Tag Archive for: urban theory
Loukaitou-Sideris Publishes New Book on Urban Design
June 20, 2019 /0 Comments/in Luskin's Latest Blog Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris /by Mary Braswell
"The New Companion to Urban Design," the sequel to an authoritative anthology on urban form and design co-edited by UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, has just been published. The new book reflects current thinking across several disciplines, including urban studies, design, planning and geography, and widens its scope to include perspectives from the Global South. Migration, rapid urbanization, climate change and the explosive growth of digital technology are among the many trends changing the landscape of cities. Essays in the latest volume explore the new economic order fueling these trends, the search for solutions to the conflicts they create, and the role of urban design in bringing about justice, sustainability and other aspirational goals. Loukaitou-Sideris and co-editor Tridib Banerjee, chair of urban and regional planning at USC, assembled contributors from diverse backgrounds to offer original perspectives on the contemporary urban experience. The "New Companion" is a sequel to 2011's "Companion to Urban Design," a sourcebook for students, scholars and practitioners. "Urban design scholarship is interested not only with aesthetic issues but also with the social, political, cultural and economic forces that affect the built environment and its residents, as well as the human and environmental consequences of design interventions," the editors wrote. Loukaitou-Sideris' research focuses on the public environment of the city, its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on the urban resident. The urban planning professor also serves as associate dean of academic affairs at UCLA Luskin and associate provost for academic planning for UCLA.
Fonna Forman, left, and Teddy Cruz deliver their May 1 UCLA Luskin Lecture on "Un-Walling Citizenship." Photo by Stan Paul
Using Urban Design to Advance Justice Lecture series and book focus on access, dignity and democracy as the pillars of city planning
May 30, 2019 /0 Comments/in School of Public Affairs, Urban Planning Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Kian Goh, Vinit Mukhija /by Mary Braswell
By Mary Braswell
A deep exploration of social justice as a guiding principle behind urban design will evolve into a book conceived by the UCLA Luskin faculty.
Over spring quarter, Urban Planning brought 10 prominent scholars to campus to shed light on public space in all its complexity. They spoke about the market forces, political calculations, environmental concerns and lifestyle trends that are transforming cities in Southern California and around the world, pushing some citizens to the fringe. And they offered frameworks for putting inclusion back at the center of urban design.
The speakers' insights will become chapters in a book that shares the same name as the lecture series: "Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City."
"Cities are very much theaters of inequality, an inequality that has been increasing in the last decade," said Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, who organized the project with Chair Vinit Mukhija and Assistant Professor Kian Goh.
"The larger question that motivates this series is whether there is anything we can do through physical planning and urban design to create more just cities."
The speakers who came to UCLA as part of the Harvey S. Perloff Lecture Series and Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series brought decades of experience both in scholarly settings and on the front lines of urban upheaval.
They included Setha Low, described by Loukaitou-Sideris as "one of the most prominent anthropologists and ethnographers of our time." A professor at City University of New York's Graduate Center, Low has worked with U.N. Habitat and other institutions to develop global social justice indicators for urban design.
"This is a really important moment in time," Low said during her April 23 visit to UCLA. "There is a push to create a society, at a moment of great divisiveness, that is much more open and accessible and let's say free. We need places to come together."
She said one of her greatest challenges is communicating these ideals to the general public.
"We need to really explain how public space creates flourishing societies," she said. "We need to really reach outside of ourselves and reach a much broader public so that they understand why it matters."
Anthropologist and ethnographer Setha Low is developing a set of social justice indicators for urban design. Photo by Les Dunseith
The April 25 lecture by Harvard Professor Diane E. Davis was moderated by Goh, who noted, "The things that I learned from her, mostly to do with politics and scale, really informed the work that I do now."
Davis, who earned her Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA and now serves as the chair of urban planning and design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, raised foundational questions such as "What makes a city public?" and "What gives a city a robust democratic public sphere?"
"I'm really interested in the politics of how people and states interact or don't interact with each other," she said. "I think that is a really important framing for thinking about the best urban design."
The notion that public space transcends national boundaries guided a May 1 talk by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, professors at UC San Diego and partners in a studio specializing in urbanism, architecture and political science.
"We believe that the convergence of geopolitical borders, climate justice and poverty is ultimately the challenge of our time," said Cruz, explaining a project the two had created for the U.S. Pavilion at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Called "MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence," the presentation cast the border region as a shared space interwoven with environmental, economic and cultural connections.
