In an effort to address California's affordable housing shortage, lawmakers recently passed statewide legislation removing barriers to the development of accessory dwelling units (ADU). Not since the postwar suburban housing boom has such a significant new market for residential production been created in Los Angeles and, more broadly, across the entire state. Simultaneously, new digital technologies are overcoming constraints in finance models, design processes, and construction practices that restrict ADU production. Through interviews conducted with emerging ADU service providers in Los Angeles, this paper identifies how digital technologies and regulatory change are enabling emergent forms of practice and production for addressing a significant housing shortage. Specifically, it asks what role digital technologies may play in facilitating the mass production of affordable housing in the post-suburban city.

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This article investigates the potential for intergenerational public space in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Through a series of site observations, focus groups, interviews, thick mapping, and participatory design exercises, we work with 43 youth and 38 older adults (over 65), all residents of Westlake, to examine their public space use, experiences, and desires, and identify where the two groups’ interests intersect or diverge. We explore the potential for complementary approaches to creating intergenerational public space using the principles of Universal Design. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of taking an intersectional approach to designing public space that considers the multiple, often overlapping identities of residents of historically marginalized communities predicated by disability and age, in addition to race, class, and gender. Our findings yield insights for creating more inclusive and accessible public spaces in disinvested urban neighborhoods as well as opportunities for allyship between groups whose public space interests have been marginalized by mainstream design standards.   Read the full article in accessible html-format here.

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On 26 September 2014, forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared from Iguala, a city in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Two students’ bodies have been recovered, while forty-one students remain missing. In Los Angeles, mourning for the students has taken the form of what we call “anti-memorialization,” where traditional forms of memorialization are upended through informality, ephemerality, art, and the digital in order to politicize and bring attention to an injustice. While informal memorials have existed as long or longer than their formal counterparts, anti-memorialization moves these informal memorials into the contemporary reality of a digitally networked world, pushing private mourning to public activism. Among these informal efforts reflecting ongoing calls for justice, one piece, part of an exhibit sponsored by Boyle Heights-based arts organization Self Help Graphics and Art, was entitled 43: From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson. The exhibition anti-memorializes not just the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa, but victims of police brutality in the United States as well, linking the two social movements across national borders.