Urban Humanities Initiative
What is Urban Humanities?
Urban Humanities offers 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.
Founded in 2012 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Urban Humanities Initiative has established UCLA as an internationally recognized hub for collaborative study of urbanism that bridges design and the humanities. Our own megacity, Los Angeles, demonstrates the power of art, film, and fiction to create an urban imaginary, and serves as an anchor for investigation over all the years of Mellon funding. The UCLA faculty’s great depth as well as breadth of scholarship about our own region provides the foundation for comparative study of megacities on the Pacific Rim, examined in sequence: Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mexico City. In 2016, the Mellon Foundation awarded a new grant to the Urban Humanities Initiative, with the aim of strengthening the existing graduate program and laying the foundation for an undergraduate program. In 2020, with a well-established curriculum and graduate certificate program, a final grant from Mellon allowed us to return UHI's efforts to the world within Los Angeles, with a focus on spatial justice in our complex, multi-ethnic city.
Visiting scholars and designers from across the globe continue to be part of the Initiative. Each year, seminars and studios are linked by a broad conceptual theme which demonstrates overlapping cultural and historical dynamics, including: borders and commons, identity, and urban memory. The Initiative supports new seminars, modification of existing courses, multi-disciplinary studios and research, some with travel to sister-cities, and all with an emphasis on fieldwork in L.A. To give this new design research geographic conviction, cityLAB develops pilot initiatives in the MacArthur Park / Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, an embedded, long term commitment of community partnership began and situated cityLAB’s continued impact.
View UHI 2013-2023 archives here.
Urban Humanities Graduate Certificate
2025-2026 Cohort Application
Academic Year Focus: Care As Critical Spatial Practice
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 methods for critical urban analysis and representational techniques that foreground new forms and models of inquiry for imagining the city.
Study begins with an intensive 2-unit Summer Institute (September 8 - 13) that weds interpretive techniques with urban design, followed by one 4-unit theory seminar in the Fall, a 2-unit methods workshop series (enrolled during the Winter), and concludes with a 4-unit Spring research capstone. The Graduate Certificate also includes two electives that can be taken anytime.
For the 2025-2026 academic year, the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative Graduate Certificate will focus on the theme Care as Critical Spatial Practice. At a time of converging crises—ecological, political, social—care emerges as both a practice and a provocation. In Los Angeles and beyond, these crises manifest across scales, from the cellular to the collective, and across spaces, from the hills to the beaches. In this context, an ethic of care challenges us to reflect critically on our disciplinary commitments and positionalities, and to explore how these might be reoriented toward more just, relational, and reciprocal engagements with urban space. By framing care as an essential dimension of spatial justice, the program invites students to collaboratively consider what it means to intervene in the spaces of the city, and to imagine new futures rooted in solidarity, repair, and shared responsibility for collective continuance.
Curriculum:
The curriculum is composed of two 4-unit courses, two 2-unit courses, and two elective courses for a total of 20 units.
Required Courses:
Summer Institute: Introduction to Thick Mapping (2 units)
An intensive 6-day course held from September 8 to September 13, introducing foundational tools and frameworks for community-engaged, interdisciplinary work in urban humanities.Fall Seminar: Urban Humanities Theory – Critical Spatial Practice (4 units)
A graduate-level seminar focused on key theoretical foundations, including spatial justice, the public realm, and critical methodologies in urban research and design.Winter Methods Workshops (2 units)
A series of hands-on workshops conducted in partnership with the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. These sessions build practical skills in urban research methods, including mapping, media production, and fieldwork. Students will enroll in two units in the Winter quarter, but workshops will take place throughout the academic year.Spring Capstone (4 units)
A culminating research capstone in which students engage urban humanities theory and methods through community partnerships, fieldwork, and interdisciplinary scholarship to produce a public-facing project.Electives (two 4-unit courses)
Students must complete two 4-unit elective courses selected from a pre-approved list of offerings related to urbanism in Los Angeles and/or critical spatial practices. The list of approved electives is available on the UHI website. Students may also petition to count other relevant courses by submitting a syllabus and brief rationale.
Admission Requirements:
The Urban Humanities Graduate Certificate is open to all graduate students across campus, either currently enrolled or newly matriculating in a master's or doctorate program. Students formally apply to the certificate program by submitting an online application via Google form (application link) that includes:
Responses to questions about interest and background (submitted directly in the Google form);
An uploaded PDF copy of resume or curriculum vitae;
An uploaded PDF copy of academic transcripts for all postsecondary schools attended (unofficial transcript is sufficient)
The deadline to apply is June 13, 2025. Inquiries about the application and admission process may be submitted to Gus Wendel, Associate Director, at gus.wendel@aud.ucla.edu.