Schools in Los Angeles are getting lots of attention lately. You might have heard of Steve Barr, a sort of educational desperado, whose Green Dot Schools wrested away several poorly-performing schools from the Los Angeles Unified School District and transformed them into educational powerhouses. But what Barr did for these communities is far more than that. He brought these schools back to life inside extremely well-designed buildings, often in empty warehouses and abandoned lots that sat like black holes in low-income neighborhoods. Barr has proved what educators and architects consistently try to demonstrate: Creating a safe, sustainable environment for students in a building that becomes a landmark in their own neighborhood is critical to learning.

There are other smart examples in Los Angeles. Inner-City Arts (above), designed by Michael Maltzan, is like a lighthouse in L.A.’s Skid Row, its angled walls as white as an eggshell in a rough neighborhood. The Camino Nuevo schools, a series of charter properties sprinkled around a neighborhood west of downtown, used the skills of architects Daly Genik to gracefully squeeze classrooms into whatever spaces were available—including, remarkably, a wasted sliver of space between two major thoroughfares. Of course, the reaction to a new, architecturally-significant school is not always positive: A performing arts school in downtown Los Angeles designed by Coop Himmelblau with what looks like a Monsoon Lagoon-worthy waterslide attached to it has been derided as a multi-million dollar boondoggle for the city. Even though the kids inside say they like going to school there.

For each of these schools, the fact that they’re housed in the shiniest new building on the block, or a warehouse that used to host drug transactions, makes a new connection to the neighborhood that changes the way students think about their education. But the not-yet-complete Central Los Angeles Learning Center No. 1, on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown, will have to work a lot harder.

In 2006, after much resistance from preservationists, the Ambassador Hotel, a 1921 building designed by Myron Hunt, was torn down. The building was famous for many reasons besides its stately Spanish-style looks: It held a coffee shop designed by Paul Williams, one of L.A.’s first African American architects; it was host of several Academy Awards ceremonies; it was home of the legendary playground for Hollywood glitterati, the nightclub The Cocoanut Grove. But it was also a place with extreme historic significance: In 1968, after delivering a speech in the hotel’s ballroom, Robert Kennedy Jr. was assassinated there. After decades of neglect, LAUSD gained control of the property, which it planned to demolish and turn into a school. Although many groups, including the LA Conservancy waged a long, emotional battle headed by its board member Diane Keaton (she delivered a eulogy at the building’s “wake”), the building was deemed unfit for preservation. The architecture fans howled. But in a neighborhood where thousands of students were being bused elsewhere every day, there was no disagreement from anyone that there was great need for a school.

The architects at Gonzalez Goodale were awarded what was probably their toughest project to date. When I visited the construction site recently with one of the project’s architects, Harry Drake, he acknowledged the challenge. Using the footprint of the original building, they designed a new plan for the site that would acknowledge the form and history of the hotel but deliver a more healthy, environmentally-friendly learning environment. “We’ve taken the elements of the original design and added more sustainable, substantial materials,” he says. And they were able to take many of the historic elements of the structure and give them appropriate educational context.

The Cocoanut Grove, renowned for its opulent Moorish-style interiors and curved roof, will become an auditorium with public programming.

The Paul Williams coffee shop, with its entrance shown here, will be preserved in its 1968 state and turned into a faculty lounge. Coincidentally, Drake told me, this area was the most difficult to restore because of all the films which had been shot here: So many set designers had added their own “period details” that it was hard to tell what was original and what was not. (See: Bobby.)

And what was once the ballroom, with a soaring arched ceiling and cut-out windows, was redesigned using Hunt’s original drawings, and is just as stunning in the context of contemporary architecture. This will be a library and center for social justice, with history about the hotel and many of Kennedy’s papers, speeches, and artifacts.

Since the hotel’s walls were essentially concrete made with beach sand, this is the only one that will remain (reinforced, of course) but many of the building’s original fixtures and windows will return to the structure. Also the hotel’s famous palm trees will be returned as well.

More features will increase interactivity with the community. The school’s pool will be open to the public in the summer. And a park will open the Ambassador’s front lawn onto the street for the first time, welcoming people onto the property where they can reflect among Kennedy’s words and images (the neighborhood is also park-deprived).

Although the school won’t open until next year, the elementary school immediately adjacent, serving K-5, opened in September. It is situated in line with the Ambassador’s strong north-south backbone, and is just downhill from the high school, so kids here can literally look up to their upperclassmen. It’s a bright, graphically-exciting place, with public artworks that acknowledge the Ambassador’s tile patterns from the former pool and a fantastic mural that chronicles the hotel’s history. As we wandered through the gates toward the school’s entrance as school let out, dodging soccer balls and scooters, I was surprised to see not only hundreds of screeching kids, but adults. Dozens and dozens of parents had walked to the school to pick up their kids, and were now gathered here doling out after-school snacks, using the courtyard as a type of public park. “We used to dismiss the students out onto the street but now I just let them all come in,” the principal said to us as she showed us the library. “Sometimes we can’t get them to leave.”

The saga of the Ambassador is still too tender a subject to broach with some preservationists I know. Keaton recently penned a beautiful essay for the Los Angeles Times about how the loss still stings—two years later. No one wanted the building to go; it’s a situation where no one could have won. But I wish that at least some of the people who are still angry about it could see what I saw at the school that day. What was once a landmark due to its exclusivity is going to be a landmark because of its inclusiveness: a place designed to be far more appropriate (and safer) for the people who will use it now, yet hopefully capturing all the importance of what came before. Whether its students truly appreciate that context remains to be seen, but one fact is certain after seeing the families congregating in the K-5 courtyard: It’s somewhere they want to be. That’s something any school could hope for.

Photos courtesy of Inner-City Arts, Michael Maltzan; Ambassador Hotel postcard, lagenealogy.com; Renderings, Gonzalez Goodale; K-5 photo, Tim Street-Porter.

The neighborhood in question is Greenwich South. Never heard of it? That’s because it doesn’t really exist—yet. Greenwich South is a campaign mounted by the Alliance for Downtown New York, re-claiming 41 acres of land between Battery Park City and the Financial District. At its center is Greenwich Street, severed by construction of the World Trade Center in the 1960s. With the plan for the new World Trade Center site development, Greenwich will again run uninterrupted through the quickly-changing area, with a chance to be the spine of a high-density, highly-desirable center for living and working. A September study revealed “Lower Manhattan is emerging as a model for the 21st century business district, and … Greenwich South can play a greater role in this transformation.” So the Downtown Alliance wants to declare South Greenwich Street as the Main Street of a brand-new neighborhood.

