The Open Streets Classroom:

A University-Community Partnership for the Public Good

February 27, 2020
12 pm to 4 pm
Free. Registration required. Lunch provided.
Spanish interpretation available.
Corvallis Benton County Public Library
Keynote: Dr. Adonia Lugo

Participants will be working in small teams around the following topics:
Health
Neighborhood engagement
Engineering and design
Inclusion and representation
Peace literacy and civil discourse
Sustainability

More than What One Can See: Sustaining the Street Life Observed through Ethnography
In this talk, Dr. Lugo will share her trajectory that started with bringing a ciclovía to Los Angeles and led her to help form the field of mobility justice. She traveled to Bogotá, Colombia in 2008 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork about the ciclovía, the basis for the international concept of open streets. On returning to Los Angeles, she co-created CicLAvia, which grafted the Colombian idea onto L.A. streets. Over the course of her ongoing fieldwork, Adonia found that the fluidity of public space she observed through ethnography was frozen not just by street design, but also by structural inequality tied to race, class, and gender. Applying these findings, she became an advocate for diversifying sustainable streets movements.

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Adonia E. Lugo started learning about “human infrastructure” (the need for diverse social networks to promote sustainable cultural transformation) through studying bicycle advocacy. In 2016, she co-created The Untokening as a core organizer. Adonia chairs the the Urban Sustainability department at Antioch University Los Angeles, supports People for Mobility Justice as an advisory board co-chair, and consults with Pueblo Planning. Her book, Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance, was published in 2018.