Moving Vegetation & People, Changing Topography, and Sci-fi mobilities ~with Deena Capparelli and Claude Willey, Moisture
~ Fall 2006 ~ 10.31.06 _am / pm ~
This seminar will look at the relationship between the movement of vegetation (native and non-native) and people (i.e. transportation) with a focus on infrastructural needs (road maintenance) and topographical augmentations (alteration of the physical environment to provide for transport infrastructure). All of this will be tied into a concluding discussion regarding mobility issues found in numerous Sci-fi literature (Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, J.G. Ballard, and John Brunner). The seminar will function as an adjunct component to our Invisible Trajectories project currently underway in the Inland Empire.
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We spent the morning and early afternoon with them downstairs in the cave watching a long and provocative slideshow, pretty much dispelling any myth any of us ever had about mobility and sprawl issues in Los Angeles. Think Los Angeles is a city? “Los Angeles is absolutely not a city,” Claude told us, “the word city makes no sense in describing this region.” (He went on to explain that “city” the word implies that there would be sub-s to this city and that in Los Angeles, there is no such thing, no such center. Perhaps in terms of economics we could consider LA a city, he said, but not in terms of movement or how people really understand their environment). Think it’s impossible to survive in LA with only a bike? Claude commutes daily on his bicycle, often to Northridge (two hours from his home in Altadena) with as much as 50 lbs stacked away in his panniers.
And then we left the dome together, the first time we had left as a cohesive unit, I think, and took the #176 bus to the Mission Station on the Gold Line. We did not talk about anything particular on the bus or on the train. We simply bought the Metro Day Pass and took our first field trip through the middle of a freeway until the train could not go any farther, walked around there, and then turned around to come back.
“Claude and Deena are great people,” Mark said. “Their teaching strategy for the evening has a place in my heart. I wish every class had visited an unknown destination with no real reason behind it save for the experience.”
Pablo (who has only ever known Los Angeles on bike and train) said that the field trip was interesting as we went as far as can from Los Angeles on the Gold Line, in the middle of almost nothing but the freeway. “And,” he added, “anyone that had never took the train before was able to discover the joys of the Day Pass: 3 bucks to get everywhere during one day.”