PanAmerican Urbanism

THE MAK URBAN FUTURE INITIATIVE PUBLIC FORUM SERIES
Presents PanAmerican Urbanism: From Caracas to
East Los Angeles



Reservations are recommended. Please RSVP for this event by calling 323-651-1510, or by email at office@makcenter.org.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 13 for PanAmerican Urbanism: From Caracas to East Los Angeles, the second event in an ongoing series, the MAK Urban Future Initiative (UFI) Public Forum. PanAmerican Urbanism will feature Efrén Santana, a MAK UFI fellow and architect with Urban Think Tank in Caracas, Venezuela; and James Rojas, an urban planner and co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Latino Urban Forum, an organization dedicated to understanding and improving the built environment of Latino communities.

Santana and Rojas will present a comparative study of the built environments of their respective cities, and discuss their evolving hypothesis of a PanAmerican Urbanism, which explores how the urban fabric of cities throughout the Americas has been shaped by Hispanic and Latino culture. Santana and Rojas will give special attention to the home as a manifestation of transnational common values, such the importance of extended family and the notion of the front yard as a public space.

More about Efrén Santana
Efrén Santana is in Los Angeles as part of the MAK Urban Future Initiative (UFI), a new international fellowship program dedicated to creating meaningful cross-cultural exchange about the challenges confronting cities worldwide. As the second UFI fellow-in-residence, Santana is researching the urban practices of Los Angeles' Latino immigrants- how they have changed the city's urban fabric, and how the city has changed them.

Santana is an architect with Urban Think Tank (U-TT), a multi-disciplinary design practice based in Caracas, Venezuela, that is dedicated to high-level research and design. U-TT's design practice places the social reality of a site at the forefront of political discussion. Their work is aimed at reversing the top-down hierarchy of governance in the public sphere in favor of bottom-up, locally driven action.

More about James Rojas
James Rojas is an urban planner who lectures widely at universities, planning conferences and grassroots community meetings on the impact of Latino populations on land use and transportation. Rojas is also the founder of the Latino Urban Forum in Los Angeles, dedicated to understanding and improving the built environment of Los Angeles' underserved Latino communities. To date, more than 300 volunteer architects, urban planners, public administrators, and lawyers have helped LUF to develop strategies and to provide technical expertise on critical infrastructure and land-use issues in the Latino community.

More about the MAK Urban Future Initiative
Funded by a major grant from the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the MAK Urban Future Initiative (UFI) is a fellowship program in which cultural researchers from diverse nations come to Los Angeles for two months, live in the exemplary L.A. modern Fitzpatrick-Leland House (R. M. Schindler, 1936) and pursue a research topic related to urban phenomena. Fellows come from nations that are under-represented in the Los Angeles discourse; the MAK Center works closely with them to create a meaningful cross-cultural exchange. The goal is to generate concepts for the urban future by stimulating dialogue and mining both Los Angeles and international resources. At the end their fellowship sessions, UFI fellows present their research at a MAK UFI Public Forum event. For more information about the UFI program, please visit www.makcenterufi.org.

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MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
323 651 1510 phone
323 651 2340 fax
visit: www.makcenter.org
contact: office@makcenter.org