or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 9 In addition to Latino majority districts, the 33rd (Watson), 35th (Waters), and 37th (Millender-McDonald) are majority-minority African American and Latino population combined. In the United States, however, Latino residents and pedestrians can participate in this street/plaza dialogue from the comfort and security of their enclosed front yards. Like the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements, Latino Urbanism is questioning the powers that be.. The numerous, often improvised neighborhood mom-and-pop shops that line commercial and residential streets in Latino neighborhoods indicated that most customers walk to these stores. I was fascinated by these cities. In Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago and Minneapolis, you might notice a few common elements: A front fence, maybe statue of the Virgin Mary, a table and chairs, even a fountain and perhaps a concrete or tile floor. A New Day for Atlanta and for Urbanism. Every change, no matter how small, has meaning and purpose. is a new approach to examining US cities by combining interior design and city planning. Rojas adapted quickly and found a solution: video content. Organization and activities described were not supported by Salud America! Where I think in these middle class neighborhoods, theyre more concerned about property values. The network is a project of the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at UT Health San Antonio. My satisfaction came from transforming my urban experiences and aspirations into small dioramas. Read more about his Rojas and Latino Urbanism in our Salud Hero story here. The nacimiento tours you organized were a local tradition for many years. Moreover, solutions neglect the human experience. And dollars are allocated through that machine.. He is one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine U.S. Latino cultural influences on urban planning/design. This success story was produced by Salud America! Many buildings are covered from top to bottom with graphics. We ultimately formed a volunteer organization called the Latino Urban Forum (LUF). By combining both these plazas and the courtyards of Mexico, residents created places for people to congregate in their own neighborhood. Overall, Rojas felt that the planning process was intimidating and too focused on infrastructure for people driving. Latinos have ingeniously transformed automobile-oriented streets to fit their economic needs, strategically mapping out intersections and transforming even vacant lots, abandoned storefronts and gas stations, sidewalks, and curbs into retail and social centers. Because we shared a culture, we were able to break down the silos from our various jobs. For many Latinos, this might be the first -time they have reflected on their behavior patterns and built environment publicly and with others. When it occurred, however, I was blissfully unaware of it. My research on how Latinos used space, however, allowed me to apply interior design methodology with my personal experiences. Folklife Magazine explores how culture shapes our lives. He holds a degree in city planning and architecture studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote his thesis The Enacted Environment: The Creation of Place by Mexican and Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles (1991). This goes back to before the Spanish arrived in Latin America. A lot of urbanism is spatially focused, Rojas said. A lot of it involves walking and changing the scale of the landscape from more car oriented to more pedestrian oriented. l experience of landscapes. Parking is limited, and so people come on foot. I also used to help my grandmother to create nacimiento displays during the Christmas season. Theres a whole litany of books on this topic. What I think makes Latino Urbanism really unique is it really focuses on the micro. I was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany and in Vicenza, Italy. In low-income neighborhoods, theyre renters and thats not the driving force behind how they use their space. We dont have that tradition in America. For example, as a planner and project manager at Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, Rojas recognized that street vendors were doing more to make LA pedestrian friendly than rational infrastructure. These objects include colorful hair rollers, pipe cleaners, buttons, artificial flowers, etc. For example, 15 years ago, John Kamp, then an urban planning student, heard Rojas present. He participated in the Salud America! We conducted a short interview with him by phone to find out what the wider planning field could learn from it. James Rojas (1991) has described, the residents have developed a working peoples' manipulation and adaptation In Mexico, a lot of homes have interior courtyards, right? It took a long time before anyone started to listen. The recommendations in this document are essentially the first set of Latino design guidelines. Streetsblog: What would you say are the key principles of Latino Urbanism? He is the founder of the Latino Urban Forum, an advocacy group dedicated to increasing awareness around planning and design issues facing low-income Latinos. Through art-based three-dimensional modeling and interactive workshops, PLACE IT! Can you provide a specific example of this? Side Yard a Key to Latino Neighborhood Sociability, Family Life Rojas grew up in the East L.A. (96.4% Latino) neighborhood Boyle Heights. We advocated for light rail projects such as the East Side Gold Line Rail and Expo Line. I went home for the six-week Christmas break and walked my childhood streets and photographed the life I saw