While the sustainable cities of our dreams will clearly require the efforts of scientists, planners, engineers, and policy makers of all kinds, they’ll also require us to completely reimagine our connections to environment and to each other. That’s a job for the arts—and in this DISCUSSIONS in Architectural History and Theory lecture, titled How to Reimagine Everyday Environments & Public Spaces – A Campfire Talk with the LA Urban Rangers, visiting research associate Jenny Price will chronicle how her LA Urban Rangers collective is creating participatory public projects to re-experience urban environments and public space. What particular powers do such art projects bring to the table? And how can these on-the-ground adventures mobilize people to envision and actually create more equitable and sustainable practices and places?

Author of Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. and Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, Price has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, GOOD, and Believer, and writes the “Green Me Up, JJ” occasional not-quite advice column on LA Observed.

As a co-founder of the LA Urban Rangers public art collective, she has co-created such projects as Malibu Public Beaches, Water Bar, and Public Access 101: Downtown LA, and has exhibited or been a resident artist at MOCA, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Price designed Nature Trail in 2012-13 as a permanent commission for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis. She co-created the mobile-phone app Our Malibu Beaches in 2013, and updates it often as a guide to everything you need to know to find and use a public beach in Malibu.

She has a PhD in history from Yale University, and has taught at UCLA, USC, and Princeton University. A former Guggenheim Fellow and NEH Fellow, she has been a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (1998-2014), a senior fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and the Barron Visiting Professor in Environment and the Humanities, Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies, and Atelier Program guest artist at Princeton University.

She is working on a new book, Stop Saving the Planet!: A 12-Step Guide for 21st-Century Environmentalists.

For more information, click here.