Embedded Planning Returns to ELARA
Part 1 in a series on the author’s return to guest speaking at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy after the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Esteban E. Torres High School in East Los Angeles has the distinction of being one of three public high schools in the U.S. with an urban planning program. Launched in 2010, the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy Department of Urban Planning and Design (ELARA) at Torres High teaches students the fundamentals of city planning practice. Community activism is core to its curriculum. The teachers who organized ELARA drew inspiration from the community’s legacy of Chicano/a-led civil rights struggle. Today, East LA and the larger LA Region serve as learning laboratories.
I’ve been a guest speaker at ELARA since 2017. The community engagement studio Public Matters brought me in as a speaker-in-practice for their flagship Greetings from East LA program, and I stayed on as a returning guest in the classrooms of Scott Cody, EdD, and Ana Tenorio. These talks allow me to motivate high schoolers by recounting my route to activist urban planning practice, a journey they’re considering taking too.
Our shared histories connect us. I grew up in the same community as them. That bridges the “lived experience gap” that can exist between well-meaning presenters and students. I was born in Boyle Heights — a longtime Chicano/a community that’s currently a battleground in community-led resistance to gentrification — and raised in both unincorporated East Los Angeles and the neighboring City of Montebello in LA’s Eastside. ELARA students come from these very neighborhoods.
As I tell the students, my pathway to planning began with formative experiences in early Hip Hop culture. I came up in the late 80s and early 90s. A cultural touchstone of that era was the rise of the graffiti art scene. The roots of modern graffiti art trace to the East Coast, but in the late 80s, the pendulum swung to Los Angeles (a similar West Coast pivot happened for the intersecting rap music scene).
My first tag was in 6th grade at age 11.
By freshman year in 1991 at Montebello High School, I was doing full-color street murals.
I got around the city by foot and bus. Sometimes solo, oftentimes with my fellow graffiti writers. You have to graduate from drawing in sketchbooks to writing in the streets. I consider this my inaugural “feet on the ground” experience.
Doing graffiti begat my love of engaging the city at the street level. However “illicit” it may have been, graffiti introduced me to LA’s multilayered urban politics. First Amendment debates about speech vs. vandalism. The territoriality of gangs. The patchwork of LA’s municipal jurisdictions. Aggressive policing in communities of color. These are a few examples of the civic lessons I learned as a writer on the streets.
I learned quickly, as well, that dangers lurk everywhere. CISCO from CBS crew, also known today as Dr. Stefano Bloch, aptly describes the ever-present threats writers face on the streets in his memoir, Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture. From antagonistic rivals and gang members to vigilantes and cops, a graffiti writer has to be ready at all times for when the shit goes down. It’s the price you pay to paint.
Like CISCO, I was chased by gang members and vigilantes, and like CISCO, I got gaffled up by the cops. The stress weighs on you. After five years, several foot races, too many close calls, and a couple of trips to city jails, I realized the risk was just too great. In 1994, I retired from graffiti.
But I didn’t retire my imagination.
Instead, I pivoted my artistic energies into architecture courses at Montebello High School, and that creative focus propelled me into community college. From there, I would eventually find my way to planning cities.
Throughout these decades, the love of the streets stayed with me. It would reemerge 20 years later when I conceived a new form of street-level praxis as an urban planner on the ground in South Central LA.
Embedded Planning is my original contribution to the field of urban planning. Embedded Planning situates the work of planners on the ground in the communities in situ where planners work. To understand a community, you have to be present in it. By embedding oneself in a neighborhood, by becoming part of the daily fabric of community life, by working as much as possible in and from the streets, the embedded planner is positioned to develop authentic, personal relationships with community members. The embedded planner gets to know the neighborhood, intimately. Get out from behind the desk and make the streets your office; you’ll understand what’s working and what needs improvement.
In bringing together people and resources to improve neighborhoods, the embedded planner works as an organizer. In acknowledging and helping to heal neighborhood trauma, the embedded planner is akin to a social worker. Through this intimate and proximate experience, the embedded planner is better equipped to craft plans, policies, ordinances and programs, but also strategies, tactics and actions, informed by people’s everyday lives and the conditions of neighborhoods in which they’re embedded. Embedded Planning advances equity by intentionally positioning planning practice within the daily lived spaces of community members, thereby bringing in more participants to the public planning process. Hence my maxim: “We Cannot Plan From Our Desks!”
