Invisible-5 / Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, and Kim Stringfellow

Invisible-5 is a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape.

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

Invisible-5 tells the stories of communities tied together by the geopolitics of the I-5 corridor, and by their struggles for environmental justice along the route of California's major North-South highway.

The communities in the San Joaquin Valley along the I-5 are often hidden just out of sight of the freeway, where easy truck access moves toxic waste to landfills through small towns like Patterson, Kettleman City, or Buttonwillow. In the areas around San Francisco and Los Angeles, communities sit directly under or adjacent to the I-5, with homes, playgrounds, and schools just yards from the freeway.

Invisible-5 examines the historic reasons why polluting industries and businesses are often sited near poor, rural and inner-city communities of color in California, through the oral histories of people fighting for environmental justice along the I-5.

Public Green / Lize Mogel

Public green space is an important factor in urban life - it is a respite from the concrete and asphalt environment of the city, and functions as a place to gather, relax, play, and experience a bit of nature. The Public Green project creates new meaning for these spaces, illustrating the complex and symbiotic relationship between the development of parkland and the growth of the city.

This mapping of publicly accessible green space in the city and environs is distributed throughout the public transit system, inside city buses and in transit shelters. Cartographic and textual information shows the distribution of green space across LA, locating public parks and giving the viewer an understanding of historical and current practices of acquisition, creation and maintenance of public green space in regards to Los Angeles economics, real estate practices, and history.

Public Green poses questions about ownership of land, and suggests the transfer of property from private to public use. Viewers are asked to rethink their local landscape, and to physically transform their environment. Through tactics of information distribution along existing transportation networks, the viewer becomes an agent of mobility and change. The information in the Public Green posters can be used geographically, to find parks locally or near daily commutes; or as a basis for community advocacy. Maps can be used for wayfinding or political means- this project suggests both functions.

LATWIDNO (Land access to which is denied no one) / Sarah Lewison and Erin McGonigle

In the case People of the State of CA vs. Louis Gottlieb (1969-73), the defendant Gottlieb asserted his right to donate the land he owned, Morningstar Ranch, to God. In doing so, Gottlieb intended to offer "Land-Access-To-Which-Is-Denied-No-One, land whereon permission to live is not required; land from which no one may be ordered to depart."

This audio piece is a "reading" of transcripts from several of the court hearings. Rather than a theatrical re-telling of a divisive Plaintiff v. Defendant court drama, the voice score speaks of Gottleib's aspirations and the fundamental legal paradoxes of the court grappling with humanistic, not-for-profit ideals.

The Sonoma County Court opined on the legal issues concerning dedication. Dedication in the proper sense involves giving a gift to the public. In common law, the intention to dedicate may be made in writing, orally or by virtue of the owners conduct. Generally, a "dedication" must be accepted by the public, though public use may be used to indicate acceptance.

In this fascinating, though virtually unknown appeal, Gottleib's defense, legal counsel and Amicus Curiae raise First Amendment Freedom of Religion claims, as well as Evidentiary and Due Process ones. Specifically about: whether the court may be allowed to assume God is a material being when God's existence remains an unsettled question of fact and, if/how the court has the right to determine whether God is or is not the legal owner of the land if God is not likely to appear before the court to make a statement. Since the court must first establish it has the legal right to interfere in any disposition before it may rule on it, the case People vs. Louis Gottleib teeters between the edge of judicial absurdity and that which is outside the scope of the law.

 

Public Access 101 - Malibu Public Beaches / Los Angeles Urban Rangers

Tired of Zuma and Surfrider? Want to find and use the other beaches in Malibu? The twenty miles that are lined with private development? The "Malibu Public Beaches" safaris will show you how to find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on a Malibu beach. Each 3 1/2-hour safari visits two or three beaches and explores natural history, jurisdiction, and the identification of public and private property. Skills-enhancing activities include a public-private boundary hike, an accessway hunt, sign watching, and a public easement potluck.

Syracuse City Hunger Project Maps / Syracuse Community Geography

The history of hunger – and the struggle to ameliorate it – has created a vastly uneven landscape where deep food insecurity can exist cheek by jowl with abundant wealth and comfort. The sociology of hunger helps define a map upon which the threat of hunger, malnutrition and perhaps even starvation clumps together in some neighborhoods and not others, stalks these children, but not those. The politics of hunger creates a complex topography of access to resources, the right to benefits, and the provision of emergency aid by churches, government agencies, and individual citizens.

This geography of hunger has been created by thousands of decisions, small and large, by whole social movements and the committed intervention of faith-filled individuals, by government policies, the shifting structures of labor markets, capital abandonment, and just plain neglect.

When we start to pay attention to the geography of hunger something new emerges – new ways of seeing the problem and, we think, new ways of addressing them. For the first time, with the development of Geographic Information Systems and other mapping technologies, we can really begin to map hunger – and its amelioration – in all its complexity. GIS allows us to see hunger in a new way. And engaging in a community mapping of hunger, allows us to collectively appreciate not only the scope and complexity of the problem, but also all that we have done right – and wrong – to address it.

Best Not to Be Here? / Marie Cieri

An Investigation of the Data Set "Known Contaminated Sites in New Jersey"

Best Not to Be Here? is put forth as a question rather than a statement because it addresses the errors, omissions and ambiguities, rather than the certainties, that can exist in seemingly authoritative data sets.

The data set I chose to investigate with ArcView3.1 software and a variety of ground-truthing methodologies contains spatial references for thousands of contaminated sites known by state government to exist in New Jersey. As a public service, this information is available not only to GIS-users who are able to buy the data on computer CDs, but also, in modified form, to anyone who has Internet access.

What I attempt to show is that "Known Contaminated Sites in New Jersey" is not all that it seems to be, though it carries the imprimatur of government authority and the weight of public anxiety over hidden environmental dangers.

In this three-part visual and textual display, I pull apart not only the data set but also the attendant tools of GIS analysis such as data collection, remotely sensed imagery, georeferencing and the overarching "creation of space" made possible by computer modeling. Putting myself in the role of both planner and public, I follow the logic of the data set to some puzzling, even absurdist conclusions, ending up not only with the question of "best not to be here?" but also "where is the contamination?"