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Urban Humanities Initiative

@urbanhumanities

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Graduate Certificate Program @ucla
Architecture+Urban Planning+Humanities
partner of @citylabucla
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Walking Altadena: Memory, Care, and Public Pedagogy in Post-Fire Altadena Students from two courses in UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design—Spatial Justice and the City and Urban Humanities Capstone: Care Place, and Performance—will present their final exhibition, Walking Altadena, at Bob Lucas Memorial Library. The free, public exhibition will take place on: Saturday, May 30 10:00 AM-12:00 PM Bob Lucas Memorial Library 2659 Lincoln Ave, Altadena Intended as an initial public conversation and feedback session, this exhibition presents student research and community-facing design proposals that explore collective memory, care, and climate justice in post-fire Altadena. Using archival analysis, the projects connect questions of environmental justice and infrastructures of care through walking-based public pedagogy. We invite community partners, residents, and guests to engage with students’ work and share comments to help students understand what elements of the projects are clear, sensitive, and carry potential for use in future community-facing work. Guests are welcome to stop by at any point between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM. #WalkingAltadena #Altadena #AltadenaLibrary #PostFireRecovery #SpatialJustice by @urbanhumanities
KBLA Talk 1580’s James Farr will deliver a guest lecture at UCLA as part of the Urban Humanities Initiative, in collaboration with cityLAB-UCLA. Theme for the lecture, Altadena: What We Witness. What We Honor. What We Record. What We Pass Forward. Drawn from months on the ground in Altadena. These stories will live on… because history isn’t just made — it’s honored, recorded, and passed forward. — James Farr #KBLA1580 #JamesFarr #AltadenaRising #UCLA #GuestLecture by @urbanhumanities
UHI Fall 2025 — Listening to Los Angeles: Care as Critical Spatial Practice Taught by Claire Nelischer and Doğa Tekin How is care spatialized in the city? What role do caring relationships play in spatial justice and the “right to the city”? How is care sounded in the city? How can we listen to care, and what do we hear when we listen closely? In the UHI Fall 2025 seminar, a multidisciplinary group of graduate students explored these questions through readings, discussions, field visits, and experimental sonic methods. Against the backdrop of Los Angeles’ present polycrisis, the seminar approached care as a critical spatial practice that reveals more just, relational, and reciprocal ways of inhabiting the city. Through close listening, sound scavenging, and sonic production, students created sonic thick maps and accompanying zines that trace the multisensory and multiscalar dimensions of care across distinct Los Angeles landscapes: mountains, rivers, valleys, and beaches. The seminar culminated in a public exhibition presenting these layered sonic interpretations of care in Los Angeles. —— Projects: Amidst the Silence: Conflict of (Un)Caring Practices along the Los Angeles River (2-5) Ícaro Carvalho, Evan Eshel, Anna Shoemaker, Heidi Yang Winds Thresholds: A Sonic Ascent (6-8) Ayanna Rose, Hugo Fortin, Serafin Olguin, Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar), Shiyue Shen Currents of Care on the Shores of Santa Monica (9-11) Anthony Garcia, Chunyi Li, Sarahy Torres, Hardy Wang, Kathy Zhang (Food)ways of Caring: Daily Movements Across Valley (12-14) Alexander Morris, Isabel Filson, Lynn Hur, Skijler Hutson Visit our website to learn more about these projects: https://www.citylab.ucla.edu/uhi-projects/fall-2025 by @urbanhumanities
The Winter 2026 Urban Humanities Initiative + Public Architecture workshop series is off to a great start! Scan the QR code to join us for future sessions! #urbanhumanities #publicarchitecture by @urbanhumanities
How is care spatialized in the city? What role do caring relationships play in spatial justice and the “right to the city”? How is care sounded in the city? How can we listen to care, and what do we hear when we listen closely? The 2025 Urban Humanities Initiative Fall Seminar brought together a diverse group of graduate students who used these questions to ground their engagement with the foundational theories, spatial concepts, and methodological approaches of the emerging field of urban humanities, and to focus their multimodal sound projects. Centering care as critical spatial practice, students explored the theoretical and practical potential of care, culminating in a final sonic thick map of several Los Angeles landscapes. A final exhibition showcased the students' sonic thick maps and zines, where colleagues, friends, and community partners could engage with the multisensory interpretations of how care is spatialized and sounded in the city. Congratulations to the 2025-2026 UHI cohort on completing the Fall quarter. We look forward to what's ahead this Winter. by @urbanhumanities
