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As the world grows increasingly urban, so grows the imperative to more fully comprehend the space of our collective life. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the context of intensely interactive, rapidly expanding cities of the Pacific Rim. More than ever, we must confront fundamental urban inequities, and unpack the roles we scholars and designers play if we are to move away from systemic racism and toward spatially just cities.
In December 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation granted us generous funding to launch the Urban Humanities Initiative. Since then, we have 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 the 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 spawned a sattelite lab called coLAB, located off-campus in the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, an embedded, long term commitment of community partnership has begun.
A book by the Urban Humanities collaboratively co-authored by core faculty, Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonathan Jae-An Crisman, was published by MIT Press (2020) which serves as the first text in this new field, Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City.
