Los Angleles, CA—How we ended up in a room filled with some of the brightest minds in Los Angeles—from the Deputy Mayor to Moby—was the result of a chance meeting under a boulder in Utah.
While we were climbing in Joe’s Valley, we ran into Orange County native Alvin Kim (check out his blog—you’ll be inspired). Alvin’s sister Christine was one of the organizers of a new event bringing together “creative leaders from across Los Angeles to share best practices and investigate new ways to make their burgeoning civic, architectural or design projects a reality.” Christine reached out to us after hearing the DesignEgg story from her brother and we soon had an invitation to the Making LA Conference, the culmination of a year-long programming series organized by de LaB, an LA-based nonprofit with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
After negotiating some pretty intense traffic, we made it to the historic River Center and Gardens in the Cypress Park neighborhood with plenty of time to enjoy coffee and breakfast provided by Good Eggs, a new concept for home food delivery that works with local farmers (think farmers market plus Peapod). The morning programming kicked off appropriately with a session on transportation. We heard an impassioned presentation by Seleta Reynolds, the new general manager of LADOT, about how she is working with planners and designers to make the city more safe, livable, and sustainable, and how good design plays an important role in these initiatives.
“If we want changes to stick,” she said, “they have to be loved by the community. And if we want them to be loved, they have to be beautiful.”
We also heard a great presentation from CicLAvia, a nonprofit that temporarily removes cars from LA streets and fills them with activities for bikers and pedestrians. “Our streets are congested with traffic, our air is polluted with toxic fumes, our children suffer from obesity and other health conditions caused by the scarcity of public space and safe, healthy transportation options,” the groups’ leadership said. “CicLAvia…creates a network of connections between our neighborhoods and businesses and parks with corridors filled with fun.”
Later in the morning, performance artist Kristina Wong brought the house down with her hilarious bit “Going Green the Wong Way,” where she chronicles her experience owning an unreliable pink Mercedes that was converted by a shady mechanic to run on used cooking oil. When the car finally burst into flames on the LA freeway, she was left car-less and turned to being an activist for public transportation.
In the afternoon, we heard one of the most fascinating (albeit terrifying) presentations of the day from Dr. Lucy Jones, the Seismic Advisor to the city of Los Angeles. Best known as “the earthquake lady,” Jones is charged with improving the city’s response to natural disaster. She talked about how Angelenos need to prepare for the inevitable “Big One” and encouraged architects to go beyond the city’s building code and design new structures that are even better equipped to withstand the quake that will “unzip the San Andreas Fault” and cause mass devastation across LA sometime within the next 30-100 years.
Other presentations and panel discussions on topics such as water usage, density, and community rounded out the programming, including an address from Moby, who talked about how LA is a great place for artists to live/work because of the large and relatively cheap spaces still available.
The day ended with a sobering panel discussion on the state of homelessness. During this discussion we heard from two community activists (one who was formerly homeless), the Executive Director of the Skid Row Housing Trust, and a journalist who covers LA’s infamous Skid Row, a four-square-mile area of downtown that contains one of the largest homeless populations in the US (between 3,000 and 6,000 according to Wikipedia).
Although we were completely enthralled with the programming, the breaks between events turned out to be equally valuable. We had a chance to network with many wonderful people who are doing important work in their city. After the cocktail hour, and a few fancy drinks from Greenbar Craft Distillery, we loaded up the Egg, said goodbye to our new friends Alvin and Christine, and headed out of the River Center full of creative energy and confidence in the role design can play in improving lives.