Embedded Planning resonates with ELARA students. Their reflection assignments show that they appreciate this activist method during a time of increasingly vexing urban problems.
To enrich my talks, I bring in allies. These fellow activists help to connect the idea of Embedded Planning to the myriad planning problems affecting East LA. For instance, organizers from #NOlympicsLA joined me in the classroom to explain how sports-driven development incentivizes gentrification. An activist from Services Not Sweeps presented on the harms of aggressive cleanups of unhoused communities that worsen the physical and mental trauma of people experiencing homelessness. As part of the Housing Element Update, County housing planners engaged ELARA students on efforts in the works to strengthen affordable housing.
On many occasions, I’ve brought in my frequent collaborator, Mike The PoeT Sonksen. Mike wears many “hats” and they all holler “LA!” He’s a poet, journalist, tour guide, educator, publisher, public intellectual, and mentor to countless Angeleno scribes of all ages and from neighborhoods across the vast LA region. After finishing his bachelor’s at UCLA in the late 90s, Mike considered doing a master’s degree in urban planning but ultimately chose to hit the streets as a working poet. Years later, he was writing a regular column for KCET exploring LA neighborhoods. I started reading his LA Letters in 2015 and instantly loved how Mike’s prose fused urban planning and social history with a Hip Hop flavor. One day I tweeted at him to express some reader appreciation. He responded with an invitation to collaborate. This led to, among many collaborations, one of Mike’s most acclaimed essays, “Everyday Heroes of Florence-Firestone.”
Mike and I hit it off as kindred spirits engaged in our own forms of street-level practice. It all came together in our mutual aspiration to educate LA’s future city leaders. ELARA was an ideal venue. With the support of faculty, Mike and I have co-taught writing workshops with 11th and 12th graders using topics such as the Right to the City, Gentrification and Displacement, and the Theory/Practice Gap — topics that Mike and I didn’t engage until well into our college years.
Autobiography lends a feeling of personal intimacy in our talks. Mike narrates his hard route to being a professional writer. I recount my long journey to becoming a planner. Students hear about my breakthroughs and successes; but they also hear about my struggles and shortcomings, self-doubts, and bouts with a feeling that I came to know as imposter syndrome. I talk about my meandering path as I labored to figure out who I am. I regale them with stories of mentors who guided me and why I pay it forward.
Representation is crucial. Time and again, the teachers relay that my guest talks resonate with the students. They learn from a practicing Latinx planner who looks like them, talks like them, and comes from the same community as them. I understand their struggles. After hearing my tales, they understand mine and why I do this work. As a practicing street-level planner for over a decade, I’ve worked to reverse the inequities these students live with, from environmental racism to community disinvestment to housing insecurity. My presence at ELARA is me doing my part to build the next generation of planners who know these struggles personally and want to fight to create a more just city.
For two years, these regular class visits brought real-life lessons in Embedded Planning that demonstrated how students could apply their learning on the streets of East LA.
Then the pandemic hit.
COVID-19 has had a particularly severe impact on this community. County health data at the time of this writing show 12,961 cases of the novel coronavirus, including 146 deaths, in unincorporated East Los Angeles. In a community with a population of about 124,000, where nearly 18% are below the poverty line, and 56% of residents ages 0–64 lack health insurance, COVID-19 is proving difficult to surmount as a life disruption for ELARA students and their families. Folks have fallen ill. Many have died. Workers have lost jobs. Housing is becoming even more precarious, with only temporary stop-gaps in place to prevent the looming threat of evictions. Meanwhile, recently released research estimates that evictions in the 27 states that removed eviction moratoriums during the pandemic resulted in over 10,700 deaths. For a virus that disproportionately affects communities of color, this news is frightening. ELARA students are witnessing these dire public health and planning problems unfolding up-close in real-time.
So it was with tremendous gratitude that I received a message from Ms. Tenorio inviting me back to ELARA to discuss with her 11th graders not only my trajectory as an embedded planner but also the current state of planning during the pandemic, this time by way of Zoom.
“I would love for our students to see a planner of color from a neighborhood like theirs and learn what you do, why you love it,” Ms. Tenorio wrote.
Happily, I agreed and returned as a guest speaker in her classroom on October 8th.
