The Capstone final project presentations and the UHI graduation dinner celebration will be on Thursday, June 8, from 6:00 to 8:30 pm at Perloff Hall's courtyard.
Students' presentations will be 15 minutes at most, and we will aim to end all the presentations at 7:15 pm, followed by the UHI 2022-23 Graduation dinner.
Jun 8, 2023, 6-8PM: UHI 22-23 Capstone Final Review & Graduation Dinner Celebration
Oaxacan Indigenous immigrants are the largest Indigenous immigrant community in Los Angeles. Mayan immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala constitute the largest Maya community outside both countries, creating an indelible presence in the city.
Working with Zapotec and Mixtec from Oaxaca and Maya Indigenous Immigrants from Guatemala and Southern Mexico, students will work in multi-disciplinary groups, conduct research and develop design ideas for two ethnic enclaves around the MacArthur Park area: El Corredor Oaxaqueño and El Corredor Maya. These urban enclaves function as small pockets of cultural and linguistic resistance and affirmation. In spatial terms, each corridor comprises the sidewalk, the curb, the street, and the walls/facades of the buildings in the block. All these urban elements work together to create a distinctive, powerful cultural expression in the neighborhood, inscribing Oaxacan and Maya indigenous cultural identities in the urban landscape.
Working closely with Indigenous immigrant individuals and groups, UH students will be tasked with facilitating and creating design ideas that express, affirm, and celebrate the Indigenous immigrant experiences, stories, and traditions of the Oaxacan and Maya communities on their respective corridors. There will be two primary outcomes:
1) a Story Map where students will collect, archive, organize, and digitally display the relevant information related to the two corridors, and
2) produce a series of drawings, renderings, collages, and digital models (if needed) of the design ideas, accompanied by a descriptive narrative of the design project.
Jun 7, 2023: UHI Capstone Final Review:
El Corredor Oaxaqueño & El Corredor Maya
May 31, 2023: Join us at Lafayette Park this coming Wednesday, May 31, from 3-6 PM for a joyful UHI Capstone event called “Craft the City.”
This capstone, titled “On-Your-Own: Micro-Urbanisms for Kid-Friendly Cities,” explores the idea of humanistic urban interventions--however informal, temporary, or minor in scale--in the context of Los Angeles that will uplift the city, the sidewalks, and commutes for its youngest independent pedestrians. Our students will hold a kid-city fair at HOLA (Heart of Los Angeles) where a variety of different-aged kids will create a fence “kaleidoscope” and “natural urban sounds” installations. There will be tacos and lots of activities to celebrate the role of play in everyday urban life!
May 31, 2023, 3-6 PM: UHI Capstone Event “Craft the City”
Los Angeles, CA (May 1, 2023) – The Mellon Foundation has awarded a transformative grant to UCLA cityLAB and nonprofit organization Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) to lead the collaborative project “MARKINGS: Inscribing Indigenous Immigrant Histories in Westlake,” an effort to illuminate overlooked cultural histories of Los Angeles’ Westlake neighborhood through public art and archives. By late 2026, “MARKINGS” will generate three interactive, public elements: a digital community archive in LA’s Felipe de Neve Public Library, as well as a digital wall display housed in HOLA’s Arts and Enrichment Center, and a public art installation in Westlake’s Lafayette Park area.
“MARKINGS” is a cityLAB design research project led by principal investigators Gustavo Leclerc of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, Maite Zubiaurre of UCLA European Languages and Transcultural Studies, and Tony Brown of HOLA, in collaboration with a team of researchers, community and Indigenous immigrant activists, and public officials. By focusing on culturally and linguistically diverse Indigenous immigrant groups, collaborators aim to elevate the Westlake neighborhood's present conditions and future potential through an understanding of its diverse history, and to deepen awareness of the Indigenous immigrant experience more broadly.
