Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Walk Audits During ICE Raids in South Central LA

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.

Embedded Planner Altruist Spotlight in The Fulcrum

Thank you to Kateri Gutierrez, MBA for the cathartic interview and spotlight on my trajectory advancing Embedded Planning Praxis while carefully balancing altruism, work, and life. Read more in newsletter, The Fulcrum: Work. Purpose. Balance.

https://workpurposebalance.beehiiv.com/p/your-local-altruist-the-embedded-planner

Never Give Up the Streets

In my recent guest talk, “Critical Public Space Planning: Challenges & Possibilities,” we explored this question:

Is critical public space planning practice possible?

Drawing from my life experience — coming up as a hip hop kid & graffiti writer in the 90s, starting in architecture (buildings) in high school before finding urban planning (community spaces) in college, creating the street-level praxis of Embedded Planning in Florence-Firestone (now worldwide!), working as a street-level community planner-organizer, designing equitable parks and open spaces in LA, leading community walks for 10+ years, continuing a lifelong critique of Hostile Architecture from my graffiti days to today — I argued YES.

Shout out to Professor Catherine Guentert and CPPURP urban design students for the space and debate.

I closed the guest talk with the words of the late Mike Davis in The LAnd (https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/):

“We must never cede the streets. Never give up the streets.”

Whittier College and Community Members Embrace Embedded Planning Praxis

Big thanks to Professor Cinzia Fissore, environmental science students, and the Hartley House at Whittier College for hosting my guest talk, “The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis.”

And shout out to my community members and former MURP students for coming through! It’s always reassuring to see friendly faces in the audience.

Embedded Planning Praxis is coast-to-coast and well beyond, with practitioners from Mexico and Brasil. This little idea born on the streets of Florence-Firestone in South Central LA is now a worldwide movement.

Florence-Firestone Community Walk with Architecture + Advocacy

Shout out to our friends at the nonprofit Architecture + Advocacy for joining us on a community walk in Florence-Firestone.

We embrace sharing the social history of this unincorporated community, street-level stories of urban planning and architecture, along with local struggles, challenges, and wins.

We see clear mission alignment in A+A’s design justice work, our Embedded Planning advocacy at the Florence-Firestone Community Organization, and A+A/FFCO’s shared goal of community partnerships.

More to come!

Embedded Planning Praxis Returns to Whittier College

The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis

This talk introduces a new method of urban planning called Embedded Planning Praxis. Embedded Planning revolutionizes practice by emphasizing street-level planning within the community rather than traditional desk-based methods. Developed by Jonathan Pacheco Bell in South Central LA as an outgrowth of code enforcement work, Embedded Planning has evolved into a community-based praxis that seeks to rebuild trust and foster meaningful relationships with marginalized communities historically harmed by inequitable planning.

Embedded Planning is working directly from community spaces and places. Embedded planners engage residents in everyday environments, evolving practice from desk-based policy formation to on-the-ground collaboration in and from the neighborhood. This immersive approach helps planners gain a deeper understanding of local needs and aspirations, ensuring that community voices and needs significantly shape planning decisions. Embedded Planning is a timely evolution in the field that aligns with growing calls for more equity-centered, place-based, participatory practices. By embedding themselves into neighborhoods, planners build strong and authentic relationships, moving beyond one-off, transactional consultations to create lasting and impactful partnerships.

Using a reflective practitioner framework, Jonathan will illustrate what Embedded Planning looks like, explain its role as his motivating throughline, highlight embedded planners implementing these inclusive methods coast to coast, while highlighting the challenges and benefits of this praxis. Attendees will learn how this emerging movement represents a crucial shift towards centering planning as an active and continuous process from within the community and represents the future of planning.

Embedded Planning Praxis Workshop at USC Price

Embedded Planning Praxis Workshop: From Concept to Practice in Los Angeles

This interactive workshop builds on the themes introduced in last year’s USC Price talk, “The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis.” Diving deeper, this event is a hands-on exploration of Embedded Planning Praxis itself. Designed as a participatory space, the workshop invites students to collaboratively explore how Embedded Planning can be implemented in LA’s unique contexts.

Embedded Planning calls for planners to work from spaces and places of the communities they serve, centering lived experience, co-creation, and long-term partnerships over top-down, technocratic approaches. This workshop asks: “What does it mean for planners to be embedded? How can we practice this approach in our communities? What are the challenges and possibilities?”

Participants will engage in interactive discussions and scenarios focused on local conditions and place-based strategies to apply Embedded Planning Praxis. The workshop also provides a supportive space for us to reflect on professional roles, institutional barriers, and opportunities for transformative planning practices. Whether you’re an experienced planner or new to participatory approaches, this workshop will jumpstart the development of practical steps to apply Embedded Planning in our communities.

