Restoration Media Watch
Seeing what’s broken, what’s salvageable, and what’s worth restoring
Urban Fabric, Streets, and Neighborhood Reality
Streetcraft - Street-level footage and commentary on LA neighborhoods, public space, infrastructure, and daily urban conditions. Shows how rules, enforcement, neglect, and design choices manifest on the ground, block by block.
LA In A Minute - Short, focused explainers on LA’s built history, planning decisions, and neighborhood evolution. Helps viewers understand what was lost, what survived, and why many SoCal places feel fragmented today.
Urban Fabric, Streets, and Neighborhood Reality
Streetcraft - Street-level footage and commentary on LA neighborhoods, public space, infrastructure, and daily urban conditions. Shows how rules, enforcement, neglect, and design choices manifest on the ground, block by block.
LA In A Minute - Short, focused explainers on LA’s built history, planning decisions, and neighborhood evolution. Helps viewers understand what was lost, what survived, and why many SoCal places feel fragmented today.
Built Environment and Community Form
Not Just Bikes - How street design, zoning, and public space shape daily life. Even when you disagree with conclusions, the channel makes structural forces visible, which is essential for restoration literacy.
City Nerd - Tradeoffs between sprawl, compact growth, and infrastructure costs. Useful for diagnosing why some places never develop small-scale commercial ecosystems.
Infrastructure and Mobility as Restoration Constraints
Miles in Transit - Underused, misused, or neglected transit systems. Transit failures often reveal deeper governance and planning breakdowns that block organic restoration.
The Proper People - Large-scale abandonment of industrial, civic, and commercial structures. This channel visually documents latent restoration assets before they are demolished, sanitized, or erased.
Direct Community Restoration in Action
New York Restoration Project - Hands-on restoration of neglected land in under-resourced communities. Demonstrates restoration as stewardship and continuity, not redevelopment or displacement.
Infrastructure, Systems Failure, and Institutional Distortion
RMTransit - Operational realities of transit systems, funding failures, maintenance tradeoffs, and long-term decay. Makes visible how misaligned incentives and governance structures prevent communities from restoring mobility and access.
Practical Engineering - How infrastructure actually works and how it fails, including water, roads, dams, and utilities. Restoration requires understanding why systems collapse or become too expensive to maintain. This channel strips away abstraction.
Land Reuse, Decline, and Latent Potential
Bright Sun Films - Large-scale abandonment of malls, factories, resorts, and towns. Documents places frozen between decline and possible reuse, before they are erased or redeveloped beyond recognition.
Exploring with Josh - Global exploration of abandoned infrastructure, transit facilities, and civic buildings. Provides comparative context showing that abandonment patterns are systemic, not isolated failures.
Small-Scale Urban Fabric and Entrepreneurial Soil
Strong Towns - Financial fragility of cities, local-scale development, and why small bets matter. Ordinary people can live affordably, invest, start small and thrive.
City Beautiful - Historical patterns of city form, zoning, and public space design. Helps viewers recognize when a place still has bones worth restoring versus places that were never built to support community life.
Environmental and Land Stewardship as Restoration Inputs
Andrew Millison - Landscape-scale water, soil, and land restoration practices. Shows how degraded land can regain function and value without institutional megaprojects.
Urban Farmstead - Food production and land use embedded directly in neighborhoods. Demonstrates how small-scale productivity supports local resilience rather than centralized systems.
Disclaimer: Inclusion does not imply endorsement. Media is curated for its ability to reveal conditions relevant to community restoration, not for ideological alignment.
Get Involved with Community Restoration ICU
Join us in making California a better place to live, work, and play.