May 5, 2023: Mellon Foundation Awarded 2.7M Grant to “MARKINGS” Project
UHI GRADUATE CERTIFICATE 2023-24
The Urban Humanities offers an innovative cross-disciplinary curriculum that bridges design, urban studies, and the humanities, leading to a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities to complement your primary degree program. Students explore research methodologies for critical urban analysis and representational techniques that foreground new forms and models of inquiry for imagining the city. The program begins with the required Urban Humanities Summer Institute from September 11 to September 18, followed by a theory seminar in the Fall, a methods workshop and a funded field studio trip to Tijuana in the Winter, and culminates with a Spring capstone research project selected from those offered by UH mentor faculty. The UH program’s core research agenda is spatial justice with all its ramifications in contexts that range from gentrification and environmental impact to public arts and open spaces. Through innovative methods workshops, students will be prepared for the advanced, multidisciplinary capstones that involve deep collaborations with faculty, community, and peers. Capstones will encompass a range of topics and geographies, undertaken by small groups with mentors from across the UCLA faculty.
Deadline:
May 31
Academic Year Focus
LA / Westlake-MacArthur Park / Tijuana
Critical Spatial Practices
Additional info / Apply
https://www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu/graduate-certificate-programs
UHI Graduate Certificate 2023-2024: Apply by May 31, 2023
The UH 2023 research field trip to Tijuana, Mexico, explored two distinct aspects of Tijuana: the city as a place of innovative forms of cultural and artistic production (what it may be referred to as Tijuana’s creative economies) and the city as a site of filmic representations.
For several decades, Tijuana has been a place where distinct forms of cultural and artistic production have been developed. These forms occur in different contexts, conditions, and scales and are evident on sidewalks, streets, buildings, and neighborhoods. These creative manifestations are hybrid and dynamic and are manifested in food, popular culture, design, and art.
On Saturday, we visited different Tijuana’s border “ecologies” in mini-buses guided by our local scholars and border experts Paola Rodriguez España, Jose Luis Figueroa, and Omar Foglio of the collective Dignicraft and professors Jorge Francisco Sanchez-Jofras, Christian Zuñiga Mendez, and Juan Apodaca. On Sunday, we had a mini-symposium with presentations by our Tijuana experts and a collective discussion afterwards.
UHI Tijuana Field Trip: Apr 22-23, 2023
Apr 22-23, 2023: Urban Humanities Initiative Tijuana Field Trip
The field trip will explore two distinct aspects of Tijuana: Creative Economies & Filmic Representations. As a large border city adjacent to the US, Tijuana has always been connected to and affected by the cultural, social, political, and economic conditions in the US and, particularly, Southern California. To quickly adapt to the changing conditions of the North (and the South), Tijuana has developed autochthonous creative cultural and spatial forms of flexible adaptation, mutation, and change. This urban border ethos has produced a system of local creative economies manifested in the arts, music, film, design, and urbanism. In our field trip, we will invite local experts to address some of these creative border systems and provide insights into how geography, history, migration, and situatedness have been critical factors in the production of innovative cultural forms.
We will explore four different areas/ecologies of Tijuana, each with its own social, cultural, economic, and environmental dynamics: I) Playas, 2) Colonia Federal, 3) Maquiladoras and Areas de Cultivo or Arroyo Alamar area, and 4) El Centro (Downtown).
UHI Tijuana Field Trip 2023 Announcement
CRITICAL PLANNING JOURNAL CALL FOR MULTIMEDIA SUBMISSIONS - VOLUME 27: “OPEN”
DEADLINE MAY 31ST, 2023
Article and essay submissions for Volume 27 are currently in the review phase and the team is now putting out a special call to makers of visual art in all forms to submit their work for publication. This may include (not limited to): individual photos, photo-series, paintings, sketches, cartoons, etc. Accepted submissions will be those which engage deeply with the theme of Vol. 27.
The ideal of the open city has long been associated with difference, freedom, creativity, and collaboration, as a “a city that is life affirming, that reaches out to others who are not necessarily like us, and that acknowledges our common humanity and the pleasures of life lived among multipli/cities” (Friedmann, 2002). From data points to migration patterns, "open" vocabularies are often employed in social movements and across urban planning efforts to express a range of democratic principles in pursuit of social justice in the city. While open city frameworks may strive for inclusivity, transparency, and diversity, they are also entangled in the logics of authority, expertise, control, exclusion, and denial.
