Ecology of Fear

In June, following raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the largely peaceful protests that formed in response, President Donald Trump loosed the National Guard on Los Angeles. Images of public demonstrations, mostly concentrated in the photogenic density of downtown, spread far and wide, broadcasting LA as the city of dissent. Federal forces soon engineered their own spectacle, however, turning public spaces like MacArthur Park into theaters of martial display.

The dead of summer brought more conflicting messages: The week that undercover ICE agents raided Home Depot parking lots, a thousand-plus troops in the National Guard prepared to exit the city. (The same force was summarily invited by the president to enter the District of Columbia in August.)

The momentum favors retreat over revolt—for now. Trump’s rapacious id is intent on subduing the country’s liberal cities. ICE is feeling both flush and fash after the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and September’s SCOTUS ruling, an ignoble rubber stamp on the persecution of an exploited immigrant population whose labor and culture have shaped LA into a cosmopolitan city of global importance.

We ask architects, planners, and critics to imagine a politics of the building site and the city adequate to a moment when municipal self-determination, public assembly, and fundamental civil protections are at stake. How can AEC workers forge meaningful solidarity with migrants in the trades? How can Angelenos harness their city’s unique history and urban morphology to build a lasting opposition to nativism, sadism, and state terrorism, whether in secret or on the world stage?

The violence against the people of Los Angeles by ICE and the National Guard is an assault on public life. This is a city of immigrants, where one-third of the population is foreign born and more than half of all children have an immigrant parent. On any given day in MacArthur Park, the site of the federal government’s bombastic military spectacle, street vendors and sidewalk preachers hawk their products; kids play games; unhoused folks stay cool in the shade; couples stroll around the lake. Alerts went out to clear the park before la migra arrived, the first defense waged by local activists against this attack on civil society. Community organizations around the park opened their doors to anyone needing to get inside for safety.

Architects and urbanists can ally with community to engage in defense measures like these, but we should also bring our skills to these groups to stage an offense. The city is architecture’s political site. Cities wither without racial diversity, without freedom of gender expression, without livability and affordability. Such goals are advanced through individual actions, including those by designers who lift up public life on every building site, making collective spaces where fear is being sown. Buildings can speak stories of welcome instead of gated fortress scenarios. Look at LA’s downtown Central Library for a master class on the public square. Architects can demonstrate the dignity of affordable housing with structures that augment existing neighborhoods, like Kevin Daly Architects’ Gramercy Senior Housing (2021), or dwellings that densify their contexts gently, like Bestor’s Blackbirds in Echo Park (2016) and all the ADUs hiding in LA’s backyards. New housing complexes can be connected by vibrant streets and walkways—full of children, seniors, vendors, and cyclists—demonstrating that loitering is not a crime but a sign of vitality. Los Angeles may in fact be the best city to create public architecture, countering the stereotype that we are a city of cars, stars, and sprawl. The impacts of design accumulate to shape our shared material world, forge our collective identities, and create our public life. Our resistance to attacks on public life must in return be public, not only when we join together as activists in the streets but when we, project by project and building by building, reshape the streets themselves. —DANA CUFF, ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATOR AND ACTIVIST

Design leaves monuments that endure, while labor too often fades into invisibility. The pyramids, Versailles, even midcentury America’s endless tracts of suburban homes stand as symbols of human aspiration. Yet behind their sublimity are the thousands of hands that shaped stone, carved wood, poured concrete, and laid bricks. Those hands left their mark, but history rarely remembers them.

Unlike those old monuments, Los Angeles is always unfinished. It is a work in progress, and this fluid urban morphology creates an opening: LA can foster a culture of solidarity in the AEC ecosystem that will be a model for cities around the world. The contributions of migrant laborers to the built environment can be reflected in curricula, programming, exhibitions, archives, and other sites of knowledge production. Firms can partner with unions, worker centers, and advocacy groups to demand fair wages, health protections, and pathways to licensing and certification.

