Redemption Square
Uncovering the hidden spirit of public space in Los Angeles.
To reimagine how people see and think about public space in the modern city, I created a short documentary and web series about a contested park in Downtown Los Angeles that reveals an inclusive vision for its future through the eyes and memories of its users.
Activities concept development
spatial analysis
archival research
community engagement
storyboarding
script writing
video production
motion graphics
Team Anne Whiston Spirn, Lorraine Morland, Lisa Biagiotti, Drew Ganyer, Garrett Lamb, Nicholas Myers, Colin Yarck, John Cranston, David Vega-Barachowitz
Date2018
StudioInvisible Cities Studio
“The film has a sense of history and memory that is sorely missing in conversations about public space in Los Angeles.”
— Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer of the City of LA
Click to view and check out original source materials...
1. On my Mind - 1:32
2. Campfire (1860s) - 1:55
3. Working Men (1900s) - 2:07
4. Unafraid (1940s) - 2:25
5. Safe Haven (1980s) - 3:36
6. Versions of the Truth (2018) - 6:01
7. Time in Place - 3:40
Hostile, outdated, unloved: this is the popular image of Pershing Square in Downtown Los Angeles. Yet beneath the sun-baked surfaces of this historic park exist countless stories of refuge and reinvention. Redemption Square is an investigation of the soul of a park and the soul of a city, and of a major perceptual gap in Los Angeles that propels vicious cycles of demolition and misguided urban design.
I chose Pershing Square as a case study to test the use of cinematic storytelling as an urban design tool for my MIT master’s thesis in 2016. Concurrent with an international competition to redesign the park, my experiments involved conducting nearly 100 interviews with park users, “reenacting” the experiences of users in every generation back to the 1860s, and constructing a possible future of the park through a montage of user aspirations.