Civic Resilience Laboratory

Presentation: Resilient Urban Data of Third Spaces

As cities and urban regions face a myriad of challenges, community bonds are a major civic resource to face them. Even in our digital world, these communities are often rooted in real, third spaces where members can gather to shop, eat, and conduct cultural rituals and holidays, especially important as populations migrate and our displaced. This is where ideas and initiatives are interpreted, adopted, resisted, and propagated.

I present a novel data generation project to map a layer of the city that is key to its functioning but has eluded urban planning: cultural hubs. The premise is that the city at the grassroots is literally telling us where these are through urban signage that expresses cultural identities. Focusing on the global urban region of greater Los Angeles, I present the process I developed using Google Streetview images to create a linguistic landscape dataset of 13.3 million lines of text mapped on to 351,146 land parcels. We then created the ethniCITY database of 96 different ethnicities’ expressing themselves and produced a map of the cultural hubs of 62 different cultures that have formed across the metropolis. This map layer is being incorporated into LA Metro transportation planning for the LA28 Olympics.

Keywords: Cultural hubs; computer vision; Los Angeles; mapping

Bio: Annette Miae Kim is Associate Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and affiliated faculty at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her books include Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press, 2008). She founded and directs SLAB which experiments with spatial ethnography and critical cartography in order to re-see the city. Her video installations have been shown internationally. She helped found the RAP collective around race, arts, and placemaking.