Project

Another City Is Possible: Skid Row and the Struggle for a Better Los Angeles

Program

ACLS Project Development Grants

Department

Geography

Abstract

This project shows how poor and unhoused people reshape the penal organization of their lives through alternative visions and plans of Los Angeles. The project expands the concept of contested development to show the push and pull contradictions of spatial difference where poor people produce alternatives against the elite and carceral development of the city between the 1930s and 2020. Using archival and ethnographic methods, this project details a several decades long tradition of poetic, sonic, legal, and insurgent planning from Los Angeles’s Skid Row to show how another city is possible.