unfolding before me with a handheld camera. or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and do not necessarily represent the views of Salud America! Ultimately, I hope to affect change in the urban planning processI want to take it out of the office and into the community. So I am promoting a more qualitative approach to planning. Maybe theres a garden or a lawn. They bring that to the U.S. and they retrofit that space to those needs. This assortment of bric-a-brac constitutes the building blocks of the model streetscapes he assembles as part of his effort to reshape the city planning process into one that is collaborative, accessible, and community-informed. So you could have a garage sale every week. It has to do with how Latinos are transforming urban spaces. His research has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books. DIY orrasquacheLatino mobility interventions focus on the moment or journey, Rojas said according to LA Taco. It required paving over Rojas childhood home, displacing his immediate and extended family. His influential thesis on the Latino built environment has been widely cited. He has developed an innovative public-engagement and community-visioning method that uses art-making as its medium. I saw hilltops disappear, new skyscrapers overtake City Hall, and freeways rip through my neighborhood. Theres terrible traffic, economic disparitiesand the city can be overwhelming. However its the scale and level of design we put into public spaces that makes them work or not. Social cohesion is the number one priority in Latino neighborhoods, Rojas said. Aunts tended a garden. Stories are based on and told by real community members and are the opinions and views of the individuals whose stories are told. This success story was produced by Salud America! Though planners deal with space a different scale than interior designers, the feeling of space is no less important. I was also fascinated with the way streets and plazas were laid like out door rooms with focal points and other creature comforts. This was the ideal project for Latino Urban Forum to be involved in because many of us were familiar this place and issue. It was like an unexpected family death, except there was no funeral, eulogy, or reflection on how this place had shaped us, Rojas wrote in 2016. Perhaps a bad place, rationally speaking, but I felt a strong emotional attachment to it.. For five years they lobbied the city. The photo series began 30 years ago while I was at MIT studying urban planning. What distinguishes a plaza from a front yard? In addition, because of their lack of participation in the urban planning process, and the difficulty of articulating their land use perspectives, their values can be easily overlooked by mainstream urban planning practices and policies. of Latinos rely on public transit (compared to 14% of whites). He recognized that the street corners and front yards in East Los Angeles served a similar purpose to the plazas in Germany and Italy. Street life creates neighborhood in the same sense that the traditional Plaza Central becomes the center of cultural activity, courtship, political action, entertainment, commerce, and daily affairs in Latin America. During this time, he came across a planning report on East Los Angeles that said, it lacks identitytherefore needs a Plaza.. Uncles played poker. Now he has developed a nine-video series showcasing how Latinos are contributing to urban space! When I completed furnishing the dollhouse, I wanted to build something spatially dynamic. The streets provide Latinos a social space and opportunity for economic survival by allowing them to sell items and/or their labor. In an essay, Rojas wrote that Latino single-family houses communicate with each other by sharing a cultural understanding expressed through the built environment.. By adding and enlarging front porches, they extend the household into the front yard. I find the model-building activity to be particular effective in engaging youth, women, and immigrantspeople who have felt they had no voice or a role in how their environments are shaped. Filed Under: Latinos, Los Angeles, Placemaking, Tactical Urbanism, Urban Design, Zoning, Promoted, This week Imjoined by James Rojas of Place It! Applied Computer Science Media Arts (STEM), Computer Science in Data Analytics (STEM), Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership, Center for Leadership, Equity & Diversity, Woodbury Integrated Student Experience (WISE). By examining hundreds of small objects placed in front of them participants started to see, touch, and explore the materials they begin choosing pieces that they like, or help them build this memory. James Rojas (1991, 1993) describes . References to specific policymakers, individuals, schools, policies, or companies have been included solely to advance these purposes and do not constitute an endorsement, sponsorship, or recommendation. His installation work has been shown at the Los Museum of Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, the Venice Biennale, the Exploratorium, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of Art, and the Getty. Business signagesome handmadeare not visually consistent with one another. In New York, I worked with the health department and some schools to imagine physically active schools. While being stationed with the U.S. Army in Germany and Italy, Rojas got to know the residents and how they used the spaces around them, like plazas and piazzas, to connect and socialize. During this time I visited many others cities by train and would spend hours exploring them by foot. I think a lot of it is just how we use our front yard. Your family and neighbors are