"Open"paradigms deserve both scrutiny and imagination. What does openness mean to the city and to contemporary urban discourse? The team invites contributors to reflect on openness as an ideological compass, a practical toolkit, and a critical lens. This volume will examine openness in planning theory and urban imaginaries; in planning research and practice; in material spaces, processes, and theories; as well as in the journal’s role supporting emerging voices.
How to Submit
Multi-media files will be accepted by the editors until May 31st, 2023. Submissions will be accepted via direct email to critplan@gmail.com. In order to submit via email, the team recommends submitting your files in medium resolution (200 dpi-300 dpi). Once your submission has been accepted for publication, the editors will follow up with a request for high-resolution files. If you have any questions about multi-media submissions, please contact the CPJ editors directly at critplan@gmail.com
Critical Planning Journal, Vol. 27: OPEN: Call for Multimedia
UCLA UHI is extending an open invitation for our final presentations on March 15th from 6-8 pm in person at Perloff Hall Room 1209B. Those who cannot join in person are welcome to attend via Zoom at https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97179614247.
Following the presentations, we will have a welcoming party for the UH2022-2023 cohort with food and
drinks at the Perloff Hall courtyard from 8-9:30 pm.
The students will present summaries of their work from all 3 of our Winter Methods Workshops including:
UHI Experimental Sound/Podcast Workshop
Instructors: Doğa Tekin and Rebecca Smith (UHI 2021 Alumni)
This 3 week workshop offers a new approach to studying urban environments through sound. Through story-mapping, developing a listening practice, taking field recordings, and producing a 2-5 minute experimental podcast, you will learn to engage with sound as a socio-spatial phenomenon.
Filmic Sensing
Instructors: Paolo Davanzzo & Lisa Marr from Echo Park Film Collective
The Sound We See: A 7 Ecologies City Symphony invites UHI students to create an analog filmwith support and mentorship from Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr of the EPFC Collective.
Working collaboratively, the group will learn about the city symphony genre, cinematically mapping the urban environment while exploring experimental techniques for filming with vintage Super 8 cameras and eco-developing black and white film stock with local organic materials.
Changing the Narrative (Spatial Ethnography)
Instructors: Sandra de la Loza & Elva Yañez
Northeast Los Angeles is a fragmented geography of largely undeveloped hills surrounded by working-class communities. A patchwork of community groups and environmental organizations have come together to protect vital green spaces from luxury home developments and unsanctioned off-roading that threaten the hillside’s native ecology.
UHI Winter Methods Workshop Final Review: Mar 15, 2023
February 27, 2023: UHI alumni Christopher Giamarino, Claire Nelischer, and Andrés F. Ramirez developed their Capstone project on Westlake into a research article, “Urban Humanities as a Framework for the Study of Public Space During the Pandemic,” published in the Journal of Urban Design this February.
Abstract:
COVID-19 has revealed limitations in traditional public space research methods. There is a need for new approaches to study and intervene during times of crisis. Interdisciplinary urban humanities approaches can help researchers respond to pandemic public space dynamics. This article develops a framework linking urban humanities practices – thick mapping, filmic sensing, and digital storytelling – to the production of space at multiple scales. A case study is presented of a course that employed these methods and proposed speculative design interventions to accommodate street vending, skateboarding, and unhoused people in the Westlake neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Link to Publication:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2023.2180353
UHI Capstone Published in Journal of Urban Design: Feb 27, 2023
Lead by Los Angeles Artist Sandra de la Rosa, students will learn the cultural, spatial, ecological and social dynamics present in the local landscape through direct engagement with community organizers, gather and/or engage spatial ethnographic research in the form of interviews, photos, video, sound, text, experiential approaches, explore the ways in which spatial analysis and ethnographic research methodologies can creatively be activated alongside community organizing efforts, and execute collaborative projects that engage graphic, performative, interventionist, sonic and/or socially based strategies. Students will present their final projects March 8, 2023, Wed, from 6-9 pm, in Perloff Hall 1209B.