As part of the Downtown Alliance’s campaign, 10 architectural firms were tapped to give their interpretations of what Greenwich South might look like. The ideas range from the totally do-able to the just plain zany. (Just the kind of urban speculation we like to see at our GOOD Design events.) Morphosis re-envisioned the entire southern tip of Manhattan (above) as a sustainable “Battery North.” WORKac’s “plug-in” tower, a mixed-use, cantilevered structure, would have rows of brownstones six stories in the air. (If you think either of those is a tall order, consider that New York has managed to physically create a nearby neighborhood out of thin air: nearby Battery Park City was built on fill created by excavation of the original World Trade Center site.)

A few firms specifically wanted to tackle the six-acre hole of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, a gaping scar across Greenwich South. Architecture Research Office wants a public market, park, and recycling center over the tunnel approach. Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis and Transolar Climate Engineering (above) want to build a vertical park over the tunnel’s entrance that cleans and filters the air emitted from the cars entering it. And for reasons that aren’t quite clear, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer wants to use the space to project images of a sun onto a 30-meter meteorological balloon (to remind us that global warming is closer than we think?).

The ideas are meant to encourage conversation, so the Downtown Alliance have placed an installation in a park on Broadway (designed by OPEN, founding creative directors of GOOD) where people can lunch among the renderings, and even pick up a 14-page broadsheet booklet of the plan from a small window on the site (you can download the PDF online). It’s good community outreach, for sure, and for each flashy rendering, there are several actions listed which the area can take now. Like before the floating sun-balloon is complete, for example, the neighborhood could place some public art on Rector Street or create a temporary gallery in a storefront.

The two major objectives highlighted by the initiative, shared by any neighborhood hoping to attract economic development, were simple: “To come and to stay.” I spent a lot of time in the area during my visit to New York, and I can say the people are already coming—the flow of tourists who, for now, solemnly march a slow path around a construction site, will never cease. The whoosh of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the clanging of construction, the influx of corporations moving to the area; it all buzzes with possibility. After all, how many major metropolitan areas get a chance to rebuild themselves? To start over, smarter?

But will they stay? And what will make Greenwich South—and its lofty ideas—stick? Asking the people who live and work there to help with some of the initiatives might be a start (call them community organizers, if you will). Making a commitment to transform the area into the world’s premier green business district is another. The campaign itself is the first step in helping the neighborhood become earnestly rebranded. I say expand it, with more ideas from designers, artists and architects exhibited as public art. And more great signage just might do the trick.

But what emotional connection will these people have to a neighborhood name that was chosen for them? SoHo, to its credit, was picked by the artists themselves who inhabited the low-rent cast-iron buildings. So in the spirit of economic revitalization and responsible development, I’m suggesting an even more appropriate and marketable abbreviation for the wannabe hood and its super-sustainable aspirations: SoGreen.

This was the fourth GOOD Design event we’ve held and I have to say, they just keep getting better. This one positively sparkled with excitement and possibility. “Programs like GOOD Design San Francisco advocate for good, quality design in the best possible way,” Erin Cullerton, assistant director of AIA SF told me. “By creating an ideas-generating space for designers and civic leaders to come together, the program allowed for the precise collective sharing of talents and expertise that will be necessary to rethink the future of our cities.” We couldn’t agree more. Here’s a quick recap of all six presentations and some more thoughts from the organizers.

E.B. Min of architecture firm Min Day kicked off the evening with a challenge filed by Monique Moyer from the Port of San Francisco. The flat, boundary-less paths along the city’s Embarcadero are not ideal for sharing when it comes to the various recreants moving at different speeds, including bikers, walkers, runners, skateboarders, and rollerbladers. The task was not only to make recreational movement safer along the waterfronts, but to improve the relationship with the water. Min hoped their design could slow people down, noting that the original use of the area was a promenade, made for “promenading”—moving slowly along the water, focused on views, not exercise. In this light, the freeway-like space would be divided up into colorful and iconic “lanes” for different speeds of motion. But the best part was the addition of all sorts of objects of interest that would slow people down as well, like planters with interesting flora, large benches, and these really fun, oversized speed humps that could double as play areas for kids. Moyer said that the very first goal for the space—safety—could definitely be addressed with the lanes and color-coding.

Surface Design’s landscape architects James Lord, Roderick Wyllie, and Geoff di Girolamo tackled a part of the waterfront that bordered Min Day’s challenge zone, the exteriors of the Ferry Building. The problem, submitted by Chris Meany from developer Wilson Meany Sullivan, who handles the Ferry Building, was to take this often vacant pier behind the vibrant, foodie paradise and transform it into a destination that produced revenue and had a better relationship with the water. Quite the tall order. They committed to creating a 21st century “agora.” Giant planters ringing the pier would create seating and shade without blocking water views, and a brilliant concept for bringing “floating gardens” (à la Amsterdam’s flower farms) would create another level of engagement. To draw revenue to the area, kiosks would create a bustling marketplace and give a local buzz to the area, which would also be programmed with cultural events. Meany seemed to agree that the flexibility of the space was what made their proposal powerful, but he crushed our dreams of the Floating Gardens of San Francisco when he mentioned that one would be exceptionally tough to pass through the proper city channels.

Mike and Maaike—the husband and wife industrial design team Mike Simonian and Maaike Evers—took their orders from Michael Cohen at the City of San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Just the mention of their area of focus—”Broadway”—was greeted with giggles from the crowd, who were familiar with the street populated by strip clubs, adult bookstores, and, at night, lots and lots of neon. Their challenge was to reinvent the strip as a vibrant commercial corridor for the city—one that people weren’t inclined to avoid day or night. Mike and Maaike committed to making the street more fun for pedestrians, starting with bumping out the sidewalks and transforming one of the steepest side streets into a Spanish Steps-esque plaza that nodded to the area’s Little Italy. (This was a powerful idea that I could definitely see happening on San Francisco’s hills.) Another central idea was their “Signs of Good Fortune,” an installation that would run along the former waterfront border, which greeted the Gold Rush-crazy first residents of the city, all the way to Chinatown. To embrace the neighborhood’s Vegas-quality signage, the fortunes would appear in the form of giant neon signs that illuminate when stepped, biked, or driven over. These included Jack Kerouac quotes co-opted from the nearby City Lights Bookstore (like “Try not to get drunk outside yr own house”). Cohen—an admitted neon freak—loved the idea both for its cultural appropriateness and its aesthetic excitement, noting that all of it was totally doable. They reported that they’ve set up a follow-up meeting to discuss this in more detail.

