LA Commons: Engaging Youth in Community-based Cultural Tourism
Interesting project profiled in the Community Arts Network newsletter that takes a new approach to cultural tourism:
LA Commons: Engaging Youth in Community-based Cultural Tourism
By Karen Mack
Los Angeles is home to many communities that represent the largest concentration of a given ethnicity outside of the country of origin. The city has a network of ethnic enclaves that are rich with traditions, history, art, cuisine and community. Yet these neighborhoods are often defined by disinvestment, high poverty rates and physical deterioration. Given the growing popularity of “cultural tourism,” a valuable opportunity exists to leverage local cultural assets to create a community-based cultural tourism model aimed at developing local economic and social capital. LA Commons has partnered with the UCLA Department of Urban Planning to implement a program called Uncommon LA to work with culturally rich neighborhoods to take advantage of this opportunity. The model being developed by the team fuses the LA Commons community-engaged approach to artistic and cultural programming with the Urban Planning department’s emphasis on community and economic development practices. Young people play a central role in the model as documenters of local experience, creators of artwork that reflect this experience and interpreters of local culture for visitors to the neighborhood. (to read more click here)
Painting in foreground by student artist Devi Ramirez as part of Fear/Less Installation in MacArthur Park. Photo by Dolores Chavez
Deciphering Culture
Deciphering Culture 
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January 5, 2010 at 8:32 pm