Northeast Los Angeles is a fragmented geography of largely undeveloped hills surrounded by working class communities. A patchwork of community groups and environmental organizations have come together to protect vital green spaces from luxury home developments and unsanctioned off-roading that threaten the hillside’s native ecology. These contested spaces are both valued places of respite for community members and home to endangered native ecosystems and wildlife. During this workshop we will work with and learn alongside the efforts of the Save Elephant Hill community based organization, that has fought to protect and preserve open green space in El Sereno for the last two decades.
UHI Spatial Ethnography Workshop: Final Presentations: Mar 8, 6 - 9 pm
The newly established Urban Humanities Network convenes a long weekend on March 3-5, 2023, of intellectual collaboration, community building, and shared meals in Tuscon, Arizona. Though nominally an academic conference, the event experiments with the form, offering a range of place-based workshops and site visits, which will remix the work that you bring to share in the desert. Much of this sharing will be completed while eating, and perhaps critically discussing, Sonoran hot dogs, frybread, carne seca, and other place-specific foods. This gathering will take the pulse and chart a path for the next generation of urban humanities scholars and practitioners.
The urban humanities are a series of practices located at the intersection of architecture, urban studies, and the humanities. Over the last decade, it has been institutionalized as a field through the support of the Mellon Foundation (AUH grant), creating pedagogical programs, research centers, and community engaged scholarship. These efforts have yielded a cohort of scholars and practitioners spread around the world who have pushed the field in new directions, creating more explicit orientations towards race, class, gender, and social justice, while seeding urban humanities in new institutions and new cities. However, this call is not confined to just those who participated in an AUH program, but any scholar, practitioner, or artist whose work fits the spirit of the field.At this critical juncture of the urban humanities, we ask: what have we gained from urban humanities? What is missing, and where do we think urban humanities needs to go from here? How has the new generation of urban humanities scholars shifted the field in their scholarship and practice? What still needs to be filled, addressed, imagined? What new questions need to be asked and networks created? Each of our respective relationships and varying approaches to urban humanities practice, situated in our embodied and site specific knowledge, will inform our collective response to these questions.
Follow Global Urban Humanities network on Instagram for more information: @urbanhumanities_network
Inaugural Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference: Mar 3-5
Join UCLA AUD's Critical Studies program as they hold a symposium on the changes and research that has proliferated from the Green New Deal. The event will be held in Perloff Hall DeCafe at UCLA on Friday, March 3 from 1-3pm. They ask that you rsvp using the QR code to ensure there will be enough seats. We are looking forward to this event and hope that you can join in on the conversations with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Billy Fleming.
After Green New Deal Architecture Symposium: Mar 3 1 - 3 pm
This Saturday, February 18, 2023, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m
the Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese massacre design finalist presentations will be taking place.
Join the six shortlisted teams for a lively public discussion. The shortlisted teams will present their designs and engage in conversation with attendees. Attendees will view design presentations, and be asked to provide feedback and commentary as well as conversation on themes of public space, civic art, memory, honoring the past, as well as exclusion, belonging, and anti-Asian violence and white supremacy. The ensuing conversation will be transcribed and provided to the design teams to inform their final submissions to the evaluation panel.
This event will be held in two sections with an identical format: design presentations, Q & A, and small group discussions. The event will be designed for public attendance via Zoom. All presentations will occur through Zoom but the event will be moderated by Rosten Woo at NAC Architecture (837 North Spring Street Third Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012) – where the public is also invited to view and participate in person.
Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre Design Finalist Presentations : Feb 18 10 - 4pm
One week left to submit proposals for Season 3 of the UHI Digital Salon! Submit your brief proposal on the topic [dis/em/re/mis] PLACE [ment] by next Tuesday, January 31. For more details, visit the website digitalsalonpodcast.org
The Digital Salon Executive Board is excited to announce our Call for Proposals for Season Three of the Urban Humanities Initaitive's Digital Salon, an academic podcast which explores urban humanities through a critical use of sound. Our theme for this new 2022-2023 season is [dis/em/re/mis] PLACE [ment], and we are looking for submissions that engage with the following questions:
In an era full of increasing insecurities driven by anthropogenic climate change and late-stage capitalism, how is our understanding of places changing?