Ms. Tenorio prefaced my visit with a module on the ways planners help impoverished communities like East LA. Her students read my inaugural op-ed on Embedded Planning, reviewed my LinkedIn page, and explored the website of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, where I now work developing parks and gardens in partnership with communities of color. My talk would ground these assignments in tangible planning practice.
Two days before my visit, Ms. Tenorio shared her students’ robust set of questions for me mounted on the class’s Padlet. I read them, and I re-read them. I was so impressed! Many of their inquiries I recognized as college-level thinking about urban planning. I wondered how further ahead I would be had I grappled with planning debates at age 16.
That’s why you become a mentor. I did it so students from my community can access the knowledge, resources, and experiences that I did not possess.
In today’s Work From Home culture, getting excited about the next video conference is a tough ask. Yet I was stoked to join this Zoom because it marked my return, and the return of Embedded Planning, to ELARA.
We started with an ice breaker calibrated for this anxious era. “How do you feel today?” Followed by the statement, “I’m in.” One after another in the chat box, students shared their moods. Consensus was, “I’m feeling good, though tired. I’m in!” (it was the same for me).
Because I was meeting this cohort for the first time, Ms. Tenorio took a few moments to explain our ongoing partnership at ELARA. I then launched into my talk explaining how I became an embedded planner.
Titled “Every Urban Planner Has An Origin Story,” the 30-minute presentation traced my evolution from junior high school to today. The deck featured rich visuals showing my graffiti art. Students saw my progression from sketchbook practice tags to the street murals I painted in 11th grade. Architecture models from high school and college represented my next chapters post-graffiti. The deck also illustrated my meandering path. “Go where your passions take you. Discover who you are,” I implored. “A non-linear path is okay.” From there, students learned about my awakening to race and class consciousness circa 1998 which prompted my pivot from architecture to political science to, eventually, urban planning. They learned about the pressure I felt being only the third person in my family to finish college, and the first to attend graduate school.
Of course, the students learned about Embedded Planning. “You gotta go to the people! You can’t make them come to you,” I urged. As an LA County planner, I devoted 13 years of my life on the ground in the unincorporated community of Florence-Firestone in South Central. This is where Embedded Planning was born. In the deck, photos of community members and me working together in Florence-Firestone rendered the bonds formed over a decade of planning in and from these streets. Real-life examples illustrated my message. Embedded Planning helped us finish the Florence-Firestone Community Plan after 10 years. The praxis was fundamental to my co-authoring with residents Florence-Firestone’s first-ever community history book. Over the years, I’ve met passionate community members of color wanting to attend grad school, and I’ve had the honor of writing Letters of Recommendation to help them achieve their dreams. These relationships formed through Embedded Planning.
Ms. Tenorio’s students also learned about my recent career moves to stay true to my advocacy goals. I’m in a new role developing green spaces on the ground and from the bottom-up, I explained, now, of course, with requisite PPE and social distancing. In the end, I showed how embedded planners act as trusted community resources particularly in tumultuous times like these. The presentation drew a through-line connecting my roots as a street artist, to my experience as a street-based urban planner, to my creation of Embedded Planning on the streets of Florence-Firestone in South Central LA. And the praxis continues.
I wanted to answer every question they’d submitted, but time just didn’t allow it. We covered only a handful during Q & A. But each student deserved a reply, I said. So I promised to respond in writing.
We closed the presentation with another check-in: “How are you feeling?”
I’m humbled to report the consensus was: “Inspired!”
In the time that’s passed, as I’ve been working on this response in fulfillment of my promise, the students were working on their own responses, too. Ms. Tenorio recently emailed me a folder containing 23 letters students wrote to me, each one impressively written with the care and precision of business communication. In the letters, students expressed appreciation for the presentation but also challenged me to keep this conversation going. Using the 3, 2, 1 reflection technique, they identified 3 things they learned, 2 things that resonated, and 1 thing that remains a question. That last prompt uplifted many issues within and beyond Embedded Planning that merit attention. They’ve given me ideas for my next talk at ELARA.
In Part 2, I’ll begin to answer the over 50 questions submitted by ELARA students. Their questions have been lightly edited, grouped when similar, and organized thematically for this series. Part 2 will start at the beginning. The theme is, “Origins.”
