Two concrete rivers: one neglected, one infamous (think Terminator 2)

How are the cutting-edge projects to revitalize these rivers addressing the cities’ most dramatic ecological and social challenges, to reinvent these cities to be more livable, more equitable, more sustainable?

Janette Kim is an architectural designer and educator based in New York City. She is a faculty member and director of the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University GSAPP. Janette’s work focuses on design and ecology in relationship to public representation, interest, and debate. Work in the Urban Landscape Lab has been featured on NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show and exhibited on the New York City subway system, and has been developed in partnership with numerous non-profit advocacy groups and municipal agencies. Janette’s ‘Underdome’ project (with Erik Carver) has been awarded by the Graham Foundation and the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship. As partner of Town/Kim studio, Janette won an international design competition to design the AIDS Memorial in San Francisco. Janette holds a master’s in architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University.

Jenny Price is a writer, Los Angeles Urban Ranger, and the fall 2011 Anschutz Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. Author of “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” and Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she’s written also for GOOD, Sunset, Believer, Audubon, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, and writes the Green Me Up JJ not-quite green-advice column on LA Observed. She gives frequent tours of the concrete L.A. River, and as Ranger Jenny, has created such projects as Downtown L.A. Trail System and Public Access 101: Malibu Public Beaches, and has been a resident artist at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. A former Guggenheim and NEH Fellow, and a current research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, she has an A.B. from Princeton University — where as a biology major she studied the white-winged trumpeters of the Amazon rain forest — and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, where she studied the plastic pink flamingos of the American grasslands. She is currently working on a new book, Stop Saving the Planet, Already!—and Other Tips for 21st-Century Environmentalists.