Rosten Woo

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3. Articles, books, stories about design, democracy, the built environment. Most of the work I do involves writing in tandem with design but here are a few projects that are mostly writing or have otherwise a PDF form that you can download.


I recently wrote about the public mediation process I developed for Santa Monica for Alta Journal. I’ve also written about spacesuits, speculative development, the political dimensions of data visualization, the naming of Los Angeles, the Library of Congress, and the politics of repair. 

Reframe: City Hall Mural Report (2024)



The full set of recommendations (adopted unanimously by Santa Monica's City Council earlier this year) can be found here. I was really pleased with both the process, the result, and this documentation of it all. So if you are interested in citizen assemblies, civic memory, indigenous-settler relations, or public art, give it a look!

I've been working with an amazing team at Metzli projects (including Joel Garcia, Robin Garcia, and Susannah Laramee Kidd) on a public process for Santa Monica's Reframe Initiative. It's a complex project designed to create a public process to consider the meaning, impact and ways forward around a controversial WPA-era Mural by Stanton Macdonald-Wright that frames City Hall and prominently depicts contact between settlers and first peoples. The project involves a kind of Citizen Assembly - Learning Circle as well as a spate of public programs, and a set of tools for gathering ideas and feedback. The end product (many months from now) will be a set of recommendations and a sourcebook of ideas for ways to move forward and respond to the mural.

Past Due (2022)




For the last year or so, I've been working with the Mayor's office on projects related to Civic Memory. One of these was this report and set of recommendations: Past Due. There is a ton of interesting content in there. I co-chaired the subcommittee on improving public process and access and I'm proud of our recommendations. Through this work emerged a project to create a permanent memorial to the victims of the Chinese Massacre of 1871. (see below)

Willowbrook is . . . (2013)
A Picture of a Place



The Los Angeles County Arts Commission asked me to produce a visioning tool for residents of Willowbrook - an unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles county between Watts and Compton –to communicate their hopes and dreams to planners. Instead, I produced a series of publications, events, and installations designed to make visible what was already there. The project was funded through an NEA program designed to spur "creative placemaking." I interpreted this to mean the ways that people invest their neighborhoods with care and meaning. In Willowbrook, a largely residential neighborhood (on the cusp of receiving a "transformative" amount of investment from the County), a lot of this care and creativity was most visible in the backyards and driveways of people's private homes.

Street Value (2010)

A pocket-sized parable about race and redevelopment in American Cities


As measured by foot traffic and retail volume, the Fulton Street Mall has been one of the most successful shopping districts in America for nearly a century. But despite these indicators of success, the city rolls out a new revitalization scheme for the area every few years. This book contrasts interviews with several generations of city planners with a pointed visual history of the area to tell a tragicomic story about politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, shoppers, fear, race, and ideology on the street.

This book builds on the outdoor exhibition “Values and Variety” to tell a sordid but commonplace story of planning, paranoia, and race in a downtown shopping district. The book features photographs from Leigh Davis, Gus Powell, and Jamel Shabazz. This book is the initial offering of Inventory Books, an imprint of Princeton Architectural Press designed by Project Projects. The book’s format is intended to recall the provocative disposable paperbacks of the early seventies.


WROL IRL (Without Rule of Law, In Real Life) 


Daniel Tucker and I contributed a meme-illustrated essay to the catalog for Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System, an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, curated and organized by Risa Puleo. WROL IRL (Without Rule of Law, In Real Life) sketched out the convergence of End-Times logic on the Left and Right –how different Americans imagine the end of the state's monopoly on violence and why it matters. Pretty Dark! You can get the catalog here. 

Power Points
A short illustrated guide to SCOPE’s remarkably useful Power Mapping exercises, backed with a short essay on the uses and abuses of the "power diagram" in art and organizing. 

In the wake of the LA riots/uprising, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Political Education formed to think strategically about long-term coalition-building power-shifting in South LA. Anthony Thigpen, SCOPE's founder, invented Power Mapping as a tool for political organizers to see their field of operations and track their success over time –from campaign to campaign. This project was commissioned by Robby Herbst and the mighty Llano Del Rio publishing empire.

What is Affordable Housing? (2009)

A felt chart, website, and guidebook about income and rent

This module of the Envisioning Development Toolkit breaks down one of the most commonly invoked but least understood aspects of urban policy. “What is affordable housing?” comprises a book, a felt poster, and flash site. The core of the project is an exercise in demographic analysis that helps everyday people compare incomes and rent in NYC neighborhoods and fosters discussions about the term “affordable.” The core interaction takes advantage of the material and psychological affordances of felt (friendly, slightly adhesive!) to facilitate group explorations of demographics and housing policy.

The Affordable Housing Tool was produced by myself and John Mangin from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, with a dream-team of support including Glen Cummings of MTWTF, Sha Hwang, Margot Walker, and Dave Powell of the Fifth Avenue Committee.