Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Rebecca Solnit explores the connection in “A Paradise Built in Hell,” articulating how amidst the destruction that disasters enact, more considerate and caring communities often arise. It’s a dynamic that can spark deep joy for those who experience it, Solnit writes — a joy that “reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness an... See more
Joanna Hoffman • Futures From Ruins
The great L.A. chronicler Carey McWilliams, echoing the novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, once called Los Angeles “an island on the land,” as if it were drifting away from its national moorings, and that was in the 1940s.
Rosecrans Baldwin • Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
Such resemblances to cities of the third world are in no way casual, or based on the “color” of a polyglot population: these are all cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens but to be labor-intensive, to accommodate, ideally at the subsistence level, since it is at the subsistence level that the work force is most apt to
... See moreJoan Didion • After Henry: Essays
You hear about catastrophic river floods much more often than catastrophic lake floods, because stocks that are big, relative to their flows, are more stable than small ones.
Donella Meadows • Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project
including congestion, high costs of living, crime, environmental challenges,
Luis M. A. Bettencourt • Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems
Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters