"Ako Castuera is a painter, sculptor, and textile artist. For Realms (art exhibition at Giant Robot 2 LA), she has turned her focus to work on paper with a variety of media, primarily using watercolor and gouache. The works continue her ongoing interest in land, the life within it, and the life it sustains. "Suburban tracts sprawl over hills and are at once picturesque, parasitic, and fragile. They coexist with dinosaur like animal forms that suggest prehistoric life," she says. "Dinosaurs have always inspired awe and fed fantasies of the past. Their extinction forces contemplation of the future, of what's in store for the land, animals, and humans all." Ako studied at CCA, and is based in Los Angeles where she works as a writer/storyboard artist on the animated television show, Adventure Time."

"We can be the producers of new conceptions of citzenship in the reorganizing of resources and collaborations across jurisdictions and communities…We could be the designers of political process, of alternative economic frameworks."<br />
<br />
[via: http://www.diygradschool.com/2010/06/professor-teddy-cruz-ucsd.html ]

"Los Angeles has been compared to a laboratory — an urban ground for experiments both prescribed and accidental. Laboratory is a perfect word. Enveloping, chaotic and mutable, LA is a nocturnal workshop where the constant experiments leave no time to tidy up and reset the data in order to start fresh in the morning. In LA, you are both the experiment and the scientist. One is forced to be the object of fascination and fray, while simultaneously judging and monitoring the urban experiment…<br />
<br />
what is the new identity for a city whose entire life has been marked by its ability and desire to endlessly expand? Perhaps the lack of perceptible hierarchies — or, likely, the reality that traditional thresholds and boundaries in this city are hidden and constantly transgressed — makes LA a difficult case study in the urban milieu…<br />
<br />
As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles."

"A more demographically complex society induces cultural and economic shifts, including perceptions about urban life. Reportedly a majority of Americans, especially young adults and senior citizens, now prefer living in walkable neighborhoods and sustainably designed communities characterized by diverse land uses and a broad array of civic amenities. Their close-to-home wish list includes: transit access; plenty of shopping; cultural, recreational and entertainment venues; parks and playgrounds; good public schools; health-care services, and job opportunities. Affordable housing is also on the list.<br />
Shifting demographics, along with increasing consumer interest in a more-urban existence, are redefining the real estate market. This requires rethinking how we plan, regulate, design and build — or rebuild — parts of suburbs and the cities they encircle. To respond to evolving market forces, new templates for truly smart growth are needed. Such templates must do the following…"

"The American land-scape is shifting and, in the eyes of many, not for the better. Farms and fields yield to ever more suburban development. Commutes lengthen as traffic worsens.  A changing economy and warming climate threaten historic settlement patterns.  Meanwhile, America seems to be metamorphosing into a repeating scene of strip malls and chain stores while, in many communities, residents lament the lack of community.<br />
The changing face of America’s cities and towns is a subject of much debate and hand-wringing, yet discussions of the subject often produce more heat than light. Shifting Ground is a public radio series that aims to elevate the dialogue on land use issues. The series reveals the complex forces reshaping America and shows how individuals and communities are regaining control."

Sheesh. Even NYC is above all the non-US cities in this graph.

"Esta imagen...muestra las áreas construidas de Atlanta y Barcelona (1990). Ambas urbes están representadas a la misma escala, y tienen aproximadamente la misma población. Sin embargo el contraste en su manera de utilizar el suelo es increíble: resulta que podrían caber 26 Barcelonas en el área que hoy ocupa Atlanta.

"Where Do the Children Play? is a one-hour documentary for public television that examines how restrictive patterns of sprawl, congestion, and endless suburban development across America are impacting children's mental and physical health and development.

"Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living"

"Our ambitions are huge. We think there should be Urban Think Tanks all over the world – we want to be a non-university university, reach out to schools of architecture and give them our office space. We want them to send students to us so we can show them the realities of the informal city – we want to link the first and third worlds. We also want to see massive investment, in the way that governments invested in computers for informal cities, and we want to see these changes in our lifetime. Everybody says we have ten years to reverse climate change – we think the same way about these cities of sprawl.”"

"In fact, a wide variety of municipal regulatory and spending policies have made Houston more sprawling and automobile-dominated than would a more free-market-oriented set of policies. The article also proposes free-market, anti-sprawl alternatives to those government policies."

"On a ride outside the central city, Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University who has studied Houston for decades, tells NPR's Steve Inskeep about the city's sense of scale.

"parking spaces can cost between $10,000 and $50,000 – typically more than the cost of the car that occupies it. High parking requirements can raise the price of homes and apartments by $50,000 to $100,000, a serious challenge to affordability." Not enough people complain about subsidized parking, not nearly as many as those that oppose subsidized mass transit, and thus we live in the cities that result.

"the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever 'walks around the city center' to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That's what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live."

"1. Globalized jobs return home; Sprawl stalls; Four day workweeks; Less pollution; More frugality; Fewer traffic deaths; Cheaper Insurance; Less Traffic; More Cops on the Beat; Less obesity"

"America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres. That is both good news and bad"

'Its politicians are determined to turn Los Angeles into a normal city...original metropolitan miscreant is now trying to reform itself so fundamentally that Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University, compares it to rewriting a DNA code."

"Planners, lenders, & most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. [this index] takes into account not just cost of housing, but also intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs"

"The clash between private interests and public welfare in Oregon raises a question that has vexed the nation since its founding."

"time to look at the patterns of urban development (& wider political context) that created this situation...fringes of metro areas = fastest growing parts of US & Australia. Not just enabling but subsidising and encouraging sprawl"

"If a correlation exists between birth rates and urbanization, does the post World War II baby boom owe its existence to urban sprawl?"