Urban utopia or nightmarish sprawl? Dream city or hell town? What kind of world do you envision? UCLA researchers are creating new ways to explore, research and understand cities – and sharing their visions of the perfect place.

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Forget blueprints and hard-to-understand charts. The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA combines relatively simple 3-D models with aerial photographs and street-level video to create realistic models of neighborhoods. Maneuvering a computer mouse as in a video game, users can “drive” through or “fly” over animated landscapes. The team’s models have already:
Take a […]

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Imagine walking down L.A.’s Temple Street with a hand-held GPS device. As you cross Beaudry Avenue, a flag pops up on the device’s on-screen map. Turns out an earlier user of an online interactive guidebook has “attached” a digital image or a snippet of information to these GPS coordinates. Interested in L.A. […]

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Team UCLA engineering and art students with Disney Imagineers, then charge them with bringing together art, education, history, culture, community and technology in a very traditional venue – a state park. See what happened when Remapping L.A. gave it a shot. <more>

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Will you be ready when disaster strikes? Will help arrive in an emergency, and will there be programs to speed recovery?
When it comes to natural disasters, the ways UCLA fulfills its three-part mission of research, education and service draw sharply into focus:
• Research on mitigating the effects of disasters – from helping hospitals withstand […]

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You really can prevent forest fires. “Fireproofing of homes is important not only for the houses, but also for the forest,” says UCLA professor Michael Ghil. “When you fireproof houses, not only do you help preserve those houses, but you also help limit the spread of fires to a much smaller area.” <more>

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Wildfires leave behind much more than ashes. Increased amounts of iron, aluminum and mercury accumulate in watershed systems after a fire. UCLA scientists, studying how this adversely affects downstream water supplies, have already put their research to practical use with the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Adults, children, infants – click for instructions on building disaster kits for the whole family.
One Infant or Toddler (0-12 months) (PDF)One Child (1-3 years old) (PDF)One Child (4-10 years old) (PDF)One Adult (or Child over 10 years old) (PDF)

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Fortuitously timed population data – combined with good old-fashioned sleuthing and the latest technology – are giving UCLA researchers a better look at what’s happening to Indonesians since the 2004 tsunami than after any disaster in scientific literature. What they find may revolutionize how we help people on the road to recovery. […]

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He dreamt of being the “father of emergency medicine,” and of helping “in the development of the emergency medical system in Kenya and within the sub-Saharan region.” To learn how, Dr. Charles Otieno enrolled in UCLA’s School of Public Health. <more> (PDF)

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Guns, Germs and Steel (Quicktime / 2:31 min)Meet UCLA professor Jared Diamond and learn about the inspiration for his best-seller.   Download QuickTime here.
Lesson: Be voraciously curious.
UCLA’s Jared Diamond brings together such seemingly unconnected topics as (to name but a few) the domestication of animals; the development of the Indo-European family of languages; the […]

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