Former Mayor Antonio Villaragosa shaking hands with cyclist at Ciclavia (April 2012)
Next events in South LA around bicycling and social justice include:
- Check out the cellphone photos from our recent mapping events, including a planners’ tour of East Side biking and a Downtown Food Walk, both on December 8th. All pictures are published live from the cell phone cameras of the people who came along!
- Regular rides in South LA are growing; we’ll list any we know about. If you know of any we should list, let us know! Also check out the event pages of our local bike clubs like ESR. (And let us know about more clubs we should list here.)
- Sign up to be notified of our next big ride!
- Missed a past ride or event? Visit our events archive. It includes the July 1, 2012 South LA Peace, Love and Family Ride & Fair, hosted by the Real Rydaz; the June 17,2012 Return to the Map ride; the May 26,2012 City Lites ride, and more.
Our blog with recent stories are always below this status post. So far, we have distributed about 2000+ copies of the Watts Ride map.
Today we are thrilled to announce that the Guggenheim Museum has included our video in their new exhibit on the Participatory City. Our contribution is a video response to the term “Collaborative Urban Mapping,” based on our work in South LA with the Healthy Food Map. The video was funded as part of the Guggenheim’s exhibit, which addresses “100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab,” and is showing from October 11, 2013 through January 5, 2014. The exhibit explores the major themes and ideas that emerged from the Lab during its travels to New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. See all videos in the collection in a YouTube playlist (ours is #17).
Here is our video (English version — for Spanish see below):
Our Statement:
“Collaborative urban mapping” is different than just making group maps online, or celebrating the digital. To make our maps, we take a deliberately low-tech approach to the collaborative side, both for reasons of equity and innovation. Our goal with mapping is to empower a neighborhood, since empowerment shifts the frame to collective efficacy and civic literacy, rather than data as a good unto itself.
In South LA, we want to shatter some stereotypes — to show that the Watts Towers can be reached by bicycle, that urban gardens are often hidden in plain sight. Mapping is a kind of local media, spreading stories that resonate with neighborhood storytelling networks.
We tell a collective story with our process, embedding mapping with bike parades and group walks. The Vojo technology works with very basic phones (no apps!), reaching across the digital divide. Participants are invited to tell their own stories in pictures and SMS messages. We resist the “crowdsourcing” that treats participants as cheap sensors for data. Instead, we proclaim that distributing our voices is an act of civic advocacy, a way to build power.
Even as we mount iPads to bicycle handlebars, our multi-platform approach always involves paper and people. Paper maps are easy to write on and draw what should change. “Walk the map,” we say — and tell us what is missing! Use it to organize! For us, every part of mapping is an excuse to talk to strangers and friends, to set neighborhood priorities and to advance social change.
Press Update: our video release was covered by USC News on October 11th!
Team biography:
RideSouthLA ( http://RideSouthLA.com ) is a collective that is bringing mobile mapping, bicycling and social justice to South LA. Our mapping is multi-platform, involving mobile phones, paper and our bodies in space. We seek to tell a neighborhood story of assets and opportunities that is bigger than any one organization. For us, mapping is a tool for social change — documenting our community, envisioning our future, and building our collective power. Our team includes many organizations and individuals, including TRUST South LA, Community Services Unlimited, bike clubs like the East Side Riders, and University partners including the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, the Metamorphosis Project, and the USC Laboratory on the Social Frontier. Technology and design partners include VozMob, Vojo.Co, and DesignedByColleen. Countless individuals have joined our mapping process by contributing their own images, stories and strategies for change.
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Events taking place in the month of June Sponsored by Community Health Councils and TRUST South LA
Complete Streets Ride
INFORMATION: The COMPLETE STREETS RIDE is from 11AM-3PM. Our ride will focus on the corridors along MLK Blvd, Crenshaw Blvd, Vernon Ave, and Central Ave. We will study these corridors to better envision what complete streets development can look like.
DETAILS: For more details visit out Facebook event page here!
KNOW ANY JOURNALIST?: Invite the press and community correspondents to the event.
WHO IS WELCOME?: We welcome everyone including children to join us on this ride!
STAY CONNECTED: Sign up to be notified for future events here!
Join us on April 6th at 10am for a great ride from one of South LA’s great Healthy Food and Culture spaces, The Mercado La Paloma, through some of our distinctive neighborhoods to Normandie Ave Elementary for Earth Day South LA. It will be a great day of community building and healthy activity that will close with an annual community festival celebrating sustainable and healthy living! We will particularly celebrating our new Healthy Food Map for South L.A., which we launched at a ride in March.