Kuth Ranieri’s Byron Kuth and Liz Ranieri took a challenge submitted by Carlos Garcia of the San Francisco United School District, which was to relocate a school to the Civic Center, and changed it slightly to address the needs of all San Francisco schools. By using Willie Brown Jr. Academy, a junior high located in the Bayview neighborhood, they offered a scalable case study that could help to make schools more valuable for their neighborhoods. The designers offered a sobering array of facts about the massive scale that these schools operate on—the solid waste produced in a year could fill 166 semi trucks—and how, because of “family flight” from the city, enrollment is way, way, down: almost half of what it was in the 1960s. Adding to troubles was the school-choice system that sends students to schools far from their homes. The designers realized that the key to improving schools was to enlist community involvement. To do that, the schools needed to be more open for local residents. They began with a very basic and sustainable structure for a new school that didn’t have the bunker-like qualities typical of many schools. And they added programs like daycare, food banks, community gardens, a farmer’s market, even a dental clinic. Garcia mentioned that the schools were already very open to ideas like this (some already have dental clinics and adult education centers), but transforming a school into a highly-visible landmark like this would truly be the key.

Stamen’s Shawn Allen and his client Tim Papandreou from San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency were charged with designing a better citywide bicycle parking system. Allen described the challenge as a chicken-and-egg scenario: Cyclists need better bike parking to feel comfortable riding and leaving their bikes, but the city won’t build more until there’s more demand for it. After reviewing some current solutions (taking over one parking space makes parking for 30 bikes) and creating some maps showing where cyclists were most likely to lock up (the data crunching that Stamen is famous for), Allen concluded that more parking was needed, and lots of it. But a better solution? Devalue the bike. Make cheap, forgettable, lose-able bikes the standard, and drop a fleet of “junker bikes” into the city. Both men were cyclists—Papandreou lamented that his front wheel had been stolen recently—and they both understood how hard it was to feel good about leaving their pretty bikes strapped to a lightpost. While Papandreou acknowledged that the city was fighting hard to wrestle parking spaces from cars, he said it has been incredibly challenging. And while the MTA couldn’t approve a fleet of junker bikes, he wouldn’t be opposed to seeing a renegade art project just happen to leave a bunch on the streets of San Francisco.

Finally, Volume, Inc.’s partners Eric Heiman and Adam Brodsley gave a rousing and quite entertaining solution to a problem submitted by Zahid Sardar, author, design editor, and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. The problem, to put it simply: those freakin’ bins. Even though San Francisco has a progressive residential recycling program, the disposal system—those freakin’ bins—are based on an old trash-collecting model that doesn’t reward residents for having less waste. The solution? Not a fancier bin. How about no more waste pickup? None! Instead, the designers proposed a new system: Bin There Done That. Community recycling, composting, and minimal waste collection would be done at sites within walking distance to residents, who will get credits-per-pound of compost, and lose points per pounds of trash. To further cut down on waste, each resident would get a kit of reusable bottles and containers they could take to the store, and the city would give incentives to stores who cut out packaging in favor of these refillable alternatives. This proposal turned the whole trash paradigm on its ear, as the room nodded, imagining a city more responsible and accountable for its actions, where recycling and composting almost became a game.

As the Q&A ended and attendees filtered out into the lobby for wine and more conversation, there was a strong buzz in the room. “The fact that all of the designers respun these ‘problems’ into opportunities speaks to their industrious nature—where every example of how something’s been done before is only a chance to do it better,” said Julie Kim, SPUR’s public engagement director. “And I think the city leaders all showed great enthusiasm, even for the ideas that were wacky and out there—in a good way. It’s good to help break down that public perception that city leaders are resistant to new ideas.”

The biggest question for designers and attendees was how to keep this momentum going, and this was one place where the city leaders had the answer: Get involved. Go to meetings and hearings sponsored by groups like the school district and MTA, meet your city council members, find those grassroots causes that need help and then use your skills as designers to bring them to the city’s attention by making them accessible, understandable, and shareable for the public, which is certainly what the design teams did for the enthusiastic audience here. We can’t wait to follow the progress of these six fruitful collaborations, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted.

More coverage of GOOD Design SF at Fast Company, Curbed SF, Inhabitat, and Planning 4 Change.

Although we tend to focus on the automotive pursuits on the eastern side of the Lower Peninsula, Western Michigan has a long history of art and design. Over here, the Big Three are Steelcase, Haworth, and Herman Miller, the sustainably-focused furniture companies. Artist communities like Saugatuck and Grand Haven cluster along the shores of Lake Michigan. Grand Rapids itself—the second-largest city in the state—is lush with grassy public spaces, airy blond wood coffeeshops, and restaurants in restored Victorian structures serving local craft beers. It’s also the home of the first LEED Gold-certified art museum designed by wHY Architecture, a public plaza by Maya Lin, and the first federally-funded work of public art installed in a city, Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse, whose abstract likeness represents the logo for ArtPrize.

In fact, it’s that legacy (the sculpture celebrates its 40th anniversary this year)—not the down-at-the-mouth news from Detroit—that prompted visionary Rick DeVos, the soft-spoken Grand Rapids native, and 27-year-old heir of the Amway founders, to introduce the concept. Earlier in 2009, DeVos imagined an “explosion of creativity” across the city, where artists and designers could engage with the community. “We wanted it to be so distributed that we would own as little as possible,” DeVos told me, seated in the clubby bar of the Amway Grand Plaza, a hotel his grandfather had helped renovate and expand in the 1970s. ArtPrize’s official launch was in April, and it was almost as open and inclusive as DeVos envisioned: 1,700 artists applied, and 1,262 were matched with 159 venues in five downtown neighborhoods. After a week of voting thumbs up or thumbs down to each piece, the top 10 will be announced, and voters can cast their picks exclusively for those, with the winner announced October 9. Yes, the most money ever doled out to an artist in prize money will be picked by the people.

The real-life, visual artist-version of American Idol that includes the voices of more than 7,000 registered voters—online or by text message, and there’s also a fantastic iPhone app—comes from DeVos’ erstwhile pursuits. He founded the movie review site Spout, one of the first genre-focused social networks, with Bill Holsinger-Robinson, another web entrepreneur who is serving as executive director of ArtPrize. They believe the true value of the event is in the connections that are made between artist, venue, and voter, whether in real life or via, say, Facebook. “This can kickstart entrepreneurship in the area,” said Holsinger-Robinson. “Every venue has a vested stake in the artists they’re hosting. They become a community in and of themselves.”

