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.
~
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.”