Fall 2023 Seminar: Mobilities & Motion in LA’s Borders and Commons
Instructors: Gustavo Leclerc, Heather Seybolt
Teaching Assistant: Claire Nelischer
Students: UHI 2023-24 Cohort.
Public discourse about borders and commons and the politics of mobility/motion (kinopolitics) points to the deep interrelationship between borders and commons. A threshold, for example, can be a barrier, a point of welcome, or both. Beyond the threshold is a shared space where many potentials exist simultaneously, including sanctuary, friction, violence, community, and anonymity.
In this seminar, students studied the invisible walls and pockets of resistance, or “thresholds,” in four particular spaces, or “ecologies:” Flatlands, Downtown, Tijuana, and Freeways/Boulevards. They asked questions such as: How are these invisible walls and pockets of resistance produced and reproduced within these spaces? How are the pockets of resistance or micro-commons experienced and interpreted? Who controls these spaces, and in what way? Who is granted access, who is denied access, and why? How do they affect people’s right to the city?
As part of their final project, students worked in groups to produce thick maps that analyzed an internal border or common space in their assigned ecologies. Below are some examples of their amazing work.
Mapping Joy
UHI Fall Seminar 2023
Students: Alejandra Rios, Jacqueline Vela, Xen Pei Hoi
South Los Angeles is a community whose history has constantly demonstrated it as a fluid, mobile community. By focusing on elements of food, vegetation, nature, and music, across public and intimate gathering spaces, we aim to curate a sensorial, multidimensional map that reimagines and celebrates inter-species play and joy in this ecosystem outside of its flatness.
(De)Establishing The Macro Frontier
UHI Fall Seminar 2023
Students: Steven Carmona, Nidia Bautista, Emma Fuller-Monk
What does framing the macro frontier as an ecology do? Our group began unpacking the contradictory metaphors and provocations relevant to borders and mobilities. Reading resonant infrastructures containing so much dissonance allowed us to begin the mapping project we were interested in. A project grounded in the material conditions and attuned to the affective landscape that Dear and Leclerc describe as “The Postborder Condition.” From reading Claire Fox’s work, “de-establishing” became the guiding project of our map, and “alternative representations” became its aesthetic realm. We invited UHI participants to disorient our map as an embodiment of theory and urban humanities.
Big Cut
UHI Fall Seminar 2023
Students: Nils Jepson, Peter Cheng, Sarp Tanridag, Leila Ullman, Maxwell Kilman
Our map, “The Big Cut,” explores the horizontal and vertical expansions of the I-405 Freeway. The 405’s expansion directly mirrors the expansion of the US colonial project: Tongva footpaths were widened into dirt roads to transport grain which were widened into Sepulveda Boulevard and eventually the 405 Freeway.
To counter this expansionist narrative, we illustrated the worlds that exist below the freeway. Underpasses provide cover, shelter, and space for insurgency and the accumulation of a vast array of experience, so we raised the freeway and collaged photos we took of underpasses along with other materials we found in these spaces.