Working in Industrial Los Angeles

Martin Krieger is professor emeritus of planning at the University of Southern California. He has published ten scholarly books and many journal articles. Since 1998, he has been systematically photographing Los Angeles and its environs. His original training was as an experimental physicist.

I am a voyeur.
When I am walking or driving in Los Angeles, where I teach, I keep asking, What’s going on here, in this place at this site? Being a professor of city planning, my curiosity seems appropriate, although most academic studies depend on archives, interviews, statistical in-formation, and remote sensing. When I notice the high frequency of the same phenomenon, say storefront houses of worship, eventually my awareness is awakened and I wonder, What’s going on here, and why? Initially, I do not go out and look for these phenomena. But their insistence and ubiquity kick me in the pants. —Martin Kreiger

Working in Industrial Los Angeles Production Video

Previously published works:
The Thriving Professor. Singapore: World Scientific, 2018 (xxvii + 247 pp.).

The Scholar’s Survival Manual, A Road Map for Students, Faculty, and Administrators . Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2013) xxxi + 380pp.

Urban Tomographies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 (xviii + 130pp.).

Doing Mathematics: Convention, Subject, Calculation, Analogy. Singapore: World Scientific, 2003 (xviii + 454 pp.). Library of Science selection. [MR1961400, 2004a:00011]. 2nd edition, 2015 (xxiv + 467 pp.).

What’s Wrong With Plastic Trees?: Artifice and Authenticity in Design. Westport: Praeger, 2000 (xxi + 157 pp.).

Entrepreneurial Vocations: Learning from the Callings of Augustine, Moses, Mothers, Antigone, Oedipus and Prospero. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996 (xvii + 210 pp.).

The Constitutions of Matter: Mathematically Modeling the Most Everyday of Physical Phenomena. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (xxii + 343 pp.). Library of Science selection. [MR1425391, 97g:00015]

Doing Physics: How Physicists Take Hold of the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 (xx + 168 pp.). Library of Science selection. 2nd edition, 2012 (xxvi + 218 pp.).

Marginalism and Discontinuity: Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989 (xxiii + 182 pp.).

Advice and Planning. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981 (xiv + 241 pp.).

Articles of note:
“Polaroid SX-70 Camera System: An Optical-Mechanical-Chemical ‘Tightly-Coupled’ Design,” Optical Engineering, 61 (12) November 2022: 120701. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.61.12.120701

“Riding Uncertainty,” Journal of Planning and Education Research, 42 (3) 2022: 482-486.

“What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?,” Science 179 (2 February 1973): 446455; Exchange of Letters, op. cit., 180 (25 May 1973): 813816.

Awards and Recognitions:
Research fellowships from the University of Michigan, School of Business (Zell-Lurie Fellow in the Teaching of Entrepreneurship, 1990-1991); Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society (1981-1982); National Humanities Center (1978-1979); Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1973-1974); American Council of Learned Societies (1973-1974).

Research grants from the Ewing Merion Kauffman Foundation (2012), Google Research (2010), the Office of the USC Provost’s Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences program (2009-2010); USC-CSULB METRANS Project (2008-2010, 2011), the USC Integrated Media Systems Center (2008); The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation (2001-2002, 2002-2003, 2004-2006, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2019-2020); the Lilly Endowment (1991-1992); the Exxon Education Foundation (1985, 1987); Russell Sage Foundation (1982-1984).

Trim: 7” x 9” Landscape
Extent: 220pp
Binding: Softbound
ISBN: 978-1-957183-90-9
Season: Spring 2024
World Rights: Available