PtoR (Public to Residential)

Project Location: Watts, Los Angeles, USA
Project type: Academic Urban Design Studio at Woodbury University, California
Supervisor: Michael Pinto
Project Status: Submitted Spring 2014
Team: Lara Waked, Lauren Amador and Devin Flores

A team project aimed at transforming the city of Watts through the visions of our clients of the WLCAC. In teams of three, we were requested to develop an urban design scheme that responds to the challenging conditions of the city. This by finding what to leverage from these conditions in such a way that creates opportunities for development and organisation of programmes and intervention that would appropriately suit the surrounding community as well as nurture and promote the rich historic background of the district.

The initial process began with the analysis of the different zones and nodes within the district. Our methodology proposes a mediation between residential commercial industrial, public community and educational programmes. Finally the addition of a pedestrian way from the WLCAC to the Museum connects the overall scheme and becomes the centre of a walk-able quarter mile radius plan for the public. The project intends to connect and improve existing zones from residential to public on an urban scale while using methods of ‘everyday urbanism’ to address the needs of the human scale. Personal contributions to the project include collecting data for urban analysis of the surrounding context, documenting and mapping data, concept generation, collaging of vignettes for concept representation, program design and organization.