Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group

How do we design for a future with more seats at the table?
How do we reconcile our collective histories in civic space?
How can art & the humanities be deployed as tools towards civic truth?

In November of 2019, Christopher Hawthorne, former architecture critic of the L.A. Times and the chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, convened a working group of 40 members to produce a thoughtful series of recommendations on how the City might engage its history with honesty. While cities in the South must contend with the legacy of confederate momunents, and such structures are more notably absent in our landscape, symbols and structures of oppression still persist. How can Los Angeles contend with shared memory in civic space in ways that allow more just and equitable futures to emerge?

The Working Group was comprised of eight subcommittees. I served as co-chair of the fifth subcommittee along with Frank Escher, co-founder and principal of Escher GuneWardena Architecture, on “Monuments, Markers, and Layers of Space.” The images to the left are excerpts from a 40-page document produced by our subcommittee, several excerpts from which were included in the final report, Past Due: Report and Recommendations of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group.

As part of the final report, I co-facilitated a roundtable conversation with Monument Lab, a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia.