The verve of the Latino community in East Los Angeles will always live on through the music, narratives, and the visual arts created by its artists.

Despite these cultural, social, and visual interventions, urban planners often ignore these cultural assets, which are rarely found in the local planning and zoning codes. The planning documents do not reflect the community in the visceral way art does.

(Flickr/James Rojas)

Chicano artists, specifically, can help preserve and enhance the Latino community’s values through the urban planning process because they offer new methods of planning inquiry and engaging with residents. Many Chicano artists have a good grasp of the Latino built-environment because many were raised in this community, which inspires their practices.

As part of my MIT thesis, “The Enacted Environment: The Creation of Place by Mexicans and Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles,” I investigated my community’s identity of place, through the lens of sociology, anthropology, architecture and urban planning.

Through their cultural, social, and economic behavior patterns and needs, Latinos imagine, investigate, and transform their physical landscape. For example: a fence becomes a place of social interaction; a store sign becomes a work of art; and a front yard becomes a plaza.

Planners often lack the tools to investigate and understand this built-environment, or take seriously these interventions, even though they are creating such a palpable sense of place and neighborhood identity.

It was not until I opened up Gallery 727 on Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles with Adrian Rivas that I realized what urban planners could learn from artists like Sandra de la Loza, Gronk, Arturo Romo, Mario Ybarra Jr., Karla Diaz, Raul Baltazar, Carmen Argote, York Chang, Elana Mann, and a host of others. While these artists saw their work as expression and representation, I saw the work as reframing urban planning.

Urban planners and artists occupy the same city space. People generally leave an art venue satisfied, wanting more, while people leave a public meeting thinking, “Thank God it’s over.”

(Flickr/James Rojas)

Through my involvement with Gallery 727’s cadre of artists and curators, I was able to experiment in applying art to urban planning. I learned that urban planning is an art practice because people imagine, investigate, and construct their environments the same way an artists creates their work.

As planners we should embrace the public creativity and not squash it. My method helps people investigate how their memory, experience, and imagination shape their environment and how we as planners can capture this information to inform public projects, plans and policies.

This approach I started at the gallery is revolutionizing the way people, especially youth, immigrants, and women imagine, investigate, negotiate, construct and reflect on their communities. While most urban planners take an indifference toward the communities they serve and jump around from city to city.

The City of Los Angeles should apply to an Art Place much like Minneapolis did, to embedded artists in the Los Angeles Urban Planning Department.