How are borders moving and transforming?
Who and what are being replaced at the level of the human, the plant, the mineral and how are these new divides reshaping the city?
How is city planning shifting and how do we decide what to remember and forget in these cities?
Submissions should include a 1 page single-spaced abstract about your vision for your 20-30 minute podcast and EITHER a 2 minute demo OR a storyboard of your intended podcast.If you are interested in submitting to the podcast, please review our extended CFP.
Submissions are due to the Digital Salon Editorial Board at ucladigitalsalon@gmail.com by January 31st.
ONE WEEK LEFT: Call for Proposals: Digital Salon Season 3: Apply by January 31
Works of multiple UHI Almuni have recently been published in Volume 26: Just Futures of the Critical Planning Journal, including:
Managing Editor: Gus Wendel
Editorial Collective: Claire Nelischer, Eliza Franklin, Hilary Malson, Andres F. Ramirez
Other Contributors: Peter Chesney, Akana Jayewardene
Works of UHI Alumni Now Published in Critical Planning Journal - Volume 26: Just Futures
With a shared commitment to “turn the university inside out” and invite artists, community organizers, and movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change, the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and cityLAB-UCLA are pleased to announce Steve Diaz, Melissa Acedera, Josiah Edwards, and Marlené Nancy Lopez as the 2023 UCLA Activists-in-Residence. Join us to welcome them in an open reception. Register in advance here.
2023 UCLA Activist-in-Residence Welcome Reception : Tuesday January 31 4-6 pm
Join UHI Core Faculty & alumni Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Chris Giamarino, Claire Nelischer, Andres Ramirez, and Gus Wendel for their upcoming PSRG Network Event, Fostering Intergenerational Public Spaces in Disinvested Neighborhoods.
We discuss the potential for intergenerational public spaces in one disinvested Los Angeles neighborhood. Through observations, focus groups, interviews, thick mapping, and participatory design exercises, we worked with neighborhood youth and older adults to understand where their interests intersect or diverge. We yielded insights for more inclusive public spaces and collaboration opportunities between typically marginalized groups.
November 18, 2022 / 12p ET/ On the Web
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkcu6tqzwqH9L4aQdKziSoyNEl99Xa-1oR
Alumni Coming Together: Creating Common Grounds Event
At the upcoming Urban Affairs Association (UAA) conference in Washington DC, UHI alumni Dr. Jacqueline Barrios and Gus Wendel discuss the ways experimental podcasting produces an urban attunement, defined here as a political and artistic disposition, invested in using sound to liberate immersive and participatory strategies for belonging to the city, and each other. Their podcast practice-The Digital Salon-began in 2020 at the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic and has evolved in methodology and reach ever since.
Podcast City: Crisis, Urban Audioigraphy and the Digital Salon
UHI Alumna Leigh-Anna Hidalgo’s essay for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2021) 3 (2): 11–28 narrates the use of the fotonovela medium in a community-driven TOD campaign due to its ability to bridge multiple epistemological and praxis divisions in urban struggles, community organizations, and marginalized communities.
A Love Story Against Displacement
Our team’s shared outreach efforts have culminated in a findings and recommendations report to CNCA Burlington administrators and leadership team. By highlighting existing neighborhood assets and areas of opportunity, our research findings will inform the future implementation of broader scale neighborhood advocacy efforts that center safety and posit the sidewalk as a place for community connection.
coLAB Presents Camino Seguro
This event highlights a new neighborhood amenity: Golden Age Park. Despite the park’s intentional design which emphasizes intergenerational needs, the park remains relatively unknown in the neighborhood. This event is intended to celebrate the park and the community with an afternoon of performances, games, community building, and food! The program will feature a performance by the Heart of Los Angeles’ newly formed Intergenerational Orchestra. We hope you will join us!
