archive and further reading

Additional resources from UCLA's Spatial Justice community collaborative course and further reading.

* street views (first edition)

Street Views is a mutual aid newspaper published by UCLA urban planning graduate students, unhoused community members, and mutual aid organizers. Our goal in creating Street Views was to build power and community by uplifting strategies of community design and planning that unhoused communities are engaging in as forms of self-governance and by creating new lines of communication among encampments and organizers across the City. Street Views is a platform for communities to plan, design, and build together through dialogue and collective visioning.

* beyond 41.18

Beyond 41.18 is a community-based online counter-mapping platform on which users submit their personal experiences living and organizing in 41.18 zones. The genealogy of 41.18 must be understood through the lens of those who are unhoused. Through story-telling and counter-archiving, we seek to start conversations and bring attention to patterns of lived experiences in Los Angeles.

* diy platform on wheels

An R.V. T.V. Special Report tutorial with construction instructions on how to build your very own platform on wheels. The platforms and video were made in community collaboration with residents of Aetna Street, UCLA urban planning students, unhoused activists, and Elvis Summers of The Tiny House Project. In an act of innovative resistance to the banishment of people from public by laws like LAMC 41.18 and 56.11, we offer our process as inspiration & motivation. This represents one possible approach to a DIY platform build. english | español

* our aetna street

A community-powered vision for a vibrant, healthy, and equitable Aetna Street Aetna Street of Van Nuys borders 177,000 square feet of underutilized land. Along the sidewalk, Aetna Street residents live without access to basic needs. Our Aetna Street defines Aetna Street as a place where democracy, care, and solidarity are supported through alternative infrastructures owned and managed by Aetna Street residents.

* further reading materials

The Street Spirit: Street Spirit is an independent newspaper in the East Bay dedicated to covering homelessness and poverty from the perspective of those most impacted. Est 1995.

The Street Sheet: The Street Sheet is a publication of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco. The Coalition on Homelessness (COH) was formed in 1987 to foster the active participation of homeless and low-income San Francisco residents and front-line staff in the struggle for economic and social justice. Through an integrated approach that combines outreach, peer support, leadership development, public education, advocacy, and community organizing, the COH works to defend homeless and low-income people from attacks on their rights and their persons, while advocating for permanent solutions to homelessness that take into account not only poverty’s devastating effects, but also its root causes.

Rebel Archives: Radical Memory Work as Resistance, Collective Care & Healing - The “rebel archive” is presented as a methodology for creating and contesting histories within the housing justice movement. Because the official record is often created by people detached from historical events and/or invested in current power structures, bottom-up, participatory history and knowledge building is necessary to keep our histories and practices alive. This resource provides exercises and examples for rebel archiving, as well as reflections on accountability and positionality when doing this work.

Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research by Joanna Kusiak - This paper proposes critical legal engineering as a new methodology for legal-geographic action research. Kusiak argues that legal geographers' knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source of power that could allow them to set legal agendas and pluralize legal discussions. CLE assumes that legal geographers can put forward technical legal arguments thus using law’s own tools to implement normative agendas implied in critical research. It co-opts the legitimacy provided by the legal system lending it to the agendas that are otherwise perceived as “too radical.”