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📚  Readings 📚



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📚 Anchored Readings: Core Texts for TOTAL LANDSCAPING
 
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📚 Privatisation of Public Open Space: The Los Angeles Experience
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📚 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: The Undercommons
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📚 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
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More to Come as We Evolve :)


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🍊June 11th: The Orange Groves 🍊

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Why These Readings:

These readings follow a few throughlines to help us think about the brief history of the Franklin Canyon Orange Grove, one of the few remaining orange groves in Southern California. The grove is currently undergoing restoration, with aspirations for a ‘full revival’ in the coming years. This revival process was supported in part by the David Bohnett Foundation, whose founder and namesake is known for his work as a philanthropist and tech entrepreneur. Bohnett is most recognizable as the co-founder of Geocities, a web hosting service in which users, known as “homesteaders,” were organized into distinct digital “neighborhoods.” These connections between the Franklin Canyon Orange Grove and the legacy of Geocities, and early internet lore are accompanied by investigations into the transfererance of frontier logic (Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006) and indigenous futurity (AbTeC Island) across digital spaces.



Readings

📚The Franklin Canyon Orange Groves 

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📚 🎧 The Lost Cities of Geo (Podcast + Short Article)

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📚 Excerpt, From Countercultures to Cyberculture by Fred Turner (pg. 73-102)

Optional: Introduction, and pg. 118-148 on the creation of the WELL.


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📚 Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC)

More on AbTEc here.


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⛰August 6th: Verdugo Mountains⛰

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Why These Readings:


Session Two meets in a 300-acre plot of land in the Verdugo Mountains, set to be developed into a gated luxury housing community called Canyon Hills. In response, No Canyon Hills (NCH), a group of ethnobotanists, artists, advisors, and neighbors have formed a coalition to oppose this development. Our session will be led by the folks of NCH; they will speak more to their work and current projects. 

This series of readings are specific to NCH and the texts are directly relevant to guiding their work. Public Comments are a number of letters and notes from the public in opposition to Canyon Hills. These comments take up particular issue with the 2003 Environmental Impact Report (EIC), which describes the open land as environmentally insignificant. The 20 year-old report, riven with issues to begin with, is even more so outdated today; it ignores the flourishing ecology of the mountains and the impact of ongoing climate change. No Canyon Hills calls for a revised, Subsequent EIC, and argues that such surveys must exist as living documents, able to change and iterate. 

The themes of this session take up notions of property as one of colonial ideology and practice, and therefore one which transliterates across the globe. The Colonial Lives of Property examines the racialized hierarchies and systems of legitimacy across Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Palestine. Reproducing the Plot describes the plantation, as it coagulates the ownership, dispossession, and struggle between land, people, and labor, positioning the Caribbean as a critical locale for these social and legal transformations.


Readings

Public Comments*

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Environmental Impact Report for the Canyon Hills Project*

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Colonial Lives of Property by Brenda Bhandar (pg. 84-101)

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Reproducing the Plot: Making Life in the Shadow of Premature Death
by Rachel Goffe  

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*These are larger collections and documents that can be read lightly.


Additional Readings:  


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🏭September 24: Discard and Landfills 🏭

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Why These Readings:


This Session explores space as a public health crisis: how does a pattern of settlement reveal certain assumptions about toxic and discarded materials as “matters out of place”? Each of the readings speaks to ways “waste” is employed to induce the capitalization of bodies through malpractices in land use. The readings begin with a few articles centered around discard systems in Los Angeles: An archived exhibition from CLUI, POST CONSUMED, discard of household hazardous waste, and Exide’s abandoned toxic site in Vernon.

Toxic Pregnancies: Speculative Futures, Disabling Environments, and Neoliberal Biocapital and Spectators of the Pacific investigate toxicity as warfare, that which activates borders, state-sanctioned intervention, and promissory sciences. These histories take a form beyond the shape of discarded objects. Rather, how do larger systems of discard propagate systems of valuation, which deem some disposable and others powerful? And further still, how do these systems uphold presupposed notions of a whole, well, body?    

Lastly, how do we explore these conditions of massive waste and accumulation, beyond its witness? Against the Anthropocene introduces a visual analysis to probe and reevaluate how one experiences the so-called epoch. In response to this text, our third site is a home in Highland Park, a quick drive away from the Highland Park landfill.



Readings