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.
Graduate Certificate
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.
Study begins with an intensive 2-unit Summer Institute that weds interpretive techniques with urban design, followed by one 4-unit theory seminar in the Fall, a 2-unit Winter methods workshop and field studio trip to Tijuana, and concludes with a 4-unit Spring research capstone. The Graduate Certificate also includes two electives that can be taken anytime.