resources

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

* street views

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.

Street Views is looking for support in leading and sustaining this paper. If you are interested in helping with or submitting to Street Views, please contact @aetnastreetsolidarity on Instagram or email streetviewsnews@gmail.com.

* 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

* further reading materials

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.”