That’s not always the case with other art festivals like the Venice Biennale with its more than 70 pavilions from different countries trampling the city every two years, or Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, the sprawling rural site of the largest outdoor art festival, with 350 artists. Never has there been a citywide exhibition this large—and this uncurated. ArtPrize allowed the venues to select their own artists, and invited five commentators to stroll the city, offering their opinions. One of them, Peter Murray, said that in his role as director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the U.K., he has always looked to make art more accessible to the public, but thought this move was above and beyond. “As soon as you put art outside the gallery walls, it’s a risky business,” he told me at the JW Marriott, overlooking the smooth spill of the Grand River. “Not having it curated is even bolder.” Still, Murray sensed a “real buzz in the air” and was excited to see how the experiment worked—and how his peers would react. “It will make the art world sit up,” he said, smiling. “It will confuse the art world.”

There are a few big names—Eames Demetrios’ Kcymaerxthaere work is installed at Kendall College of Art & Design—and about half of the artists are from Michigan. The quality is uneven at best. But everything seemed to have landed in the right place. The impressionistic paintings of kids on a beach were tucked into conservative corners of a bank, a parking lot hosted an environmentally-focused Richard Serra-esque fort of compacted plastic bottles, the large contemporary museum in town found a massive balloon-animal installation to confound and delight its guests. The bridge into town was set with a giant table and chairs; a Calder-esque mobile twirled on an island in the river. (A toilet-on-wheels didn’t seem to have a home but instead roamed the streets, proclaiming he was both “#1 and #2.”)

But it all fit somewhere, and if audiences didn’t immediately find a piece they connected with, they’d soon be aided by a barrage of marketing materials pushed by the artists and their street teams. Giovanni Arce planned to promote his painted toilet-paper roll mural depicting George Bush by giving away toilet paper rolls wrapped with tissue-sized $10,000 bills, to represent the amount of money he’d give back to local art charities. “I’m in it to win it,” he grinned as he readied his display inside the BOB (Big Old Building), a converted warehouse glutted with ArtPrize entries.

After the official launch event (adjacent to yet another building funded by DeVos’ family), groups flooded out into the suddenly sunny evening, dispersing according to routes they had plotted on maps. As I elbowed into the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts for one of the opening parties I wondered what would happen to all these pieces when it was over. One could hope that everything would be snapped up by patrons or dealers—effectively funding the local creative class—or that the artists could donate larger works to the city permanently. The lasting effects won’t be known for a few months, but you could equate the impact of ArtPrize on the community to a large non-profit setting up shop in the area: There was a sense of volunteerism and civic pride, coupled with some pretty high-tech training—more than 1,000 people had offered to work for free, in some cases setting up email addresses for older residents, and teaching people how to use things like Twitter.

Later as I ate dinner (including a locally-produced rosé, in a LEED-certified restaurant), I listened to ArtPrize conversations buzzing around me. I realized that for the next two weeks Grand Rapids would essentially be host to a large-scale scavenger hunt. Find this artist, climb inside this venue, poke into dark corners, visit a new neighborhood, campaign on behalf of your favorite artist, debate a piece’s value with your friends, make a decision, and move on to the next one, as quickly as you can. It’s like a massive multi-player, explore-your-city game, and these people were taking it extremely seriously. In that spirit, I’d also like to see a prize go to whoever votes on the most pieces: The challenge to see and pass judgment on all 1262 artworks is a potentially daunting and thrilling task—will anyone achieve it? And what perspective will that person gain from the experience?

I’ll be interested to see who takes home the cool quarter-million as well. But the real winner, of course, is Grand Rapids.

More photos from ArtPrize can be found here.

Luckily, at one moment during that stratospheric trajectory, Pilloton was approached by Metropolis to write a book about socially-impactful design. Again, working at the accelerated pace at which Pilloton’s brain seems to be exclusively programmed, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People was written in 90 days, and designed in a few more by Scott Stowell, the founding design director of GOOD, and his team at Open (so needless to say, we love the way it looks). This book functions as a guidebook to Pilloton’s thought process over the last several years, and you can almost watch her wrestle in real-time with the complicated and intertwined issues of sustainability, cultural appropriateness, materials, functionality, and designer responsibility. You can also see how her approach inspires designers to rally around her: It’s uplifting but honest; she even addresses criticism of some of the 115 products within.

For readers of GOOD, avid viewers of TED videos, or fans of exhibitions like the Cooper-Hewitt’s Design for the Other 90%, many of the products and initiatives featured in the book will be extremely familiar to you. But Pilloton’s focus isn’t really on the slick, cutting-edge design that has always looked a little odd as it’s held up by residents of developing nations. Sure, projects that have gotten plenty of that kind of attention like the One Laptop Per Child and the Lifestraw are here—and we learn the terminology behind them like leapfrogging (introducing technology to developing cultures) and appro-tech (using appropriate local methods for manufacturing). But for each foundation-sponsored project with millions of research dollars thrown at it, there’s the $10 solution as well (and each entry does include its price). These basic ideas can often be as minimal as the coat of paint proposed by Publicolor (pictured above), a program that works with students in New York City schools to revitalize their educational environments. Or tape imprinted with soccer ball-graphics that can be rolled into a ball, a high-impact idea for youth who will never have access to a the leather version. Or the creative reuse of an everyday object, like Denver’s Donation Meter Program that allows people to donate money to homeless programs right on the street.

Design Revolution shines at showing the beauty of these achingly simple solutions. My favorite products in the book are the scrappy concepts like a DIY clay water filter, or a recipe for biodiesel. There are resources for making your own rainwater catchment systems with developing world ideas that are so good, they could inspire an American homeowner to hack his own gutters. These entries list only the materials you need, with some background and a brief tutorial. For some entries, like the give-and-take network Freecycle, the concept is so simple you have to wonder if it even counts as product… or even design?

But that’s the point. What Pilloton is doing here is not creating another beautiful showcase of objects. She’s doing exactly what she talks about in her introduction: Taking the product out of product design. It’s about time someone did.

This being Pilloton, the story does not end there, and the book itself is functioning as one of those simple ideas optimized for maximum impact. She wanted a way to bring the book and its message to design schools—the very place Pilloton wished that she had known this kind of designing was possible. So she sourced a 1972 Airstream trailer and she began curating a mobile exhibit of products in the book, which she plans to take to cities nationwide. Pulling the trailer will be a 1996 F250 Ford diesel truck which we can only guess will be powered by the book’s DIY biodiesel. (Although Pilloton is in the market for a backup, seeing as the truck already has 250,000 miles on it; if you’ve got a diesel truck sitting in your driveway, you might consider sending it her way.)

