PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE X URBAN HUMANITIES RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP SERIES [2026]
[READ ABOUT THE BUILDING DEPARTMENTAL CAPACITY GRANT HERE.]
I worked on this project as the Director of Public Architecture at cityLAB-UCLA. The team consisted of Dr. Dana Cuff, myself, and Claire Nelischer.
In partnership with cityLAB, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design (AUD) received funding to build departmental capacity to devise and support community-engaged teaching. This program through the Center for Community Engagement is a core element of UCLA’s Strategic Plan—Goal 1: Deepening UCLA’s Engagement with Los Angeles. cityLAB and AUD plan to use the award to (a) enhance, integrate, and require existing community-engaged teaching programs offered through courses as well as studios, (b) leverage opportunities to expand community-engaged teaching through community partnerships, particularly at the new DTLA campus, and (c) develop a departmental emphasis on “Public Architecture” through a plan to sustain ongoing community-engaged teaching and community partner relationships beyond single courses. AUD was one of six departments to receive funding.
During the 2025–26 academic year, I collaborated with instructors at the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative on the organization and management of six experimental workshops that emphasize hands-on, place-based, and community-engaged methods of teaching and learning. The workshops—including sound scavenging and filmic sensing, spatial ethnography and critical cartography, and archival analysis and visual documentation—explore humanistic methods of elucidating the city as a space for knowing and doing. The students enrolled in the workshops come from diverse educational backgrounds—including anthropology, architecture, biology, Chicana and Chicano studies, chorographic inquiry, French and Francophone studies, Hispanic languages and literature, library and information science, public policy, and urban and regional planning—thereby fostering an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the built environment.
