In honor of GIS Day, November 19, 2014, we would like to take the opportunity to celebrate the Lewis Center 2014 GIS contest winners and display their work.  1st place: Anne Brown “Neighborhood Change Along the Orange Line” In this project, Anne examined how the Orange Line, a full-service bus rapid transit line in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, influence on the surrounding area since the line began operations in 2005. Through advanced analysis and GIS skills such as  proportionally adjusting the geographic boundaries, Anne found […]

The title of opening talk at the 24th annual Arrowhead symposium was brazen and even a touch combative: “What are Resilient Cities and Regions, and Why Should We Care?” In his introductory remarks, Symposium Director Brian Taylor quickly made clear the provocative tone was driven by urgency, since if resilience takes the form of a buzzword that means almost anything, then it may soon mean almost nothing. The central intellectual challenge of the symposium would thus be to apply this powerful yet elusive term […]

Fulton began with the basic question everyone came to discuss: How does resilience relate to planning? Resilience is usually thought of in economic or environmental terms, and the resiliency of the built environment and social fabric of the city receive much less attention.   Bill Fulton argued that we should think about how cities and the people within them respond to disturbances. The built environment must be adaptable and redundant. Fulton cited some examples of built things that have […]

Most people are familiar with hard infrastructure- perhaps images of roads, bridges, buildings, and sewers immediately come to mind. Yet many may not be as familiar with the concept of soft infrastructure, which refers to human capital and the social and cultural resources that cultivate healthy communities. Nurit Katz, Chief Sustainability Officer at UCLA, moderated a panel of presentations that looked at this idea of soft infrastructure and its relationship to resilient cities. […]

The Sonoran Desert covers large parts of California and Arizona, and is the hottest desert in North America. Yet the desert area also hosts Phoenix, AZ, a metropolitan area of 4.3 million and one of America’s fastest-growing cities. Roughly two decades ago Phoenix decided to prioritize the preservation of desert land in the northern part of the city and sought to acquire 20,000 acres of Sonora Desert. The city faced a number of obstacles: a lack of funding to acquire land, pressure from the real estate industry to pursue […]

Both of California’s major regions, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, sit on active earthquake faults. How resilient will they be when the next one hits? Together, three panelists offered insights on just how many systems and approaches come together to form earthquake preparedness — or lack thereof — in California. Consider the wide range of activities currently underway: buying and selling insurance, funding and constructing building reinforcements made of plywood and nails, political strategizing about water bonds, retrofitting large public infrastructure like highways, airports, […]

As is tradition, Lewis Center Director Brian Taylor closed the symposium with an impromptu synthesis of the past few days. He spoke about what he thought were some of the most compelling and provocative themes: Yin and Yang Taylor noted a pattern of yin and yang throughout the event. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. The world is complex, but keep it simple: people need things to be simple in order to take action. Without simplicity, the big […]

On any given night in Los Angeles, roughly 58,000 people are homeless. Lewis Center Faculty Fellow Paavo Monkkonen moderated an important panel on this topic yesterday that delved into the question of whether homeless was at its core a housing problem. The question is counter-intuitive, but all three speakers- Inner City Law Center’s Adam Murray, PATH’s Chris Callandrillo, and the LA Housing Authority’s Peter Lynn- acknowledged the complexity of the issue at hand by answering both yes and no. […]

When the first road was built to Yosemite in 1856, entry to the park cost $1 by foot and $2 by horse. The November ITS Brown Bag seminar saw 2nd year student Casey Osborn, whose passion for the outdoors is longstanding (see photo), provide this and other delightful insights in a talk that tackled the tense relationship between some of our most beloved wilderness locations and the cars we need to get there.  Osborn also offered several sharp ideas for applying pricing and public transit to better manage access to our National Parks in the present-day. […]