With generous funding from Adobe and a grant from paper company Sappi’s Ideas That Matter, her team is building out the Airstream (currently scraping the 38-year-old paint off it), and booking slots with schools. The Design Revolution Road Show officially kicks off with a book release event in San Francisco on October 1. Last week, Pilloton was announced as a Social Innovation Fellow for the conference PopTech, so look for her there in October as well. Then the exhibition-on-wheels will begin rolling around the country in February, hitting 22 schools. The tour will also include a week in North Carolina where the team will pause to work with the Bertie Public Schools, where Pilloton’s Project H built a series of educational playgrounds made of repurposed tires called Learning Landscapes. An ongoing collaboration with an extremely design-savvy superintendent will likely be a more permanent home for Project H’s first design-build program, starting with a computer center they completed for the schools this month.

“I believe that design is problem solving with grace and foresight,” Pilloton begins her introduction in Design Revolution. The design world has spent the last few years realigning to a version of this statement, but it needed a new voice that could reframe it for us without preaching, without precedence, but with a renewed sense of urgency. This book—this movement—works because Emily Pilloton is out in the field, solving problems with grace and foresight, and enthusiastically encouraging others to do the same. Towards the beginning of the book you’ll find the Designer’s Handshake, a hot pink, two-page, 13-point pledge for designers you’re instructed to sign and mail back to her. You could do that, but the language is so smart, so inspiring, so appropriate—for any industry, mind you—it’s a real shame to have to send it away. I recommend fashioning it into some kind of flag that flies over your desk. After all, this is nothing less than a revolution.

Last week, as I visited the dozen or so of my friends who have recently relocated there (some without jobs themselves), I did not, as you may think, have to step over piles of out-of-work hipsters. Portland is an outpost of high-tech entrepreneurship nestled firmly in the Silicon Forest, and these highly-educated people are already finding innovative ways to make money. But like other “youth magnet” cities (Austin, Charlotte, Seattle), they’re less likely to go to work at an office. As I strolled the city from meeting to meeting, I realized that out of necessity, Portland is quickly finding the answers to a much greater issue that’s going to affect an increasingly freelance workforce across the country: Where are all these people going to work?

Ziba Design is a design firm headquartered in Portland that stands to benefit from the influx of talent. “We always have a [lot] of interest from around the world, but over the last few years we have begun to see more local talent interested in working at Ziba,” says executive creative director Steve McCallion. “The quality of this talent seems to have increased.” McCallion attributes the pilgrimage to Portland’s personality. “Portland’s DNA is based on collaboration, creativity, and independence. This has manifested itself into a thriving DIY creative culture making everything from craft beers, to micro-roasters, to handmade bikes.” Being a good corporate citizen is also important to the city’s residents. “The young creative class is interested in working for companies that have strong values and are rooted in doing good for the community.” So when the 25-year-old company recently built a new headquarters in the Pearl District, a quickly-gentrifying part of downtown known for housing many of the city’s creative firms, they made several decisions that go against the sealed-bunker mentality of design firms often working under strict NDAs: They opened the building up to the local community.

Ground floor retail rings the building and a “pocket gallery” create cultural opportunities for the neighborhood. A huge 200-seat auditorium will host public programming and be available for nonprofits to use free of charge. Ziba is even renting office space within the building and allowing their tenants to share their amenities—again, radical for a company that practically requires a retinal scan to enter. Besides the fact that supplemental rent helps keep their own business afloat, the reasons for all these things were clear to Ziba:  The more they can have those serendipitous interactions with people outside the firm, the stronger it will be. “The emerging practice of open source design means that creative firms must get better at co-creation and collaboration,” says McCallion. “The creative class is looking for diversity not just in their city, but in the workplace as well. Opening up to the community increases diversity.”

Co-working, an option that’s growing in popularity across the country, is obviously big in Portland. Much has been made about the closing of CubeSpace, a popular co-working spot that closed in June. Other co-working spaces like Souk or an innovative live/work space Leftbank Project provide good options, but a far more interesting model is one pioneered by ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, whose office is a few blocks from Ziba’s in the Pearl. When a retail tenant on the ground floor of their headquarters (a former cold storage warehouse) moved out, W+K turned over the stripped, industrial space to a group of designers, developers, and tech entrepreneurs as the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). The group uses the space for free (W+K tossed in furniture from elsewhere in the building) in return for serving as ambassadors to the local tech community, which helps W+K—a traditional ad agency—make inroads to that industry. Those chosen for PIE include creators of the popular site Bac’n and the makers of Unthirsty—providing online happy hour listings worldwide. When I was there, I met Rick Turoczy, author of the blog Silicon Florist, and Darin Richardson, a web designer and developer. The group plans to hold tech events, and they’re already enjoying weekly Thursday suppers family-style (and one time they did, indeed, have pie).

“There are a lot of spaces in Portland, but it’s hard to get cool office space,” says Richardson, “And cool costs more money.” And not even cool guarantees that creatives will be looking over the shoulders of their peers working on like-minded projects, or sometimes, pitching in to help, as has happened at PIE. Richardson described how several members tag-teamed the development and design of Urban Airship, a new mobile app spearheaded another PIE member. He was amazed at how fast ideas disseminated, and how quickly they got the project finished. “If I was in my office or a co-working space, that wouldn’t have happened.” W+K is hoping some of those ideas float all the way into the agency: Someone from W+K could walk downstairs and tap PIE to help with a project they’re working on; conversely, a piece of PIE could present a good idea for a product or service to a W+K team member for one of their clients. Wandering the Pearl afterward, I noticed how many retail spaces were vacant in an area. Creatives often can operate in a bare-bones environment—”we walked in with our computers,” says Richardson. Why not let creatives set up shop until a new tenant moves in? Who knows, the cushion might give them enough of a springboard to start renting the space themselves.

Over the Willamette River, in the Hollywood District, I saw an even more innovative solution for those who need affordable space and a sense of community, but might need just a smidge of privacy. 3800 Business Center is a converted motel (complete with appropriately Googie signage) that now houses everything from creative firms and production companies to lawyers and chiropractors. The developers played upon the parts of the motel’s functionality that now work perfectly as an office park (private entrances to each room, and plenty of parking), stripped the rooms to the bones (sorry, no beds for naps), and added bright landscaping and solar panels to the roof. Insert your “renting by the hour” jokes now, but that’s not a bad idea, either.

A converted motel room runs pretty cheap (less than $500 per month) and is perfectly sized for one to two people. Tommy Spann, who works remotely for Convio, a software company for nonprofits, looked at several spaces before deciding on this one. Although it was a bit more basic, it was affordable and in a bustling area—and it allowed him to have a real office. “I’m not a hermit, but I like the work privacy,” says Spann. “I’m on the phone a lot and pace when I talk. I like having my own place.” Also a plus: Having your own bathroom (although the showers are plugged for the time being).

