For two years running, I have co-sponsored an Urban Growth Seminar at USC that focusses on radical urbanism. This year’s entry was excellent, just like last year’s, and I’m thrilled to share the YouTube of the event. I think students learned a lot, and it’s been a real education to me. A big thank-you to the panelists and to our terrific student organizers: Richard Aviles, Lynette Guzman, Taylor Relich, and to our staffer, Jennifer Hong. You are all such gifts to planning at USC.
Here is a link to the full program on YouTube. I’m proud to have helped make this happen!
From USC’s materials:
Policies, from redlining to zoning, are practices that continue to colonize land and impact the life and cultures of people of color. Decolonization was born as a liberatory response to the hurtful legacy of colonization. Panelists discussed their work, the hurtful consequences of development, and the power of art as a participatory method within the planning profession.
Carolina Caycedo is a UK born Colombian artist, living in Los Angeles. Her artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, sculptures, and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and acting. Through work that investigates relationships of movement, assimilation and resistance, representation and control, she addresses contexts, groups, and communities that are affected by development and extractivism. Caycedo is currently Artist in Residence at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. She held residencies at The Huntington Gardens, Libraries and Art Collections (2018), and at DAAD artists-in-Berlin program (2012). She was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA, and has received funding from Creative Capital, California Community Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Harpo Foundation, Art Matters, Colombian Culture Ministry, Arts Council UK, and Prince Claus Fund.
Marina Magalhaes is a border-crosser, bridge-builder, and dance-and-change-maker from Brazil based in Los Angeles. She has shared her unapologetically feminist and latinx work throughout the US, Brazil, Cuba, Botswana, South Africa, and France earning her an LA Weekly Theater Award for Best Choreography. Magalhães is a graduate of UCLA’s World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department and a Lecturer at UC Riverside, a Resident Choreographer with Viver Brasil Dance Co, and a Resident Artist at Pieter Space in LA (teaching the weekly Dancing Diaspora class funded by California Arts Council). She is currently pursuing her MFA Dance degree at University of the Arts guided by Thomas DeFrantz and Donna Faye Burchfield, projected to graduate August 2019.
Carolina S. Sarmiento is an activist scholar and urban planner dedicated to interconnecting organizing, scholarship and the struggles for justice in the city. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She joined the Department of Civil Society and Community Studies in the School of Human Ecology (SoHE) in 2014. Carolina received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in Planning, Policy and Design and received her MA from UCLA in Urban Planning. She has her BA Worlds Arts and Cultures from UCLA. Her research and teaching examines community-based planning, transnational development, and the creation and destruction of new democratic processes and cultural spaces by and for working class communities of color. She was one of the founders of el Centro Cultural de Mexico’s first center, an organization and radical space in Santa Ana, California, where local community work for immigrant rights, anti-gentrification efforts and cultural autonomy. It continues to serve as a community organizing hub in Orange County.