cityLAB leverages design, research, policy, and education to create more just urban futures with real impacts for communities in Los Angeles and beyond.

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Founded in 2006, cityLAB is a multidisciplinary research center within UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design Department. Through rigorous analysis, radical methodologies, education, and practical implementation the lab actively explores urban dynamics in the postsuburban metropolis, rethinking sustainable approaches to spatial, political, and social infrastructures to promote equitable and sustainable cities.

Although based in Los Angeles, cityLAB’s impact extends well beyond the region. The lab has garnered significant national and international recognition and focuses on building creative partnerships with educational and community organizations in the US and around the world. Our team of architects, designers, planners, and humanists further disseminates new ways of approaching urban studies.

To stay updated on cityLAB’s events and news, you can join the mailing list by clicking here.

To stay updated on cityLAB’s events and news, you can join the mailing list by clicking here.

Statement in Support of Student Protests

The events of the past three days on UCLA’s campus have been shocking, heartbreaking, and despicable. University campuses are places for the free expression of ideas. The public university, in particular, makes space for debate and scholarship, where the public can assemble to peacefully voice opinions with the knowledge that they will be safe and secure when doing so. This makes the extreme violence experienced by our students, faculty, and staff all the more inhumane. While security and police watched, a mob attacked those in the encampment. This attack was then wrongfully and deceitfully used to justify “protecting” students by destroying their encampment. 

We condemn these actions in the strongest terms. Surely the university’s top priority is the safety and security of its student body. This week, UCLA has failed to uphold its core tenet.

As a research center focused on spatial justice, we hold in highest regard the fundamental right to use public space for political expression. Architecture and urban planning have long been wielded as tools of oppression and erasure, and over the past few days, we have watched the militarization of our shared campus spaces in real time. 

It will take a long time to heal from this collective trauma, but we stand in solidarity with our students as they courageously speak out against injustice. We stand for the right to create space, with our bodies and material means, for protest. The violence is an effort to chill our collective discourse and to shake our commitment to each other. We vow that the events of this week will only cause us to redouble our efforts to work through spatial justice issues with empathy and compassion. Our community is hurting right now, but cityLAB’s doors will remain open for those in need of solace and support. If anyone needs conversation, community, a hug, or a space to process their emotions, you are welcome to join us as we navigate these challenging times together.

BEWell Parklet
2023–Ongoing

Collaborating with the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative, UCLA transportation, and UCLA students to propose and design a parklet on campus.

Promoting a healthier and happier campus

Urban Humanities offer an emerging paradigm to explore the lived spaces of social justice and injustice, dynamic proximities, cultural hybridities, and networked interconnections. The complexity of such spaces calls for new intellectual and practical alliances between environmental design and the humanities. Urban Humanities integrates the interpretive, historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design, to document, elucidate, and transform the cultural object we call the city.

Urban Humanities Initiative

Urban Humanities Initiative

Architectures of Spatial Justice
Year: 2023

Organized around projects and topics, Architectures of Spatial Justice is a compelling blend of theory, history, and applied practice that focuses on two foundational conditions of architecture: its relation to the public and its dependence on capital. Emerging from more than two decades of the author's own project-based research, Architectures of Spatial Justice examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture’s limits—and its potential.