In my neighborhood in Los Angeles, which is filled with creatives who crowd the coffee shops by day, there are also at least a dozen crumbling motels. Artists and creatives generally move to areas like this that are at the leading edge of gentrification, meaning hotel rooms once hosting illicit activities are now hosting generally less illicit activities; but it’s not quite time for a W Hotel to take over. Creatives occupying a seedy motel would transform a blight into a cultural hub for the neighborhood, while giving important members of the community the space to expand and focus their work. Of course, the real benefit down here is that your office would come with the use of a sparkling blue pool.

Ziba photos by Stephen A. Miller; 3800 photos by Tommy Spann.

I’d been to a dozen events just like this in L.A. Even if it’s a room full of transit advocates who all arrived by bus, everyone has their own vision for fixing L.A.’s immobility issues. It’s nearly impossible, even for the most articulate of us, to communicate what we think should be done without dissolving into a red-faced mass of well-meaning do-gooders. It’s an emotional topic! But this event was different. After the panel ended, one of the panelists, James Rojas, led the audience to the rear of the room, where everyone gathered around what looked like a table covered with Toys R Us stockroom rejects. We were going to build our own L.A. transit systems. Every single one of us.

James Rojas is a nearly ubiquitous figure in Los Angeles. He’s an artist who founded Gallery 727 in the downtown Arts District. He is an urban planner and a founder of the Latino Urban Forum, which gives the Latino population a voice in city planing issues. He also works at Metro, L.A.’s design-centric transportation authority, where he funds transit improvement projects like medians and crosswalks. But his favorite thing to do is stick a dozen wooden blocks, a plastic alligator, some empty hotel shampoo bottles and a few rogue Legos into the hands of anyone who will listen, and tell them to redesign their own neighborhood.

“Many planning meetings are boring, contentious, and fail to stir people’s creative energy,” says Rojas. Even though planners consistently work closely with groups of constituents, they’re stuck with the kinds of tools they like to use: maps, words and pictures. Well, not everyone can understand a complex map. Other people are uncomfortable writing. And even the physical tools—Post-It notes, simple blocks, whiteboards—that planners use during charrettes do nothing to get the imagination pumping.

“My process gives the public the power to create,” says Rojas. ”Giving people small interesting objects sparks their interest. Creating a 3-dimensional world with 3-dimensional forms breaks down the planning process into simple terms and helps participants translate conceptual planning ideas into physical forms.” Additionally, Rojas gives power to groups that might be disenfranchised by the typical neighborhood council meeting. “People who do not speak English or are shy are at a further disadvantage,” he says. “Through the interactive map and model, urban planning becomes a fun, interesting game.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like many of us, Rojas has been building his own cities since he was a kid, but didn’t see a way to merge this interest with his 20 years of urban planning experience until recently. He took a class at local art school powerhouse Art Center College of Design, where professor Doreen Nelson was using model-making as a way to teach children. “I though why don’t I use it for city planning!” he says. ”Her class was very informative in helping develop my workshop process.” In the last few years, Rojas has taken his workshop all over L.A. and even to neighborhoods form Florida to Massachusetts, tackling issues from bike lanes to street vendors.

Perhaps most interesting about Rojas’s approach is that it makes you think about cities in a different way—creatively. ”Art and design taps people’s creative energy to solve problems,” says Rojas. “Every human being uses design or thinking to solve problems in their daily life, from combing your hair to designing rocket ships. In this process I have developed, design becomes a product of thinking about the built environment.”

I admit, even someone like me, who supposedly thinks about this kind of stuff everyday, was rather transformed by the whole experience. I had never been asked to envision my ideal transit system, just dutifully used the one we had.

I realized immediately that like other landmarks in L.A., if the trains or buses were the most spectacularly beautiful, high-tech, cutting-edge objects in the city, that other people would want to ride them, too. I paved my transit lines with a handful of rhinestone-encrusted gold buttons I poked through the pile to find. And I also wanted riders to feel appreciated—especially those who didn’t have a choice. So at every stop, I created Love Platforms out of tiny foam cut-out hearts, where great music would be playing and free food would be passed out to those getting on and off the buses and trains. It was my little slice of mobility utopia. And you know what? Since I’ve built it, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about how to make it happen.

Now, where are we going to get that many giant rhinestone-encrusted gold buttons?

Thirty years ago, Vance Corum was one of the founders of the first authorized farmers’ market in California, which opened in Gardena in 1979. The weekly, open-air market became a model for farmers’ markets across the state and rippled inland. “Farmers’ markets are coming of age. Customers want beautiful, abundant marketplaces and farmers need large crowds of people,” he says. “Farmers have plenty of production; the challenge is for us to create strong markets in cities and towns across America that recreate and improve upon the local food systems of the past.” But to serve those crowds, the traditional market is begging for innovation at every stage, from pieces that can aid the loading, packing, and transporting of foods, as well as the vending systems, which Corum says farmers have been ingeniously building themselves. “What would be especially valuable is a compact, easy to assemble, interlocking table and display system that is flexible, strong and rigid to show off two or three tiers of product on a slant.”

Due to the locations and accessibility of farmers’ markets, fresh fruits and vegetables aren’t always reaching the often-underserved communities who most need affordable, healthy produce. Mobile produce vehicles are finding their ways into cities as a cheap and efficient way to bring produce to the people. The Greener Grocer’s Veggie Van delivers its wares on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, and is equipped with technology to accept credit cards and EBT credit, the electronic equivalent of food stamps. Small business advocates Mercy Corps worked with the branding agency Saatchi & Saatchi helped to design food carts in Jakarta to help vendors make healthy snacks as attractive as ice cream trucks. And there are many farm-to-school programs like the one in Santa Monica, California where the public school district has bought farmers’ market produce for their salad bars for 11 years. Corum says even kids really do know the difference: “When really fresh farmers’ market produce was substituted for produce from the wholesale terminal, the number of kids choosing the salad bar quintupled from eight percent to forty percent.”

Even if farmers can get their produce to a local, temporary market they’re still selling at smaller scales—farmers’ markets themselves only move about 1% of the food consumed in the United States—and their audience is mostly single families and chefs for smaller restaurants. Websites like Foodzie—an online farmers market where small food producers and growers can sell their product—might help, but for farmers who want to move larger quantities of produce, getting local tomatoes made into local tomato sauce, for example, is extremely difficult. “Currently the potential supply of local food is restricted by an economically monolithic system of production, processing and distribution,” says Vanessa Zajfen, program manager for The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. So, especially for large metropolitan areas, there’s the need for a “hub,” or terminal, for local farmers to deliver, distribute and process their produce.

