DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you so much, Rayne. This has been a wonderful introduction to some of the projects cityLAB is doing. A lot of what you discussed seems to center around public spaces and amenities and their privatization. With our hyper capitalist society, privatization has only increased in the past decades. Instead of public parks or pools, we have focused on large backyards and private pools for play and entertainment, for example. Added to that, people seem unwilling to pay taxes for public amenities. How do you deal with that in your work?

Rayne Laborde: That’s a great and complicated question. I am proud to live in a city where we did choose to voluntarily tax ourselves to fund measure HHH [a $1.2-billion bond measure to fund homeless housing]. This allowed us to build several thousand units of new affordable housing. Of course, we need to do much more.

As a Marxist scholar, I have a profound interest in modern monetary theory. I believe that as a nation we should not be so concerned about racking up debt to further our social opportunities. We have the capacity to fund what we need, through a controlled system of taxation to create equitable balance. The very wealthy might not agree with this. But I do believe in a strong government that chooses to create a better world for its citizens.

Alexandra Staub: The work at cityLAB often shows that something can happen in ways that are counterintuitive. It gives people pause to reexamine common and widespread beliefs. With the ADUs, you showed an alternative to what people thought such units would look like and demonstrated how their aesthetic value would enhance the community. Can you comment on this aspect of design research as social research?

make our schools run. A huge part of that problem is housing affordability. By showing that we can successfully co-locate housing on school sites, we can create better facilities for the schools themselves and more stability for students through a stable teaching environment.

Rayne Laborde: Design research is our bread and butter. It’s what cityLAB has been doing for many years now, with Dana Cuff at the helm. Grant funders are sometimes skeptical about design research. We like to reorient perspectives and show the possibilities that are hidden in plain sight.

Our school housing project, like so much of our work, was initially met with resistance. People thought we should preserve school land, as if every inch is used as a play yard. In reality, much of it is parking lots. So, it’s all about the reorientation of possibility and for finding those opportunities that are in plain sight.

We’re currently developing prototypes for housing on school lands across California. It’s a project similar to our ADU project. We have about seven Manhattans’ worth of underutilized school lands in California. At the same time, we have a statewide problem where we don’t have retention for the education staff or the facilities staff that

Alexandra Staub: When you do take on a new project, how do you begin to work with the community? Community buy-in is very important to your work.

Rayne Laborde: Embedded research has been a very explicit goal of ours for the past three years. In the Westlake MacArthur Park neighborhood, for example, we have three core partners: the school group, an aftercare program that does youth program- ming, and a senior services organization. At cityLAB we have had extremely long relationships with those groups. We are also constantly looking to form new partnerships. In addition, we’re an organization that attracts people that are already working in the community. We organize and take part in advocacy boards because we’re passionate about the partnership aspect to begin with. Another question is how to introduce students to community work, especially when you might only have an academic quarter to structure the project. That can be a challenge. We focus on maintaining long relationships, and not leaving a place until something is done.

Rayne Laborde: It depends on the project and is neighborhood specific — the people that we’re working with, specifically. In addition to our project structure, we’re involved in larger initiatives. Our work on ADUs is part of our housing initiative. Our initiatives never quite end, and we’re always staying in touch with various groups that we’ve worked with. We also partner with our university’s planning school and are on their juries. That provides another way to see how research is evolving in other parts of the university. Communication is important. We do quantitative research as well, but it tends not to be our focus. We have many incredible partners for quantitative research, for example the Turner Center at Berkeley, and the Lewis Center here at UCLA.

Alexandra Staub: That can be difficult when you’re working within an academic calendar. You constantly have new people that have to be brought up to speed and there’s a rotating cast of characters. Could you speak a bit about how you follow up on projects? How do you evaluate them months or even years after their completion?

Alexandra Staub: The issues you’ve addressed go far beyond Los Angeles or even the United States. Thank you very much, for this fascinating talk about cityLAB’s work. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the near future.

Endnotes

1 Cuff, D. T. Higgins & P.J. Dahl. Backyard Homes LA SP: 2010.

2 Le Guin, U.K.” The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction. Ed Denise Dupont. St. Martins Press, 1988.

3 Cozens, P. & T. Love. “A Review and Current Status of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED).” Journal of Planning Literature. 2015.

4 Crowe, T. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Woburn, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000.

5 Ibid.; Crowe, T. & D. Zahm. “Crime Prevention through Environmental Design.” NAHB Land Development Magazine, 1994.

6 COLLOQATE, Design Justice for Black Lives. SP.

7 Bloch, Sam. “Shade.” Places Journal, Writing the City. 2019.

8 Mitchell, D. “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29(3). 2002.

9 Roy, A. “Racial Banishment.” Antipode at 50. 2019.

10 Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 2015.