Listening to Los Angeles: Care as Critical Spatial Practice An exhibition of student work from the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative Graduate Certificate Program Tuesday, December 09, 7:30 - 9:00 pm at UCLA Perloff Hall (Double Height Space) Join us for Listening to Los Angeles: Care as Critical Spatial Practice, an exhibition of student work from the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative fall 2025 seminar. In the context of Los Angeles’ present polycrisis, care has emerged as a critical spatial practice that points toward more just, relational, and reciprocal relations in the city. Centering the theme of care, students used sound scavenging and sonic production methods to develop sonic thick maps and accompanying zines that explore and interpret the multisensorial and multiscalar dimensions of care across several distinct Los Angeles landscapes. This open exhibition welcomes all to experience the students’ work. Listen to the sonic thick maps, flip through the zines, and discuss these projects and future possibilities with students, instructors, and alumni of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative. by @urbanhumanities
cityLAB’s two pedagogical initiatives - @urbanhumanities and Public Architecture - hosted a guest lecture by Dr. Alexandra Staub, Professor of Architecture at Penn State University. Dr. Staub’s lecture centered on her recent book, Architecture and Social Sustainability, highlighting how engaged, ethical design research, pedagogy, and practice can leverage architecture’s potential for social change, from the building to the block to the city. cityLAB shared our own approach to “starting small” as an approach to impactful, community-driven design scholarship and teaching. by @urbanhumanities
Our 2025-26 @urbanhumanities Graduate Certificate program kicked off with a week-long Summer Institute exploring ”care as critical spatial practice“ with our wonderful partners at the @lapubliclibrary. Students engaged with the theories, fieldwork practices, and representational tools of urban humanities to create a ”thick map“ exploring practices, stories, and spaces of care at the library. Final thick maps and full descriptions available on our website. TRUTH IN MENUS: Anna Shoemaker, Sarahy Torres, Alexander Morris, Ayanna Rose TACTICAL AGENCY: Hugo Fortin, Skijler Hutson, Lynn Hur, Anthony Garcia, Chunyi Li PEOPLE‘S PLACE: Evan Eshel, Hardy Wang, Ícaro Carvalho, Isabel Filson, and Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) BODY OF CARE: Serafin Olguin, Shiyue Shen, Anatoli Ulyanov, Heidi Yang, & Kathy Zhang by @urbanhumanities
Join us for a guest lecture by Dr. Alexandra Staub, editor of the new book, Architecture and Social Sustainability: Understanding the New Paradigm. Co-presented by cityLAB-UCLA‘s Urban Humanities and Public Architecture Initiatives, we will discuss socially engaged design research, pedagogy, and practice globally and here at UCLA. Thursday, October 09, 2025 | 12:00 - 1:30 pm | UCLA, Perloff Hall room 1243A Alexandra Staub, Ph.D. is a Professor of Architecture at Penn State University, where she teaches design studio, research methods, and courses on architectural ethics. After training as a professional architect at the University of the Arts in Berlin, she completed her Ph.D. at the Brandenburg Technical University at Cottbus, Germany. Her research focuses on how our built environment shapes, and is shaped by, our understanding of culture. She has lectured and published widely in the field, including three books published by Routledge: Conflicted Identities: Housing and the Politics of Cultural Representation (2015), The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space, and Gender (2018), and Architecture and Social Sustainability: Understanding the New Paradigm, published as an open-access book in 2025. by @urbanhumanities
Congrats again to the 2024-2025 UHI cohort for completing a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities! The program may have concluded, but new urban humanist adventures await. To learn more about our Urban Humanists projects please visit our project page: www.citylab.ucla.edu/uhi-projects #urbanhumanities #uclaurbanhumanities #thickmapping #research #urbanplanning #spatialjustice #designjustice by @urbanhumanities
Congrats again to the 2024-2025 UHI cohort for completing a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities! The program may have concluded, but new urban humanist adventures await. We will miss you terribly, but our paths will intersect again! by @urbanhumanities
UHI Spring ’25 Final Project: Team 2: Urban Ecologies ARCHIVES OF CARE: MAPPING MUTUAL AID IN URBAN ECOLOGIES Ángela Godoy-Fernández, Anna Whittell, Dusty Frye, Willow Coleman Our installation explores how community-led mutual aid networks in Downtown Los Angeles sustain life where formal systems fail, particularly during times of crisis (e.g., wildfires, extreme heat, and food insecurity). At the heart of this project, we highlight the labor of care practiced by grassroots organizers, centering Polo’s Pantry, the Peace and Healing Center, Skid Row community hubs, and People’s Market. Drawing from interviews, maps, zines, video, and sound scavenging, our installation traces how migrants, unhoused individuals, and low-income residents have a history of caring for one another through systems of support that are fast, flexible, and grounded in deep, nurtured relationships fostered through day-to-day interactions. This work is a part of a history, an archive, of care and resistance rooted in kinship, trust, and the rhythms of daily life. Move through layered ecologies and witness the intimacy of organizing. Listen to the DTLA voices; hear the rhythm of the LA river; plant seeds; read wet paper. Interact with maps to learn about all resources made available by the communities of DTLA who are creating alternative futures. by @urbanhumanities

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