“We need market designs that will provide year-round direct marketing opportunities for farmers and create vibrant public spaces with food at its core,” says Zajfen, who points to a space like the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona, Spain, which received a beautiful renovation and shimmery ceramic roof by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue in 2005. The Barcelona market functions as not only a wholesale terminal, but a beloved retail and dining destination where local food is processed into delectable tapas served under the same roof. “This is the oldest market in Barcelona; it was opened in 1848,” she says. “Its modern redesign has kept this market relevant and functional.” (For more innovative permanent market designs, see Peter Smith’s story on GOOD: “The Public Market Renaissance.”)

A contemporary answer to Barcelona’s example might be the New City Market, a concept by Vancouver-based citylab, that will create a 21,000 sq. ft. year-round indoor-outdoor farmers market, wholesale food distribution, commercial processing facility, business development, local food advocacy and, conference space, and will also push the form when it comes to sustainability. A market like this could be at the center of a sustainable food policy for a city, like the one recently unveiled in San Francisco. Instead of the traditional farmers’ market channel, farmers would have multiple options to sell to consumers, says Zafjen. “A shift in our system of food delivery to an increased variety of direct marketing methods would be an important step in the development of a sustainable regional food system.”

Of course, another option is bringing those rural farms closer to the people. Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farms concepts, towering skyscraper greenhouses in high-density areas, and the The Science Barge (above), a floating sustainable farm in New York, are both non-traditional ways that family farmers could produce and deliver their food to growing city populations. And there are hundreds of outdoor classrooms across the country that bring food production right into schools, the most famous being Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California. These teaching gardens tap the engaged expertise of community chefs, producing local food that can be given back or sold to neighborhood restaurants. And they might even be recruiting a few future farmers along the way.

Can you design a better way to bring locally-produced food to urban residents? Enter our Redesign Your Farmers’ Market contest by September 1.

Arkitip has always striven to make its limited-edition magazines affordable, according to founder and creative director Scott A. Sant’ Angelo, but newsprint offered even more room to play. “This price-point encouraged us to experiment with a few new ideas, and the inherent imperfection of this method of reproduction yielded all sorts of happy surprises,” he says. “Working with printers whose experience has mostly been with local news publications and supermarket mailers also put our design and layout sensibilities through an entirely different filter.” It also gave each contributor a platform to prove that high-gloss is not always necessary for viewing high-quality work. “By putting a quality publication that’s printed on newsprint in the hands of our customers and on the shelves of our stock lists, we hope we’re helping to legitimize the format as a medium for art publications.”  (Kyle Blue turned his spread into a public art map of San Francisco, below.)

But throughout the process, Sant’ Angelo was surprised to learn much, much more about the magical medium—and the industry that drives it. “Over the last 20 years, newspaper publishers have largely taken it upon themselves to environmentally optimize their production lines with the installation of de-inking equipment to paper machines and drastic increases in the levels of recycled fiber used,” he says. “We knew that newspaper is one of the most efficiently recycled materials, but were surprised to find out that it’s often more economical and environmental to recycle it into other products such as cereal boxes, egg cartons, and grocery bags than to ship it out-of-state to distant mills for recycle into new newsprint.” Suddenly a publication printed on newsprint, by a local press, makes much more of a statement that just what’s printed upon it.

Newspapers as an industry may be in decline, but the newspaper as a form is being seized with delight by new generation of designers. In 2008, the “post-digital” collective Really Interesting Group tickled the blogosphere by collecting online stories and images and publishing them as Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008. It wasn’t a statement about the languishing newspaper industry, in fact, it was quite the opposite. “Blogs aren’t killing journalism,” says co-creator Ben Terrett. “That’s just a false comparison, like saying radio’s killing comedy. Blogs, like newspapers, are a tool, a channel, a medium. They have advantages and disadvantages. We wanted to see whether you could combine blogs and newspapers in a way that would get the most benefit from both of them.” And in keeping with that spirit, he says he must politely decline when people ask for a copy as a PDF.

The group’s love for newsprint runs so deep that they have recently launched the Newspaper Club, a service that will help people design and produce their own newspapers. One component of this club will be creating “bespoke newspapers,” limited-run publications like the one above—eight essays published for the BBC—or an upcoming piece for the book publisher Penguin. “Newsprint is a great medium,” says Terrett, who encourages fans of newsprint to watch the site closely. “Newspapers might be in decline as a business or industry—and note, that ‘in decline’ is not the same as ‘dying’—but the ink on newsprint is still an awesome format.”

Whether a clever play on its predecessors, or providing a creative outlet for a designer who usually pushes pixels, newsprint is adaptable, flexible and cheap. And as a material, you can’t get much more sustainable:  its shape-shifting ability to morph back into itself, or melt into the soil of your vegetable garden, makes it the one medium that is 100% disposable. This very publication has experimented with that aspect, recently on the GOOD Sheets, which you may have seen nestled by the register at your local Starbucks. These tiny squares of newspaper provide a perfectly digestible bit of information while waiting for your pumpkin spice latte. To produce them out of any other material would be pointless; people—except for designers, who will keep an infographic about the U.S.’s closest elections—are going to toss (hopefully recycle) these. That’s okay. Take it or leave it. Yet in newsprint’s infinite utilitarianism, a GOOD Sheet actually may have multiple lives:  could also be used as a coaster, an emergency notepad, a method for sopping up your pumpkin spice latte when it take a tumble in the car. Non-precious and place-specific, it’s an ideal twist on coffee and the morning paper.

In 2007, Cahan Associates swept pretty much every annual report category in every design award on the planet for the Gap’s 2005-2006 Social Sustainability Report. This 100% recyclable piece not only turned the annual report world on its ear—a land of foiled, French-bound, matte-finished extravagance—it asked its readers to sit up and take notice. “The large-format, black-and-white photography and 40-pound text paper stock give it the feeling of a newspaper, and therefore, a serious subject,” designer Bill Cahan told STEP in 2007. I loved this piece, and was anxiously awaiting the next edition. But the next time the report was released, on July 31 of this year, it was in an online-only form. What happened in those two years? Did a zero-waste policy go into effect, or did the “feeling of a newspaper” lose some cultural heft?

The newsworthy quality of newsprint originally piqued the interest of Project M, who published a newsprint piece for Buy a Meter, a campaign to help connect residents to the municipal water supply in Hale County, Alabama. (I wrote about their process for GOOD two years ago: “Real World Studio.”) Here it was also a matter of necessity:  Newsprint was pretty much the only printing option for the designers, who wanted to produce the piece locally. But I’ll never forget the other qualities they mentioned loving about the medium:  Its messiness—by the time you’re finished reading it your fingers are dirtied and black—and its fragility—the piece would start to disintegrate with the slightest bit of water or sun—both of which they thought brought their experience of working in rural Alabama directly to the reader.

