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Rooted in Safety, Rising in Joy: Walk Audits During ICE Raids in South Central LA

Saturday, October 3, 2026, 10:30-11:45 a.m. | APA CA Conference 2026, Los Angeles, CA

Speakers:


– Emily Ocegueda: Emerging Planner, Florence-Firestone resident, Walk + Roll Audit participant, UCI Urban Studies graduate

– Briana Villaverde: Urban Planner, Just4LA

– Alexandra Ramirez: Executive Director, Los Angeles Walks

– Jonathan Pacheco Bell, AICP: Co-President & PIO, Florence-Firestone Community Organization
 (moderator)

Session Summary (short):

How do we plan for safe streets during ICE raids? This session explores a Walk + Roll audit in Florence-Firestone in South Central LA centering joy, creativity, and safety over fear. Learn to use storytelling, reflection, and zine-making to turn walk audits into healing tools for mobility justice.

Session Summary (full):

How do we plan for safe streets when simply being in public space carries risk? In South Central LA’s Florence-Firestone community, active ICE enforcement disrupted a planned walk audit, forcing organizers and residents to reconsider not just how to assess streets, but what questions the assessment should begin with. Rather than centering the audit on traditional infrastructure deficiencies alone, Los Angeles Walks, Florence-Firestone Community Organization, the Vision Zero Artist in Residence, and community members grounded the process in a 7-Generation visioning exercise that asked: For whom are streets meant to be safe, and for what purposes?

This session shares how we restructured the Florence-Firestone Walk + Roll event to prioritize safety, community storytelling, and reflection before observation. Participants engaged in a facilitated walk that uplifted lived experiences, memory, and care – followed by a creative zine-making session that helped translate stories into shared values, priorities, and visions for safer streets. Infrastructure conditions were still observed but interpreted through a relational and cultural lens instead of a checklist.

Panelists will reflect on how this approach shifted facilitation, documentation, and outcomes, and what it revealed about safety, belonging, and accountability in communities facing surveillance and displacement. The session highlights both the possibilities and limits of vision-centered engagement in mobility planning.

Learning Objectives:

– Explore a dual “Walk and Van Ride” audit model to accommodate safety and mobility needs and ensure that seniors, undocumented residents, and other vulnerable community members can participate comfortably in analyzing and documenting neighborhood conditions.

– Learn techniques to lead walk + roll audits that empower community members to engage, reflect, and share their lived experiences with mobility issues in a safe and supportive communal environment.

– Learn how facilitated walk + roll audits can center community stories, memory, and lived experience as valid forms of planning knowledge alongside physical and technical observations.

– Identify ways to reinterpret traditional walk + roll audit findings through a community-defined lens of care, joy, and belonging.

– Recognize how vision-centered engagement can inform Vision Zero efforts by clarifying whose safety is prioritized and how community knowledge can shape problem framing within capital infrastructure and inter-agency processes.

Equity Session Statement:

This session examines how planning can adapt when immigration enforcement makes public spaces unsafe. Drawing from a Walk + Roll event in Florence-Firestone, it centers lived experience across race, immigration status, disability, language, and age. Grounded in 7-Generation visioning, storytelling, and creative documentation, we show how traditional planning tools can exclude disadvantaged communities, and how care-centered approaches can better inform safer streets and Vision Zero efforts.