what youre really concerned about. Enriching the landscape by adding activity to the suburban street in a way that sharply contrasts with the Anglo-American suburban tradition, in which the streets are abandoned by day as commuters motor out of their neighborhood for work and parents drive children to organized sports and play dates. James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. These are some of the failures related to mobility and access in Latino-specific neighborhoods: Rates of pedestrian fatalities in Los Angeles County are highest among . In East Los Angeles, as James Rojas (1991) has described, the residents have developed a working peoples' manipulation and adaptation of the environment, where Mexican- Americans live in small. James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. We worked on various pro-bono projects and took on issues in LA. There is a general lack of understanding of how Latinos use, value, and retrofit the existing US landscape in order to survive, thrive, and create a sense of belonging. He has developed an innovative public-engagement and community-visioning tool that uses art-making, imagination, storytelling, and play as its media. Rojas has spent decades promoting his unique concept, "Latino Urbanism," which empowers community members and planners to inject the Latino experience into the urban planning process. Through this method he has engaged thousands of people by facilitating over four hundred workshops and building over fifty interactive models around the world - from the streets of New York and San Francisco, to Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America. I am inspired by the vernacular landscapes of East L.A.the streetscapes of its commercial strips and residential areas. The street vendors do a lot more to make LA more pedestrian friendly than the Metro can do. So, he came up with Latino vernacular, which morphed into Latino Urbanism.. These are all elements of what planner James Rojas calls "Latino Urbanism," an informal reordering of public and private space that reflects traditions from Spanish colonialism or even going back to indigenous Central and South American culture. In addition to wrangling up some warm clothes, he had to pull together about a dozen boxes containing Lego pieces, empty wooden and Styrofoam spools, colored beads, and plastic bottles. Rojas, in grad school, learned that neighborhood planners focused far more on automobiles in their designs than they did on the human experience or Latino cultural influences. It was not until I opened up Gallery 727 in Downtown LA that I started collaborated with artist to explore the intersection of art and urban planning. Front yard nacimiento (nativity scene) in an East Los Angeles front yard. However, the sidewalks poor and worsening conditions made the route increasingly treacherous over time, creating a barrier to health-promoting activity. Fences are the edge where neighbors congregatewhere people from the house and the street interact. Latinos walk with feeling. It is difficult to talk about math and maps in words.. In the U.S., Latinos redesign their single-family houses to enable the kind of private-public life intersections they had back home. However, Latino adaptations and contributions like these werent being looked at in an urban planning context. South Colton was the proverbial neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks, according to South Colton Livable Corridor Plan. Small towns, rural towns. He holds a degree in city planning and architecture studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote his thesis The Enacted Environment: The Creation of Place by Mexican and Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles (1991). Sojin Kim is a curator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. They have to get off their computers and out of their cars to heal the social, physical and environmental aspects of our landscape. The front yard acts as a large foyer and becomes an active part of the housescape.. The work of urban planner James Rojas provides an example of the field's attention to Latinos as actors, agents of change and innovators. Rojas wanted to better understand the Latino needs and aspirations that led to these adaptations and contributions and ensure they were accounted for in formal planning and decision-making processes. Rather than ask participants how to improve mobility, we begin by reflecting on how the system feels to them, Rojas said. Mr. James Rojas is one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine U.S. Latino cultural influences on urban design and sustainability. Art became my new muse, and I became fascinated by how artists used their imagination, emotion, and bodies to capture the sensual experience of landscapes. Currently he founded Placeit as a tool to engage Latinos in urban planning. When I moved away from the city, I became more conscious of a particular vivid landscape of activities: street vendors pushing carts or setting up temporary tables and tarps, murals and hand-painted business signs, elaborate holiday displays, how people congregate on public streets or socialize over front-yard fences. We publish stories about music, food, craft, language, celebrations, activism, and the individuals and communities who sustain these traditions. Its very DIY type urbanism. I began to reconsider my city models as a tool for increasing joyous participation by giving the public artistic license to imagine, investigate, construct, and reflect on their community. I excelled at interior design. Authentic and meaningful community engagement especially for under-represented communities should begin with a healing process, which