- For details: See our Facebook event page for this ride — a great way to see who is coming, share pictures, etc. We’ll meet at 10am at Mercado (get directions; it’s just east of the 110 freeway near Exposition and Grand)
- Retweet our announcement on Twitter!
- Know any journalists? Invite the press and community correspondents to cover the event live.
- Stay connected. As always, sign up to be notified of future events. We’ll also post pictures etc. after the ride.
Flyer images (or get the full PDF):
(Click for full size version.)
(Click for full size version.)
(or get the full PDF)
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Healthy Food Ride South LA from Annenberg Innovation Lab on Vimeo.
Check out the NEW VIDEO from the Healthy Food Map kickoff ride!
On March 3rd, I got the privilege to join the Healthy Food Map ride and shoot a documentary about the event. It was my first time riding with the Ride South LA crew and it was an amazing experience.
The ride was a great way to see community research and outreach in action. It brought together a diverse group interested in spreading knowledge about healthy food in South LA. The bike ride created a spectacular event that not only drew attention to the map but also embodied the types of healthy lifestyles that the map advocates for.
The Healthy Food Map ride was composed of a wide array of South LA residents, cyclists, USC faculty and students, and partner organizations. The organizations include: T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Community Services Unlimited (CSU), Eastside Riders Bike Club, Los Ryderz, USC Annenberg Lab, USC Metamorphosis, and Laboratory On the Social Frontier (LOSF). The map was made possible by funding from USC Community Outreach.
Along the route, cyclist visited community gardens at Normandie Elementary and healthy food locations such as Mama’s Chicken and Mercado la Paloma. The locations are only a few key nodes in the larger network of healthy food projects and stores in the area. Yet, many participants I interviewed were astonished and surprised by these hidden gems in the community.
The map was created by a group of South LA students to identify healthy food locations in their neighborhoods. The map focuses on pedestrian and bike routes to help support those without a car. The ride itself was a celebration of bike culture and imagining what a bike friendly Los Angeles could look like. As the riders streamed through the neighborhood streets, South LA residents often came out of their homes to photograph or cheer on the group.
This is just the first step in an ongoing campaign to spread the map and increase awareness of Healthy Food options in South LA. Please make sure to download a copy and spread the map however you can. And keep a lookout for future rides! The next one is April 6!
On March 3rd 2013, we hosted a bike parade to launch our new Healthy Food Map for South L.A., featuring live delivery of vegetables by bicycle.
- Our ride video with interviews and more
- A zipcode map of where people came from for the ride
- Press coverage
included NBC 4, KPCC’s OnCentral, USC Press, and more — see the full press list.
- Photos from the ride: coming soon, for now, here’s our informal album
- Goals include participatory mapping to promote bike friendly streets, distributing the Healthy Food map we made, starting a public conversation about the future of South L.A. for bicycles, food, and sustainable development.
- Coordination & Outreach:
- Facebook event page.
- Retweet our announcement! Partners are still unfolding — let us know if you want in. We include TRUST S LA, Community Services Unlimited, and the ParTour/Mobile Lab/Metamorphosis groups at USC Annenberg.
- Know any journalists? Invite the press and community correspondents to cover the event live.
- Schedule and agenda
- Workshop starts at 10am at Mercado (get directions; it’s just east of the 110 freeway near Exposition and Grand)
- Riders depart by 11am. Going South toward Normandie Elementary. Probably under two hours round-trip.
- Stay connected. As always, sign up to be notified of future events. We’ll also post pictures etc. after the ride.
RideSouthLA contributed a chapter to the “Critical Making” book project led by Garnet Hertz, which will be featured this weekend at MOCA’s Art Book Fair. “Critical Making” was hand-made and only 300 copies exist, some of which have been placed in Special Collections at Stanford Library as well as the Royal College of Art Library and the Kingston University London Library.
From the book site:
A handmade book project by Garnet Hertz in the field of critical technical practice and critically-engaged maker culture. Critical making is defined by Ratto as exploring how hands-on productive work – making – can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. It also can be thought of as an appeal to the electronic DIY “maker movement” to be critically engaged with culture, history and society.
Our section is in the “Critical Making – Places” portion, titled Fold, Ride, Share and Rebrand: a Low Tech Crowdmap for Social Change and Biking in South Los Angeles. Our map is also tucked into at least one of the envelopes.
We are just beginning to explore how this book will be useful for our community — more to come! More pictures below…
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