Too often, Latino labor is depicted as building space, not creating it. Yet anyone who lives in LA knows that Latino communities continually remake the city through cultural practices that reach far beyond the jobsite. Porches, front yards, murals, food vendors, and informal economies all imprint themselves upon and enliven the entire Southland. We can adopt this “Latino use of space” lens to show how design is cocreated through labor and culture, not dictated from the top down; credit should go not only to architects and planners but also to the craftspeople who construct and adapt places. LA’s story will never be fully written, but until Latino labor is acknowledged as coauthor of our city, it will always be incomplete. —JAMES ROJAS, URBAN PLANNER

When we at RIOS designed Grand Park as “the park for everyone,” we envisioned furniture that could reconfigure endlessly for gathering and connection, as it does in the great parks of the world. After images of the protests emerged in June, I was deeply moved to see those pink chairs and benches shielding protesters. I felt profound responsibility alongside appreciation, witnessing our work take on a role, however small, in the fight for human dignity.

Designed environments inevitably become stages for both celebration and resistance. The question is how to create places that strengthen bonds and enable unification and action. Parks can become adaptable platforms for solidarity. A piece of furniture, by virtue of its portability, can become an instrument of protection and an emblem of belonging. In Los Angeles, I believe, hope persists in spaces that invite connection, spark joy, and trust communities to remake them. —MARK RIOS, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

Recent ICE enforcement actions mark the latest chapter in Los Angeles’s long saga of racial conflicts over belonging and citizenship. This drama functions as performative theater that overwhelmingly impacts people of color, signaling that racial hierarchy is still very much alive in “the land of the free.” The cruel irony of this ongoing performance of exclusion became clear to me decades after I learned what it meant to “not belong” in America.

Some memories take decades to reveal their meaning. I can still hear my mother say that she married my father because he looked more Mexican than Black. I can still sense my boy Toye breathing next to me in the back seat of my dad’s 1970 sky blue Dodge Charger, on what seemed like just another afternoon getting picked up from school. We were singing a song we had learned in class that day: “This land is your land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island / From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me.” We were part of something magnificent. At least that’s how the song made us feel. Then the brakes slammed.

I’ll never forget my dad’s face in the rearview mirror, spit flying as he snarled, “Your brown asses have a lot to learn!”—his voice cutting through our innocent chorus. The rest of the ride home felt frosty. Toye and I sat silent, our song dead in our throats, the taste of belonging having turned bitter in our mouths.

Fast forward to 2016, when, after having been denied tenure at USC, I found myself in a period of professional and personal reckoning. I stumbled upon James Baldwin’s 1965 Cambridge debate on whether “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin’s words landed in my chest like a fist: “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.”

Suddenly, that ride home made sense. My father’s fury hadn’t been directed at us but at a country that had taught two brown babies to sing about belonging to a land that had never truly claimed them. We were performing our own exclusion, completely unawares. Every generation thinks it is dealing with something new, but America has been running the same program for centuries.

When I think about ICE in LA, I think about the Indigenous Tongva genocide (1771–1873); the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre (1871); Mexican land dispossession (1850s–1870s); the Mexican “repatriation” (1930s); anti-Filipino violence and the Watsonville Riots (1930); Japanese American internment (1942–1945); the Zoot Suit Riots (1943); Bloody Christmas (1951); the Battle of Chavez Ravine (1950s); Operation Wetback (1954); freeway construction displacement (1950s–1970s); the Watts Rebellion (1965); KKK activity in Los Angeles (1920s–1940s); the Rodney King uprising (1992); and contemporary Black displacement through gentrification (1980s–present). I think about the back seat of that sky blue Charger, the song, the dream of belonging. I think about the nearly fifty years it took for my understanding to be born. —VICTOR J. JONES, TEACHER, SPATIAL PRACTITIONER, AND NATURAL-BORN CULTURAL ACTIVIST

What has been taking place on the streets, in front of schools, and in the public-facing workplaces of our city both is and is not an architectural issue. If that sounds like I’m giving anyone a free pass, the opposite is true. Let me explain.

The specific geographic and topographic conditions that characterize Los Angeles are a strength. Known intimately to her inhabitants, while presenting a vague and formless face to newcomers, the city’s combination of extension and intricacy today thwarts efforts at occupation, just as it has always frustrated writers attempting to extract a paradigm from an indistinct and unpatterned map. This slipperiness, combined with the ingenuity of digital inventions such as ICEBlock (a crowdsourced platform allowing users to report and receive alerts of ICE activity), has been the source of a few important and encouraging successes.


