USC Price School of Public Policy Professor David Sloane provided the closing keynote for the 2017 Hollywood Economic Development Summit, hosted June 22 by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce at ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood.
The theme of the summit was building a more livable Hollywood, and Sloane noted the unique challenges Hollywood faces in planning for a city that is both a global brand and a Los Angeles community.
Read Raphael Bostic’s last post in our partnership with Home Matters.
We have a long history of mobility. It’s one of the advances that set the New World apartfrom the Old. Our founders wanted us to move. They didn’t want us confined to the class we were born into or the name we were given or the land our parents could bestow on us. They wanted us to set out across this vast continent, and they didn’t want us to settle until we found a home we could call our own.
Peter Berg’s The Kingdom is an action procedural which tries also to be a lesson in cross-cultural tolerance. Released in 2007, we wonder if this film makes the same amount of sense after ten years. The film follows an FBI team which travels to infiltrate and find a terrorist cell in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia following an attack killing many American citizens (as well as fellow FBI agent). If art is an imitation of life, have we moved on in the last ten years, or does this remain salient?
To listen to the Price Projection Room discussion of The Kingdom click the orange arrow in the Soundcloud player at the top of this post. Or download and subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Google Play.
On April 29, 1992, Los Angeles erupted into chaos and violence after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of African American Rodney King. The Hotel Play asks what, if anything, has changed in the past 25 years?
Join Jody David Armour, Paula Cizmar, Aubrey Hicks, and David Sloane as we think about race, Los Angeles, art, and social movements. We look at the moment that was the uprising in 1992 and how community organizing that grew out of that moment became a movement.
To listen to the Price Projection Room discussion of The Hotel Play, click the arrow in the Soundcloud player at the top of this post. Or download and subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Google Play.
In our previous post on community engagement, we talked a lot about innovation and how to make citizen engagement more attractive for community members. Additionally, during our first LA Civics Initiative workshop, we talked about the barriers that prevent people from becoming civically engaged in LA. One of the barriers that our attendees pointed to was a certain disconnect or feeling of apathy from Angelenos towards government or other formal institutions. Could online engagement and social media be the keys to making communities feel more interested and connected to local governance and decision-making?
One of the barriers discouraging civic involvement identified in our LA Civics Initiative kick-off workshop last year was “baseline knowledge”—the idea that people need to be informed and educated in certain issues and processes in order for them to fully engage and participate. It is no surprise that Sherry Arnstein writing on citizen participation in…
Building trust is paramount for genuine community engagement
As I mentioned in our first community engagement post, Arnstein’s article on citizen participation (1969) shows us that there are wrong and illegitimate ways to do community or stakeholder engagement. In my research and my classes at Price, I’ve found that the first step to a legitimate process seems to be a legitimate desire by the engager to listen to the stakeholders and take their input into account when making decisions.
Last summer we launched the LA Civics Initiative – a collaboration with City Impact Lab meant to start a conversation about civic participation in Los Angeles. Through collaborative projects and workshops, we sought to figure out how the city’s residents can become more civically-minded as well as civically-active. Living in a representative democracy, most citizens…
We ask how to define “good” policing, as we discuss sociologist Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. What expectations do we put on police officers? How do police departments measure success? What should we measure for success? What does “law and order” mean? Do police receive the right kind of training to deliver the service communities want them to provide? How does Baltimore differ from Los Angeles? We also discuss the epic policy failure of the War on Drugs and the idea of legalization.
“What strikes me is that you’re tremendous social pioneers,” Bostic said. “You’ve taken ideas and really implemented them with the explicit design to get different people into the mix and the conversation.”
In our latest event in the Leading from the West series, we brought in chef Roy Choi and philanthropic foundation executive Tara Roth to discuss how building a community online translates to real-life engagement.