Public Project
Real Land
seen and felt as an undesirable change in urban experience, representing a different regulation of both spaces and people, creating projects and dependencies on a larger
scale, eliminating the means by which poor people and ethnic minorities produce their lives, and reducing the social and aesthetic diversity that has been a historical element
of city life.”
- Sharon Zukin, 2009
There are many discussions both in and out of academia about cities shifting from a physical location that is people and community centered into economic nodes with a global profile, mass gentrification, and the financialization of urban and public space. Southern California (specifically around Los Angeles) is a place of extremes - contrasting forces that shape the way landscape is interpreted and used. The experience of living within those spaces is filled with visual cues and reminders of the aggressive transformation that happens when financialized urban zones seep into residential ones, and monetary value is associated with physical elevation and proximity to, or distance from, the ocean.
The images in Real Land illustrate places where the perception of the landscape comes into contact with the natural world as it exists. It may show that there is a disruption, an incompatibility, between these ideas when placed into visual form the urban landscape.
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