The militarization of space in Los Angeles this past summer forces a rethinking of who we are, as Angelenos, Californians, Americans, both citizens and non-. These events present us with a more complex depth of field, as we are compelled to focus on overlooked and invisible populations who play important roles in our social fabric and in our economy.

As architects, we have an opportunity to open our eyes to the interdependence of what we do, to see clearly the reality of exactly how our buildings are realized and the threats being posed to some of the most exploited and vulnerable workers in the AEC economy. But it is also a moment to redouble our efforts to make architecture—as a professional practice, a critical tool, and a visionary project—an important presence in our civic discourse.

The void created when we withdraw and simply perform in the service of our clients, and in the name of legal, political, and economic expediency, is profound, and it has left us with a hollow and disconnected public sphere. We have the tools to propose alternatives, to describe the linkages between space and social relations, and to design environments that prompt a recognition of agency within communities and on the part of individual actors.

It is time that we evolve from a profession peppered with a few political activists whom we honor (and hide behind?) as our Citizen Architects and become a body composed of Architect Citizens. We can be seriously committed to whatever form and scale our investigations of design and architecture take while remaining available as responsible members of society; we can see the world as it is and choose to act—as architects and otherwise. —CHAVA DANIELSON, ARCHITECT

Learn and practice the labor of small organizing. Rather than assemble buildings, gather cohorts. Mutual aid is workplace training. Make your workers protection plan. Join ICEBlock. Protest. Share skills, techniques, and tools of organizing people for actions. Surface invisible forms of labor. Revoke the Alien Enemies Act. Read the Rent Brigade’s “Disappeared and the Displaced.” Dismantle the corporations; build an office of public architecture. Resurrect social housing. Make architecture part of general, public education—quit professionalizing. Dispel debt. Think systems repair. Commit to a moratorium on building. If work or be kidnapped is the choice of many, none of us should work. Go on strike. Withhold taxes. Get illegal. Get uncomfortable. Reclaim your labor. Build alternatives, seek alterity. Join the LA Tenants Union. Be a witness. Advocate for legal pathways to citizenship. Entangle the office with the jobsite. Reform AIA. In a new presidency, we will have Mothers of the Disappeared (see: Argentine junta). Memorialize the missing. —JIA YI GU, DESIGNER

On Christmas Eve 1974, masked members of artist collective Asco laid a white-clothed table for a dinner party on a median of Whittier Boulevard. The choice of location was significant. Four years earlier, in a mass demonstration known as the Chicano Moratorium, nearly thirty thousand people marched down Whittier against the Vietnam War and the disproportionate numbers of Chicano youth killed in pursuit of American empire, a pursuit that would claim three more lives when the protest was brutally suppressed by LA County sheriffs. A carnivalesque communion of punk glamour and Latino visibility, First Supper, known to us today through its surviving photograph, commemorates a flashpoint of Chicano struggle but also reminds us of a truth too easily forgotten: Our joy is our defiance.

When Latinos make up nearly half of LA’s population, the very idea of “the right to the city” is absurd—and yet we continue to fight for our existence and for the spaces we inhabit.

Los Angeles is a metropolis of infinite multiplicities, shaped by an urban form that prioritizes movement over interaction. Only through activation and joy are our spaces transformed into democratic ones. CicLAvia down Wilshire, bonfires under the flight path at Dockweiler, night markets in San Gabriel Valley parking lots, a festival of masks through Leimert Park Village, the taquero serving up carne al pastor on the corner—these are our true civic rituals. The challenge of achieving this state of celebration is not one of scale or density—it is one of velocity. A multimodal city creates opportunities to slow down and reclaim space for and by the community. Will we allow our current peril to prevent us from such reclamation?

If designers and policymakers want to be in solidarity with the struggle today, they must break out of their bubbles, dispense with the economistic reduction of Latinos to laborers, and embrace all aspects of life in Los Angeles. Performative solidarity from the comfort of social media, symposia, or podcasts will not cut it. Immigrant communities don’t need saviors—they need partners, investors, and coconspirators of joy. —CHRISTOPHER TORRES, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT