Chris Giamarino
Research Associate
Chris Giamarino is a public space activist, researcher and doctoral candidate in urban planning at UCLA Luskin. His dissertation explores how unhoused people and skateboarders resist hostile architecture through do-it-yourself (DIY) design tactics, which he advocates city planners and urban designers should learn from to produce more inclusive public spaces. Presently, he is a California Policy Lab Graduate Fellow and a Haynes-Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. He holds a Bachelor of Science in urban sustainability with magna cum laude honors from New York University and a Master of Science in urban planning from Columbia GSAPP. His research on vehicular homelessness has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate. His forthcoming book chapter entitled “Just Urban Design Scholarship?” will be featured in Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City (MIT Press, November 2022), edited by Kian Goh, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, and Vinit Mukhija. In it he critiques the lack of consideration for justice in seminal urban design books that continue to influence pedagogy and practice. In his free time, he enjoys skateboarding and constructing DIY obstacles in public spaces.