A Walk Through Downtown LAA Walk Through Downtown LA

Over the last decade, Downtown Los Angeles has undergone a spectacular transformation. The historic city centre has had a face-lift, with new museums, skyscrapers, designer stores, restaurants and bars springing up. Project developers jumped in, and real estate prices shot up. In 2018, Downtown LA was, in fact, the most rapidly gentrifying area in the US, putting pressure on many of its long-standing residents and businesses. In the meantime, little was being done for the neighbourhood's existing issues, such as poverty and homelessness. A new population mix arose, with wealthy newcomers alongside disadvantaged residents.

The photographer Désirée van Hoek, who had been working in the area since 2007, saw lots of things going on that the squatters' movement in Amsterdam in the 1980s had warned about: rocketing housing prices, growing inequality, and the city becoming Disneyfied and bourgeois. In_ Notes on Downtown_, she has recorded the changes in the district in over 135 images.

Désirée van Hoek made her international debut in 2015 with her book Skid Row, about the extremely impoverished district of the same name in Downtown Los Angeles. The book, designed by Mevis & Van Deursen and with an introduction by the_ LA Times_ staff writer Gale Holland, was well received in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Japan and the USA, and it was selected as one of the Best Designed Books of the Netherlands and Belgium. In the LA Review of Books, Michael Kurcfeld described Skid Row as "a vivid record of a fragile world by an unlikely outsider." Wired's Pete Brook praised Van Hoek's approach: "As responsibly as one can make images of society's disadvantaged. Kudos." _Notes on Downtown _is Van Hoek's second book.