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.

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.

We are excited to start off our 2024-25 UHI cohort, with our seven-day Summer Institute! The Institute introduces students to the principles and practices of urban humanities, focusing on thick mapping as a core methodological approach. Students will develop thick maps in partnership with the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Branch. Our partnership with the library initiates our year-long investigation of the theme: Downtown LA Commons: Past, Present, Future.

California Community Colleges

California’s community college system is recognized as the best in the nation in terms of offering quality, affordable education that improves outcomes for its diverse and underserved population. Yet the state’s affordable housing crisis threatens access to the benefits of affordable higher education. CCC is a report that comprises an evaluation of the existing student housing, an analysis of current proposals to the state, interviews with key facilities staff at community colleges, and a survey of emerging design models for affordable student housing. Read the full project here.

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.