Mission & Vision

A People’s Guide is a popular geography project that shows how power manifests in cities and other places. By focusing on vernacular landscapes – everyday places – we show how various forms of power, including domination, exploitation and resistance, not only produce inequalities, but shape the world around us.

Located at the juncture of landscape studies, radical geography, and public history, A People’s Guide collects and shares stories of how – and where – social and environmental inequalities have been produced, exacerbated, and challenged. Rejecting grand narratives of place that lionize wealthy and well-connected individuals, we honor instead the labor and love of people who actually created, built, or used a place – especially working-class and low-income people, Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, women, migrants, and political dissidents. By narrating and interpreting the extraordinary but often little-known events that have occurred in public parks, bowling alleys, real-estate offices, church basements, restaurants, and other ordinary places, we hope to facilitate a better understanding of how power relations are produced through place.

Our goal is to encourage people to think critically about place as a site of contestation and a galvanizing force for justice.

A People’s Guide website is an outgrowth of our book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). A People’s Guide is now a book series with the University of California Press. This website highlights content from the books underway in the series, as well as related projects in online and other formats. The site is especially aimed at helping people use the Guide for teaching and learning.