy fog settled over the Arroyo Corridor in the early hours of June 15. More than three thousand bike riders began to appear from every direction as they lined up in front of the entrance to the freeway/parkway. Caltrans had placed one of the signs that Diane Kane had been promoting – Historic Arroyo Seco Parkway -- at the entrance way. During the next hour, thousands of others would also converge at four different locations through the Corridor, from north to south, to be able to walk on top of this historic parkway. The destination point for the walkers and bikers was Sycamore Grove Park in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park about midway between the two points where the parkway had been closed. Nearly 100 murals were draped over the historic bridges and overpasses that intersected the parkway, produced by participating K-12 schools, to provide color and imagination for the event. More than 70 booths were being set up by community and advocacy groups as well as ethnic food vendors throughout the park while some of the local bands began to assemble for the festival that would take place as the bike riders and walkers found their way through the hole in the fence that led from the parkway to the park grounds.

The bike riders took off just as the fog began to lift, while those who walked the parkway joined soon after. The stories about the event that we received through e mails, word of mouth, and web postings in the days that followed captured what many characterized as a magical moment for Los Angeles. Since it was Father’s Day, a number of families came out and most of the bike riders were there for the sheer pleasure of riding a freeway rather than to demonstrate speed and prowess as some riders at bike events liked to demonstrate. People who entered the parkway by bike or foot were exuberant and while the horseback riders were never able to secure their liability insurance, they were able to ride their horses along the concrete channel of the stream below the parkway.

The experience for the bike riders was particularly a revelation about how a bike ride not only provided pleasure but could potentially serve as an alternative form of transportation. One South Pasadena mother e mailed us that after “having received some information two days prior to the event, I managed to get my father involved for the bike ride…. Best of all, both of my children (daughter age 10 and son age 13) had the opportunity to cycle on the freeway with a significant sense of purpose! Such a reward and life lesson that my children and I will never forget! Everyday that we drive the 110 [Pasadena] Freeway, both children are still amazed that we cycled so far in such a short time!”

The bike riders, walk participants, and residents adjacent to the freeway also noted how uniquely silent it had become that morning and how much they appreciated their chance to connect to the green space and natural surroundings of the Arroyo. One participant noted that while he knew that parks lined the parkway, “seeing and experiencing them as I went by was magical. I could feel the cool air coming out of the tree-covered parks. I always knew the parkway was built to be beautiful, but seeing it at the appropriate speed clarified my vision.” One of the speakers at the Community Festival who lived close to the freeway in Highland Park spoke of how disorienting – and liberating – it was to “open my window in the morning and hear birds and the wind and breathe the air in a way I had never experienced before.”

Part of the focus of ArroyoFest was the opportunity to explore and promote alternative transportation options to the car and the freeway. The Gold Line, the new light rail system from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena whose route paralleled the parkway and the stream, was close to completion. Part of the message of ArroyoFest was identifying car and freeway alternatives such as the Gold Line, along with expanded bus service and the new rapid buses that sought to mimic rail service, commuter and recreational bikeways, and pedestrian pathways, with each contributing to the possibility of connecting rather than separating from the communities they passed through. Several ArroyoFest participants noted that the organizing for the event brought an increased attention to those alternative transportation options, based in part on the distribution of the thousands of fliers and posters showing bus and bike routes between the Festival at Sycamore Grove Park and the four starting points for the walk and bike ride. One ArroyoFest participant described how she had sought information on how to get back from the park to her home about a mile and a half away in the Hermon neighborhood. One of the ArroyoFest speakers who lived nearby in Highland Park and was herself a frequent bus rider, provided information on the #81 bus that stopped by the park and continued north to a point just a few blocks from the participant’s home in Hermon. “You know, I’ve lived seventeen years in Hermon and I never knew about the #81 bus, let alone to get to various places such as the park. And it actually stops close to my work in downtown L.A.,” she exclaimed, recognizing an opportunity she had never seized before.

The experience of nature in the city was also a theme present throughout the day. One tour took participants to the nearby Debs Park where the Audubon Society had established its first major inner city park and nature education program. During this event, several participants (including those who lived nearby) acknowledged that they had not previously been aware of the park. The Audubon Society tour leader later noted what a noticeable difference there had been in the sounds in the park. “I could hear birds sing and not just parrots, and I saw red-tailed hawks, bullock's orioles, and red-shouldered hawks nesting near the Parkway,” he subsequently e mailed us. One of the local leaders of a major national environmental organization (Environmental Defense) participated in one of the walks with several friends, including the 12-year old daughter of a family that lived in a nearby neighborhood. “There was a quite extraordinary moment that symbolized to me the power of ArroyoFest,” the environmental leader told ArroyoFest organizers. “My friend’s daughter was walking with us and at one point let out a shriek. ‘That’s a passion flower,’ she cried out, pointing to a delicate flower growing along the edge of the freeway. ‘I know it, because I studied it, but I never thought I’d actually see one!’”

