The Hills

UHI Fall 2022: The Architecture of Seven Ecologies II: Engaged Urban Theory and Praxis in Los Angeles

Instructed by: Dr. Gustavo Leclerc

Teaching Assistant: Daniel Rodríguez Mora

Student Collaborators: Josephine Dine, Natalie Marshall, Kay Wright

In a UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative Course titled “The Architecture of Seven Ecologies II: Engaged Urban Theory and Praxis in Los Angeles,” urban humanities students were driven by an interest in the conditions staged by the intricacies of landscape, water, policing, and surveillance in the City of Beverly Hills. Students researched on questions like what does water and landscape “stage” in Beverly Hills, How is water infrastructure designed and positioned and what is its relationship to strategies of policing space, what strategies for water and landscape security exist in the ecology of the Hills, how can we explore (in addition to studying physical evidence) soft evidence (e.g., narratives of water in Beverly Hills and what the consequences of those memories of water are), and how does the position of this infrastructure related to water privilege some user groups and not others. Their research to these questions cumulated in a thickmap.