Interplay Volume 2: Recasting Edges

It’s been nearly 2 years since we launched our inaugural issue of Interplay.  Two weeks after publication, COVID shuttered RELM’s studio and upended daily patterns of life. We, like many of you, are still dizzy interpreting the opportunities and consequences in the wake of the pandemic but know this: COVID has hastened a global appreciation of the spaces landscape architects design revealing the profession’s relationship to emotional health, civil and environmental justice, urban form, climate, mobility, jobs, and public life.  

Unsettling as it was revealing, this period has rendered introspection both hyper-personal and hyper-collective.  COVID crystallized personal truths and underscored our communal interdependence—from supply chains to civil rights to climate.   As RELM matriculates to a hybrid work schedule, resuming activities from our downtown Los Angeles studio, we renew our founding mission conceiving Interplay: highlighting people, ideas, proposals, and policies we believe are essential for cities and communities to prosper.  We look forward to sharing the visionaries and ideas we met/read/video-conferenced with during these many months in isolation.  Introspection begets innovation.  The virus shattered many norms.  Let us harness this disruptive energy to realize sustained, equitable, and just design–imaginative in form—that transcends failed convention.  We know a better shared existence awaits. To the great reset.

Editor’s Letter

RELM is pleased to feature professionals and practitioners who’s work we admire, changing the script of how to build better cities, better communities. In our relaunch of Interplay, we feature UltraBarrio, an urban design, planning, and architectural studio out of Houston.  Their work around transit ecology, inclusivity, resiliency, and re-imagining infrastructure inspires us.  LA and Houston share many similarities including the challenges and opportunities designing for a polycentric and polyethnic city. UltraBarrio’s approach to citymaking is quite compelling.  We hope you enjoy—and benefit—from their approach.

“You can’t script the future but thinking big, developing better armatures for cities, allows for new possibilities.” 
—Marcus Martinez