Aftermath: Bike Rides on the Freeway Every Week?

ArroyoFest identified both the strengths and the weaknesses of the new transportation, open space, watershed, social and environmental justice, and community development movements in the Arroyo Corridor and the broader goal of trying to reinvent a city and a region so long associated with the car and the freeway and their transportation, land use, and environmental impacts. The excitement following the event was palpable. James Rojas, founder and chief organizer of the Latino Urban Forum sent out a missive to his group exclaiming, “ArroyoFest went beyond our expectations about creating a linear temporary plaza where the community could come together. It struck a chord in L.A. where people from all walks of life were able to experience a peaceful and silent freeway. Elderly women with parasols, Latino families, hipsters, and just regular folks were there. ArroyoFest suggested that even a car-oriented city like L.A. can change its ideas about freeways.”

Efforts to rethink class, race, and ethnicity differences, sometimes experienced in relation to the kind of diversity that could be found among and between different neighborhoods and cities along the Arroyo corridor, also emerged as part of the ambience of ArroyoFest. A neighborhood leader involved with the Mt. Washington Association, one of the middle class neighborhood organizations that had a booth at the festival, told an ArroyoFest organizer that the event had been enormously revealing and transformative for herself and her organization. “For some time we have been disconnected and sometimes in conflict with the groups from [adjacent, low-income, and largely Latino neighborhoods] Highland Park and Cypress Park. But working together on ArroyoFest and having a chance for our organizers to talk with each other at the booths was eye-opening. We’ve now had an opportunity both for collaboration and communication and quite possibly a sense of partnership for the future.” “The power and energy [of what we’ve done] is in (re-)creating a ‘place-based’ identity in the middle of the city, which cuts completely against the grain in greater Los Angeles region,” Marcus Renner wrote in a memo to UEPI staff two weeks after the event. ArroyoFest, Marcus argued, allowed one to see how an event of that kind showed “the power of place to bring diverse communities together.”

Let’s do it again and do it more often also became a post-ArroyoFest rallying cry. Why not shut the freeway down every year, several of the organizers e mailed each other, and one person began to tout the idea that the freeway ought to host a bike ride and a stroll every week. “They do it in Central Park in New York and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco,” several e mail correspondents argued. Others noted the successful bike ride that had caused the Lake Shore Drive in Chicago to shut down; an event that had taken place on the same day as ArroyoFest. Even Mary Nichols, ordinarily cautious and focused on how to accomplish incremental change and arguably, at the time, the most important and powerful environmental official in the state, was caught up in the post-ArroyoFest enthusiasm and e mailed me that a bike ride each Sunday morning was an idea that ought to be explored.

But the obstacles for recreating ArroyoFest and insuring its future as an event remained substantial. Several weeks after ArroyoFest, a meeting was arranged between myself, Marcus Renner, the event manager from the L.A. Marathon group, and officials from Caltrans and the Highway Patrol. The Caltrans and Highway Patrol staff expressed their overall satisfaction that no major problem had occurred but that any future event had to be more limited, particularly in how long the event would be allowed. Following the meeting, we discussed with the L.A. Marathon consultants whether and how ArroyoFest could be institutionalized. The L.A. Marathon consultants argued strongly about the need to better commercialize the event in order to make it financially and logistically viable. “You need to brand it,” they insisted, and by doing so, we could attract sponsors like Toyota and other companies who wanted their own name associated with the event. We worried, however, that while “Toyota Presents ArroyoFest” would be the kind of approach that might turn ArroyoFest into a successful commercial venture, such an approach directly undermined the power of ArroyoFest as a community event and as a symbolic counterpoint to the dominant car and freeway culture.

