UnPublic Space 5th Street
Arts District Park
An Ampitheater for Dogs
Alameda hates you
Arts District/Skid Row
The Intersection is Plaza San Pedro and 5th
Militarized Community Space
Making space in the city
Paved Over Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot
Consultant Class
This stretch of 5th street transects a swath of Downtown Los Angeles. Through these blocks over about 1.5 miles, many physical realities and examine many political commentaries of contemporary Los Angeles. Through this spread of the city: gentrification, urban blight, social upheaval, capitalism, neoliberalism, the police state, community, social action, industry, and generosity are all at play.
This collection of photos highlight and capture a reality of the urban fabric of Los Angeles. A photographic collection of one of three walking studies highlight the publics in Los Angeles. Public Space has often been a contentious and elusive target in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is known for many things; from palm trees, to urban sprawl, to diversity, to freeways, and Hollywood. Really only one public space is captured in the civic identity, that being the beach. Downtown Los Angeles is some twenty miles from the beach, the public spaces here are similar to those you would find in any North American city (parks, plazas, libraries, etc.). The parks throughout this particular stretch of Downtown are particularly interesting, other then Pershing Square (a space so dead that it almost feels like a reprieve from the city).
This transect of Los Angeles is noted for its representative of
a vast collection of urban realities in Los Angeles. The chic warehouse of the Arts District, to the complexities of Skid Row, to the historicity of the Historic Core, to the splendor of the Financial District.
In Sasha Plotnikova’s essay for Failed Architecture, Barricades, Boulders, and How LA’s Public Spaces Became a Battleground for the Commons, the effect of hostile architectures and policing on the commons in Los Angeles. Plotnikova lays out the ways in which the powers at bay use access to public services and resources as tools of control. But it is through this fight over space where communities will push back, “When the state denies the community’s right to social reproduction, the community finds ways to build up physical and social infrastructures that ensure its growth.” It is partially through this where we get to the corporate “public spaces” of downtown L.A..
Public Space can not encapsulate the wide range of the places on display in this collection of photos but instead, this is a collection of social infrastructures. Both top-down and bottom-up solutions to constructing space in Los Angeles, where the city ignores or fails, communities will construct spaces to survive and try to thrive.
Public Space
In the classical sense: libraries, parks, and civic infrastructure.
Faux Public Space
Private space that are meant to portray the qualities of public space but fall within the preview of private property.
Impromptu
These are uncertain space, these are confusing spaces, these are edge conditions, these are spaces where people make community where they can make
5th Street through Downtown Los Angeles
M.Arch GT25_SCI-Arc
February 2025
Olympus Pen EE-3_200 ISO Kodak Gold