skip to Main Content

Action: Identify and activate cultural assets along the LA River corridor.

A community’s cultural assets contribute to its creativity, traditions, robustness, and vitality and can act as both resources and opportunities.

Cultural assets can be material, ephemeral, and even spiritual. They include buildings, sites, and objects holding local and national cultural significance; people, places, events, and organizations recognized as cultural anchors within a specific community; and stories that are powerful enough to bind people together in a place over time. Making cultural assets visible and acknowledging them is a key element in sustaining livable communities.

Click above for other actions that involve the implementation lead or potential partners or that apply to the same geographic boundaries.

Methods

specific, tangible ways to reach the goal

  • Create a methodology for understanding existing cultural assets in collaboration with community members.
  • Work with community partners and creative strategists on cultural asset mapping activities in neighborhoods where there is limited existing data.
  • Continue asset mapping along the 51 miles of the LA River corridor after pilot project completion.
  • Conduct community training in the tools and strategies for documenting cultural assets through methods including interviews, photography, mapping, and video.
  • Share ongoing asset mapping on the LA County Department of Arts and Culture website, and help reaffirm and build the LA River community as a vital and growing county resource.
  • Work with County, municipal, and state historic preservation offices or similar agencies to incorporate existing resources and protocols for identifying and landmarking historically significant resources as components of asset mapping, and encourage preservation in municipalities where no ordinance or preservation program is active.
  • Identify and interpret culturally significant historic resources, including buildings, landscapes, and objects that convey the layered histories of places and people.
Group of individuals gather together to participate in the LA River Campout.
The LA River Campout is one of the most popular programs at the Bowtie Project, river mile 26.2.
Photo by Gina Clyne courtesy of Clockshop, evereachmore, 2015.
Back To Top