Discouraged about the immediate choices available for a future event but inspired by the moment itself when the freeway went silent and the walkers and bikers turned it into a public space, I thought about Charles Moore’s sardonic comment about the freeway as the heart of the city and its takeover as Los Angeles’ version of a revolutionary moment. Neither the neighborhoods within the Arroyo Corridor nor Los Angeles itself were in the midst of or about to experience a revolutionary moment. Yet changes were happening. New types of coalitions had emerged involving connections between different neighborhood groups as well as new citywide and regional networks. The exploration of a different kind of approach regarding the Arroyo Seco or the Los Angeles River as a watershed rather than a concrete flood channel or the need for an integrated transportation policy rather than a freeway-centric approach was no longer simply a romantic idea but was becoming central to the debates about the direction of policy. Caltrans or the water agencies had not been transformed, but some subtle and important shifts in the culture of the agencies had begun to occur. New groups, such as the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy were linking housing, food, transportation, jobs, and community development as part of an integrated agenda and in turn influencing the political discourse. Tim Brick’s election as MWD chairman suggested how much water politics in Los Angeles had changed. New bike groups in the Arroyo Corridor and the region were also formed, such as the Bicycle Kitchen, NELA Bikes! (Northeast Los Angeles Bikes!) and C.I.C.L.E. (Cicylists Inviting Change thru Live Exchange) and undertook a number of community bike events. This included an international Bike Summer event in June 2005 with a bike ride down Figueroa Boulevard that culminated at Sycamore Grove Park as well as a “Car-Free” evening of music and celebration for bike riders at the Cornfield park. Nature and community in the city – the underlying themes of ArroyoFest – had become part of the search for that place-based identity for Los Angeles, recasting the city that had been the very symbol of the loss of nature and community and the rise of a dominant freeway culture.

Los Angeles was in fact changing in numerous ways. The city had a new mayor who spoke of his own story of transformation and of his vision of greening the city and making it the symbol of community based on difference and diversity. It had a changing population that reflected those differences and influenced the patterns of development and the creation of new kinds of place-based identities. Nearly three years after ArroyoFest and nearly two years after a police chase had turned the Arroyo Seco Parkway into an open air mariachi performance, another invasion of the freeways took place led by high school students insisting on the rights of L.A.’s newest residents. Although not Charles Moore’s “effective revolution of the Latin American sort,” the freeway once again emerged as a symbolic place in the heart of Los Angeles, and while seizing the freeway did not indicate that a revolution had occurred, it symbolized the place where change needed to occur, whether occupied or silent.

Visit the ArroyoFest web archive at www.arroyofest.org.

Re-Envisioning the Los Angeles River

Placeholder for Cornfield text.

Read an excerpt from the article by UEPI staff Robert Gottlieb and Andrea Misako Azuma: Re-Envisioning the Los Angeles River: An NGO and Academic Institute Influence the Policy Discourse

Historic...

In 1999 and 2000, the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute hosted a year-long series of 40 different events and activities about the Los Angeles River. The goal of the series, and the Re-Envisioning the L.A. River program that developed from it, was to help transform the discourse around the River and the urban environment of Los Angeles and to encourage actions for community and ecological revitalization.

Since then, awareness about the L.A. River, a critical component of any initiative for revitalization, has grown exponentially. The goal of the L.A. River movement has thus shifted from what could be called a “discourse battle” to a focus on action and actual implementation of changes adjacent to and in the River. . Along these lines, UEPI’s own program now focuses on the stretch of the River near the Occidental campus, including but not limited to the Arroyo Seco stream that feeds into the L.A. River just north of downtown L.A. Learn more.

Community Gardens
Community garden piece from LA Times
Early article on 41st street garden (with James Rojas)
Bob's testimony

Proyecto Jardin: Growing Community and Making Linkages through a Garden and Community Space
by Molly Franson

In the summer of 2004, Molly Franson went to Cuba and studied the role that urban gardens play in mainstream medicine. When she left Cuba she realized that she wanted to apply her experience to situations in Los Angles. As a result she developed a senior comprehensive project at the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute that focused on the Proyecto Jardin, a community garden located in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. Her senior comprehensive project is a client-based organizing project that focuses on increasing community involvement within Proyecto Jardin. The research question seeks to evaluate how the Proyecto Jardin can be promoted within the community by means of education, nutrition, and medicine. The report focuses on two programs being implemented. The first program involves a garden-based curriculum that has piloted at Bridge St. Elementary School. The second program focuses on increasing White Memorial Hospital resident doctors’ involvement with Proyecto Jardin by making available information about alternative medicine. This document seeks to inform the reader about my involvement with Proyecto Jardin, as well as give background information about community gardens, garden based curriculum, and provide research for the programs. Download full report

The Landscapes Project

The Landscapes Project involves research and policy development related to water use and landscape choices, including native and non-native plants. Research goals include a comparative evaluation of the actual daily water use and drought tolerance of selected native and non-native plants that are commonly grown in southern California gardens. Many useful guides for water-wise gardening and/or xeriscaping are available, but actual measurements of the amount of water used by an individual plant either have not been made or are not reported in a format that allows inter-plant comparisons, important information which the project will seek to document. Research findings will also be utilized to help lay the groundwork for the development of policies to encourage a new landscape ethic in southern California.