recognizes their daily struggles and feelings. Rojas and Kamp wanted to start with these positive Latino contributions. Healing allows communities to take a holistic approach, or a deeper level of thinking, that restores the social, mental, physical and environmental aspects of their community. James Rojas Urban planner, community activist and artist James Rojas will speak about U.S. Latino cultural influences on urban design and sustainability. with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I took ten rolls of black and white film of East Los Angeles. In Pittsburg, I worked on a project that had to do with bike issues and immigrants. I was working for LA Metro and the agency was planning the $900 million rail project through their community. But for most people, the city is a physical and emotional experience. James Rojas marks the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, a protest against the conscription of young Chicanos to serve in the Vietnam war, with a reflection on the meaning of Latino Urbanism, specifically in East Los Angeles. Planners develop abstract concepts about cities, by examining numbers, spaces, and many other measures which sometimes miss the point or harm [existing Latino] environments, Rojas wrote in his thesis. These informal adaptations brought destinations close enough to walk and brought more people out to socialize, which slowed traffic, making it even safer for more people to walk and socialize. Rojas, who coined the term "Latino Urbanism," has been researching and writing about it for . It can be ordered HERE. Waist-high, front yard fences are everywhere in the Latino landscape. Latin American streets are structured differently than streets in the United States, both physically and socially. My interior design background helps me investigate in-depth these non-quantifiable elements of urban planning that impact how we use space. Vicenza and East Los Angeles illustrated two different urban forms, one designed for public social interaction and the other one being retrofitted by the residents to allow for and enhance this type of behavior. Because of Latino lack of participation in the urban planning process, and the difficulty of articulating their land use perspectives, their values can be easily overlooked by mainstream urban planning practices and policies. I wanted a greater part of the L.A. public to recognize these public displays and decorations as local cultural assets, as important as murals and monuments. Is there a specific history that this can be traced back to? Used as an urban planning tool, it investigates how cities feel to us and how we create belonging. Fences are an important part of this composition because they hold up items and delineate selling space. As a planner and project manager for Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority who led many community workshop and trainings, Rojas found people struggled to discuss their needs with planners. Feelings were never discussed in the program. By allowing participants to tell their stories about these images, participants realized that these everyday places, activities, and people have value in their life. Latino Urbanism adds elements that help overcome these barriers. Thats when I realized urban-planning community meetings were not engaging diverse audiences, visual and spatial thinkers, personalities, and promoting collaboration. This led Rojas to question and study American planning practices. As such, a group of us began to meet informally once a month on Sundays in LA to discuss how we can incorporate our professional work with our cultural values. By extending the living space to the property line, enclosed front yards help to transform the street into a plaza. The share of the white population decreased from 33% in 2010 to 26% in 2020. OK. Ive finally succumbed to Twitter and Im using it to keep track of interesting quotes, observations and tidbits at the 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Denver. Because its more of a community effort, nobody can put their name to it. This side yard became the center of our family lifea multi-generational and multi-cultural plaza, seemingly always abuzz with celebrations and birthday parties, Rojas said. LAs rapid urban transformation became my muse during my childhood. The Latino Urban Forum was an offshoot of my research. Growing out of his research, Mr. Rojas founded the Latino Urban Forum (LUF), a volunteer advocacy group, dedicated to understanding and improving the built environment of Los Angeles Latino communities. In the unusual workshops of visionary Latino architect James Rojas, community members become urban planners, transforming everyday objects and memories into placards, streets and avenues of a city they would like to live in. You reframe the built environment around you to support that kind of mobility. Rojas went on to launch the Latino Urbanism movement that empowers community members and planners to inject the Latino experience into the urban planning process. Street vendors, plazas, and benches are all part of the Latin American streetscape. To create a similar sense of belonging within an Anglo-American context, Latinos use their bodies to reinvent the street. Showing images of from Latino communities from East Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities communities across the country illustrates that Latinos are part of a larger US-/Latino urban transformation. We organized bike and walking tour of front yard Nativities in East Los Angeles. He learned how Latinos in East Los Angeles would reorder and retrofit public and private space based on traditional indigenous roots and Spanish colonialism from Latin America.