This paper was submitted for “Urban Planning C184: Looking at Los Angeles” with Professor Jackie Leavitt in Spring 2011.

What started as a worry about artists and collectors fleeing to New York transformed the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles and set the city on the path to become a global city. I use global city as opposed to world city, for its subtle nuances as Saskia Sassen has noted. Global cities incorporate more of a networked hub of activity than just an insular hub of activity, as a world city is understood to be.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 28, 2009.

Imagine: It’s 2059. You’re in the Guiyu of Guangdong Province, China, strolling the streets. The air is crisp and the grass green. The cafe-lined streets are littered with people chatting and typing away on their laptops.

Actually, at this rate, the only thing Guiyu will be littered with is electronic waste, or e-waste, an umbrella term for discarded electronic devices.

Instead of the idyllic image of Guiyu above, the town is the main center of exported e-waste, in China.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on March 16, 2009.

In the spirit of the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday last Friday, I’d like to celebrate my favorite thing on the Web right now: Twitter.

On the surface, it is deceptively simple. It’s a social network and a micro-blogging tool in which you exchange 140-character updates with your “followers.” These blurbs are publicly visible by default, but can be restricted to just your friends.

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