Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment (DVD-ROM)

Produced by The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center. Photography and DVD-ROM design by Rosemary Comella.

If the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" holds true, then perhaps two pictures of the same place taken decades apart are worth exponentially more, for they offer us insights into a community’s development in a particularly visual way.

In the form of an interactive DVD-ROM played on one’s computer, Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment explores this premise. It not only allows one to perform comparisons between contemporary and archival images, but also to see Pasadena "aficionados" and historians such as Claire Bogaard, Janet Akosua Edge, Lee Silver, Kevin Starr, Karen Stokes and Robert Winter speak on topics ranging from architecture and geography to ethnicity and culture. Together these varied perceptions capture the distinctive ways that a particular city negotiates and reconciles two conflicting desires —the desire to preserve what is unique about the city’s history or civic identity and the drive to keep pace with the rapidly changing times. This perpetual process of negotiation is the primary subject on display in Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment as well as in the Labyrinth Project’s series of digital works on cities called Urban Traces.