Speaker Bio

Jonathan Pacheco Bell (@c1typlann3r) is a Los Angeles-based urban planner with two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. For 14 years, he worked on the ground as a Los Angeles County Zoning Enforcement Planner in South Central LA’s Florence-Firestone community. Witnessing the harms of inequitable zoning inspired him to create a new form of street-level planning advocacy called Embedded Planning Praxis. His street-level praxis has since become a movement spreading across the US and internationally. Today, Jonathan serves as Co-President of the nonprofit Florence-Firestone Community Organization – in the community where Embedded Planning was born.

Pipeline to Planning

Screenshot

Full circle moment at Careers, Capstones, and Conversation 2026, the annual UCLA Luskin MURP poster session.

Three students — Jordan, Diego, and Tanner — from my 2022 Pitzer College course “Community Based Planning Praxis” are now pursuing MURPs at UCLA Urban Planning, my alma mater. Mission accomplished 10X!

I’m encouraging all my fellow planners to talk up urban planning as a career every chance you get and build pipelines to planning practice.

Congrats Jordan James, Diego Tamayo, and Tanner Vandenbosch on this next chapter!

Hostile Architecture Survey

Planners + Community: Zena Al-Beitawi is doing an urban planning senior project examining how public spaces can be designed for inclusivity, safety, and enjoyment versus Hostile Architecture in Pomona, CA.

Please take a few minutes to complete Zena’s survey! Use the QR code or this link: https://bit.ly/HostileDesign2026

Your input will help shape Zena’s policy recommendations for equitable — not hostile — public spaces.

UCLA Network in Action

UCLA network in action! Jordan Grimaldi (MURP ‘26) is doing a master’s client project for City Fabrick analyzing utility right-of-ways in LA.

CF’s Alexander Jung, AICP (MURP ‘15) connected Jordan and me (MAUP ‘05) for deep background on the East 92nd Street utility right-of-way in Florence-Firestone.

Jordan interviewed me at the Florence-Firestone Community Organization office and then we visited the site, which is now the home of the future 92nd Street Linear Park via Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation!

I then connected Jordan with Yanel Sáenz (MPH ‘22) of the Friends of Washington and 92nd Street Park for additional community interviews about transforming this utility right-of-way into a park.

We will continue supporting Jordan’s community-based research and recommendations well after graduation.

Go Bruins!

Central Avenue Vacant Lot Activation on MLK Weekend in Florence-Firestone

Thanks to everyone who attended our Central Avenue Vacant Lot Activation on January 17th, MLK Weekend. Big shout out to our Second District Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell and our Assemblymember Sade Elhawary for joining us! Much love to all the vendors and performers, especially the Compton Riot dance crew from Kipp Compton Community School.

Florence-Firestone community members will decide the future of this vacant lot.

We have one more activation in February, come through.

Some images from our January 2026 activation:

Host Committee for Architecture + Advocacy’s Deconstructing Engagement: A Conversation about Community-Led Design

We’re building the future of architecture.

I’m on the Host Committee planning the February 7th annual fundraiser for the nonprofit Architecture + Advocacy. This year’s topic is: “Deconstructing “Engagement: A Conversation about Community-Led Design.”

Community leaders, architects, policymakers, developers, and all people who care about the future of our city, will explore ways community engagement can go beyond “checking a box” and empower residents as decision makers. You can look forward to:

  • Meeting other people who care about ending neighborhood inequality
  • Participating in an intergenerational discussion about community-led design
  • Eating delicious food from local chef, The Aisha Life
  • Bidding on (and maybe winning) a wine tasting, task chair, and more!
  • Listening to good tunes

Date: Saturday, Feb 7, 2026
Time: 5:00 – 8:00pm
Location: Western Office Showroom, 515 S. Figueroa Street, Suite 101 Los Angeles, CA 90071
Early Bird Tickets: $40
Early Bird ticket sales end January 22nd! After that, the price increases to $50. Get yours now! Tickets: https://architectureandadvocacy.org/en/events/p/architecture-advocacys-annual-fundraiser

Infographics designed by Julia Chen

In the Spirit of Frank Gehry

Architect Frank Gehry passed away on December 5, 2025 in Santa Monica. He was 96. I wrote about Frank Gehry’s influence on me as a 90s architecture student at East Los Angeles College and SCI-Arc.

Excerpt:

Thirty years later, Gehry’s ideas challenging form, challenging materiality, challenging function, challenging convention, challenging orthodoxy, challenging the architecture establishment, challenging one’s own profession, remain with me as an urban planner.

Gehry was a driving inspiration in my early development. I’m taking time to reflect on his impact and work. Meantime, check out my 1996 three bedroom residence designed in the spirit of Frank Gehry.