UCLA

Research on insurgent planning in the Global North examines insurgency from the point of formal organization, where insurgent actions are translated to rights-based discourses seeking possession of property to affect planning decisions. This framework often ignores the autonomy, movement building, and critical thought necessary for insurgent actors to take action, limiting urban imaginaries to working within neoliberal planning regimes and hegemonic systems of spatial production. The limitations that propertied citizenship places on the community’s ability to affect urban planning decisions as described by Ananya Roy (2003), Faranak Miraftab (2009), and Libby Porter (2014) encourage Global North planning scholars to incorporate informal perspectives from the Global South as a guide to alternative processes of insurgent planning that do not depend on negotiations with dominant planning regimes. This thesis investigates insurgent knowledges—alternative, marginalized, and heterotopic perspectives of urban space—and how these knowledges lead to insurgent planning actions unmitigated by property rights based regimes of planning. In late January through early February of 2024, a natural case study on this arose in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles’ entertainment district, when thousands of graffiti artists and their friends converged on the abandoned Oceanwide Plaza Towers, a trio of 40-story buildings part of a failed billion dollar development. They transformed the building exteriors with over five hundred graffiti pieces in an act of “graffiti bombing” that reclaimed these abandoned speculative developments for the people. Interviewing graffiti artists in community with or directly involved as insurgent actors during the Oceanwide Plaza Towers Graffiti Event in Downtown Los Angeles, this research seeks to understand how insurgent knowledges provide counter-narratives to the dominant norms of the cityscape, revealing the socio-political dynamics that shape urban space. What are the knowledge bases that informed the actions of direct insurgents who participated in the Oceanwide Plaza Towers Graffiti Event of January-February 2024? This research explores how the knowledge bases of social organization, positionality, artistry, history, accessibility, and spatial consciousness can help insurgent knowledge break through the dominant spatial power dynamic to stimulate urban imagination and resist hegemonic development forces.