COMMON GROUND, A Festival for Intergenerational Public Space
UHI Alumni Research Grant funded installation Plug N’ Play by Evan Bruetsch and Andres F. Ramirez lit up the Levitt Pavilion Concert Series on Saturday, June 25. Between tween instagrammers, curious families, salsa dancers, food vendors and more, countless visitors plug n’ played through the night.
Alumni Research Grant funded Plug N’ Play lights up Levitt Pavilion Concert Series
UHI Summer Research Proposals
Urban Humanities Associate Director Gustavo Leclerc will participate in an upcoming panel about Generational Activism in Chicanx and Latinx Art.
Art of the State Symposium
UHI Associate Director Gustavo Leclerc is a featured guest speaker for the 2022 AA Visiting School “Transborder Landscapes” program. A 3-year long-term research on the US/MX Transborder Landscapes, this program addresses complex socio-political, climate and territorial questions. Transborder Landscapes examines the Tijuana River juxtaposed between US and Mexico.
Gustavo Leclerc joins AA Visiting School “Transborder Landscapes”
The National Science Foundation awarded the Civic Bicycle Commuting Team, co-led by UHI core faculty member Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a $1M-dollar grant to develop a bike-share program in low-income communities near downtown LA. The grant program supports initiatives to urban transit while considering disparities between housing affordability and jobs. In addition to infrastructure and resources, the project will “create digital art in real time” by tracking bicycle “flows.” This data tracking enables analysis, organizing, optimization, and safety . Read more from the UCLA newsroom.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris Wins NSF Grant
Urban Humanities Alumni, Jacqueline Barrios and Kenny Wong published the article City Analog: Scavenging Sonic Archives and Urban Pedagogy, which describes pedagogy for teaching and studying literature and cities through the embodiment of an urban sound scavenger. Extending Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ragpicker to poetically assemble disparate urban imaginaries, we explore how two linked teaching projects set in Los Angeles, CA, demonstrate listening bodies coconstituting both literary texts and urban environments.
To read the full article visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15358593.2020.1829687?scroll=top&needAccess=true
City analog: scavenging sonic archives and urban pedagogy
On April 1, muralist Judy Baca unveiled her newest work: a 26-foot-long, three-panel piece at UCLA’s Ackerman Union. By re-narrativizing the past, present, and future of Westwood to emphasize Indiginous, Latinx, and women’s histories, notions of critical cartography are embedded throughout the mural. This is particularly true for the third panel, “The University of the Future,” created in collaboration with the 2019-2020 Urban Humanities Initiative cohort. The home of the mural is on Ackerman Union — the central location of the Associated Students of the University of California, Los Angeles. Judy Baca, ASUCLA, and SPARC are united in presenting a piece of art that can create conversations and support a changing world in pursuit of social justice, equity, and equality.
Judy Baca unveils the new mural "La Memoria de la Tierra: UCLA."
UHI Alumnus Dr. Peter Chesney was awarded The Norris Hundley Prize, best dissertation for his work, “Drive Time: A Sensory History of Car Cultures from 1945 to 1990 in Los Angeles.” The Norris Hundley Prize honors doctoral research on the US West, US expansionism, Latin America, and the Pacific World.
Peter Chesney Awarded Norris Hundley Prize
UHI Core Faculty member Professor Maite Zubiaurre was nominated for the inaugural 2022 Academy Film Accelerator Program, a five-week program that will provide filmmakers from Latinx communities with education, resources and mentorship focused on the business of filmmaking.
Maite Zubiaurre joins the inaugural 2022 Academy Film Accelerator
“Now that I am well and strong,
I would like to do something of lasting service
for the race.” - Iola Leroy
UHI invites YOU to RSVP to Dear Iola, Love South LA: a film festival featuring 8 short films directed by South LA youth based on their study of the novel Iola Leroy by Frances E.W. Harper. This Saturday, February 20 from 3-5 PM students will share their stories about precious South LA hubs under a pandemic, remembering an iconic skating rink (World on Wheels) as it faces permanent closure, speaking out against displacement and gentrification, exploring why #BLM is their fight, and more.
UHI is proud to support @litlabs_la, director Jacqueline Barrios (UHI ‘17), and collaborator Lili Flores-Raygoza (UHI ‘20).