Last week, I was in the Michigan offices of the furniture company Herman Miller (disclosure: I was there working for them) where this rather antiquarian device stood out among the Eames and Nelson pieces. For the last three years, the company has published Spirit, a 40-page publication covering the vast community and environmental work done by its employees. They specifically picked a newspaper format for its democratic qualities—cheap, immediate egalitarian—and specifically decided not to put the paper online, for a reason that I’m embarrassed to say was not immediately obvious to me. “Not everyone at Herman Miller has a computer or consults one at work,” editor Clark Malcolm, told me. “The tactile part of reading Spirit contributes to its impact.” And there was a far more interesting reason: “We also wanted something people could take home to their families.” Sure, a glossy printout, a hand-written notecard, a marbleized certificate might all have been a nice way for Herman Miller to thank its employees for their service. But that employee’s contributions suddenly become so much more valuable to them, to their community, to their families, when they become “the news.”

“Walking in L.A.” is a pretty decent 1982 song that’s more famous than it deserves to be. This is due to a signature lyric which has become somewhat of a call-and-response whenever anyone mentions Los Angeles and walking. What’s that, you’re going for a walk? Nobody walks in L.A.

That statement is, of course, categorically untrue:  Every day, millions of people in this city use some combination of mass transit and their own two feet, the same people who probably have also never heard of the band Missing Persons (or what I think is their far superior song, “Words”; compare/contrast yourself). But as much as I want to believe that walking is an acceptable, perhaps even enjoyable activity in this city, as I walked with a group of people from downtown to Hollywood last weekend, the number one question asked by anyone as they rolled past us—yes, usually in a car—was this:  “What are you walking for?”

“What are you walking for?” or, sometimes, “What are you walking for?” As if any pedestrian effort was such a huge imposition it had to be for charity. We’re just walking, I thought. Isn’t that enough?

Despite the fact that there are plenty of walkers in Los Angeles, there might be a trend of extreme walking in Los Angeles right now. For the last three years The Great Los Angeles Walk has famously traveled a boulevard from downtown to the Pacific Ocean, ranging anywhere from 12 to 18 miles in a day. There’s Mathieu Young’s Walkabout, four-day, 20-mile L.A. stroll with a strobe light, featured on this very site. And there are individuals like Walking in LA, whose anonymous author has been documenting long walks in town since 2002 (recently walking our Metro Gold Line extension, opening any day now). It’s almost as if the act of extreme walking might will the rest of the city to fall in step behind you. “The point of our event is to show that Los Angeles can be walked,” agrees Dan Koeppel (below, pointing skyward) an outdoor journalist who organized the two-day, 40-mile, 100+ stairway event last weekend, named The Big Parade. “This is one city that can be walked, and enjoyed, as an outdoor, urban, and cultural experience.”

It was diverse, enlightening terrain. Our very first stairway paralleled the Angels Flight Railway, which shuttled passengers to the top of downtown’s Bunker Hill beginning in 1901 (and will creak back into operation soon). The walk ended just below the Hollywood sign, on the hiking paths that were carved into Griffith Park starting in 1896, when Griffith J. Griffith bequeathed the land what would become one of the largest and most rugged urban parks in the country (and then might have shot his wife in the head, but that’s a story for another time). We walked by Modernist mansions and cinderblock apartments. Ate tamales and sushi. We saw guerrilla gardens and makeshift mosaics and graffiti galleries, and not one, but two, houses painted in Lakers colors. And a dog with dreadlocks. And an armless mannequin who looked like a backup singer for Duran Duran.

Our route ventured into 10 urban parks, and may have made history in one of them. Thanks to sympathetic powers in City Hall and the Department of Recreation and Parks, we received special permission to camp—10 of us—in the city park at the foot of the most famous stairway in the city, the Music Box Steps, named for the 1936 Laurel & Hardy film made there (you can watch it at that link). And if you think that people give you weird looks when you’re walking, you should see the faces of early morning dog walkers as they watched us climbing out of mummy bags and tents. Actually, I think they just assumed we were homeless but had really nice gear.

At every meeting place on the route—every single one—our fellow walkers appeared out of the shade. Over 250 people joined us at various points along the way; at one point, 50 people were waiting for us at a single location. And I shall never forget the kindness of strangers. Someone along the route threw open a cooler full of beer on his driveway. One woman was waiting for us at her house with ice-cold watermelon.

All along the trail we were following—the reason the stairs all existed—was the echo of the streetcars that zipped passengers around the city pre-freeway. (Although how those passengers huffed up all 236 of the Baxter Steps in their lace-up boots and petticoats, I do not know.) Just west of downtown we zig-zagged down steps that the neighborhood used to access a now filled-in Red Car tunnel that went to Hollywood. 10 miles later we visited the Corralitas Red Car site, where we were guided by resident Diane Edwardson, who has documented the history of the former right-of-way as well as the plight of developers to get their hands on the hilly real estate. Some places you could squint and see the how the rows of bungalows gently sloped down to a soft grassy canyon where tracks used to be.

And suddenly, as we rolled over a 710-foot summit in the Echo Park neighborhood into a former spiritual retreat, 60 of us marching single-file down the brick and stone steps custom-built by the first homeowners, I realized that we actually were walking for something. Sidewalks are one thing, but the hundreds of public stairways in L.A. are a unique infrastructural element in that they were made only for people. By drawing attention to them physically—the sweeping civic staircases, the dark secret passageways, the trampled dusty cut-throughs—and also symbolically—the published-in-books maps, the hand-drawn neighborhood maps, the GPS-enabled Google maps—we might create enough awareness to show that Los Angeles is not only great for pedestrians, but actually built for pedestrians.

As it turns out—and quite unintentionally—our unofficial walk for walking did exactly that. “I’ve been contacted by several branches of the city government who’d like to work with us on pedestrian access issues and permanent routes,” says Koeppel, who notes that he has also received related requests from the city council and the parks department. “Pedestrian advocates from Beverly Hills and the South Bay have also asked for information on what we’ve done and how we did it.”

And there’s also talk within L.A.’s City Hall about a neighborhood trails system, a series of “best routes” for walking, hiking and biking inspired by cycling advocacy group C.I.C.L.E’.s list of L.A.’s bike routes and a signage system by designer Joseph Prichard. As our walk proved, no new sidewalks or bike paths need to be built to make this work. It’s just a matter of knowing which way to walk. And of course, knowing what you’re walking for.

Camping photo by Lisa Anne Auerbach, more photos by myself, Steve Matsuda and Larry Gassan.