Forman sounded an alarm about the "nativist mentality" that is moving into the mainstream, "legitimizing open racism that we haven't seen since the middle of the 20th Century."
"We see the San Diego-Tijuana border region as a microcosm of all of the injustices that neoliberal globalization has inflicted on the world's most vulnerable people: poverty, climate change, accelerated migration, gender violence, human trafficking, slow suburbanization, privatization and so on," she said.
Forman said that she and Cruz want to tell a very different story about life on the border.
"Our work reimagines the U.S.-Mexico border as a tissue of social and spatial ecologies, an amazing laboratory for political, urban and architectural creativity. For us, conflict is a creative tool."
These other speakers also contributed to the series: Rachel Berney and Jeff Hou of the University of Washington, Alison Hirsch of USC, Kimberley Kinder of the University of Michigan, Matt Miller of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Rios of UC Davis.
Loukaitou-Sideris, Mukhija and Goh will join the "Just Urban Design" lecturers in contributing chapters to the planned book, which has sparked interest from several publishers.
Collecting the insights of guest speakers in a single book is a model that UCLA Luskin Urban Planning has successfully used before. In 2014, Loukaitou-Sideris and Mukhija invited lecturers to contribute essays examining urban activities such as street vending, garage sales and unpermitted housing to create the book "The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor," published by MIT Press.
Stan Paul contributed to this article.
On Flickr:
View photos from the UCLA Luskin Lecture by Setha Low.
View photos from the Harvey S. Perloff Lecture by Diane E. Davis.
View photos from the UCLA Luskin Lecture by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.
Terry White is deputy general manager at King County Metro Transit in Seattle. Photo by Stan Paul
Transit Forum Focuses on Impact of Mobility Innovations UCLA scholars join government, nonprofit and private sector representatives to discuss declining ridership in an era of emerging mobility services
March 12, 2019 /0 Comments/in Alumni, Business and the Environment, Complete Streets, Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels, Environment, For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Sustainable Energy, Transportation, Urban Planning Martin Wachs, Michael Manville /by Claudia Bustamante
By Claudia Bustamante
Across the country, public transit ridership has been declining.
But that isn't the story in Seattle. Terry White, deputy general manager at King County Metro Transit, said that can be attributed to the agency's community efforts.
Speaking at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies' 12th annual Downtown Forum on Transportation, Land Use and the Environment held March 1, 2019, at the Japanese American National Museum, White said an organization that doesn't reflect its community will lose trust.
"We've been making a concentrated effort that the folks that make up our outreach and leadership teams reflect the communities we go out and serve," White said. "I don't think it's an accident that we have better relationships since 2014."
King County Transit, which most recently won the American Public Transportation Association award for outstanding transit system, makes more than 400,000 trips per day and has seen all-time-high ridership as more people move into the Seattle area.
Joining White at the forum were UCLA scholars, and government, nonprofit and private sector representatives who share other real-world examples of how to tackle declining transit ridership, especially in an era of emerging mobility services.
ITS' 12th annual forum was held at the Japanese American National Museum. Photo by Stan Paul
The forum focused on successful public-private partnerships that could fill gaps in transportation services. Other topics included effective uses of data to manage mobility, practical innovations that can yield great gains for transit ridership, and how new mobility technology and services can enhance equity and quality of life.
Speaking specifically to how a big-city transportation department can put equity first was Ryan Russo, director of Oakland's Department of Transportation, which was recently formed as a new model of urban mobility centered around progressive policies that aim to recognize and address past injustices.
Russo said the Bay Area city's legacy of redlining is still seen and felt throughout the area, which means that departmental projects must be considered through an equity lens. Dedicated monthly meetings are held to strategize ways of infusing equity into projects. For example, Paint the Town combined community art and traffic safety through street murals.
For every project approved in less disadvantaged communities, at least two were approved for low-income neighborhoods.
"Transportation and street management isn't about getting people from A to B," Russo said. "It's the way we will serve our community."
Partnerships and Pilots
In light of the proliferation of private mobility companies, the forum discussed different ways the public sector could partner with these companies to meet transportation needs.
One example came from HopSkipDrive, a ridehailing service for school-aged children, which partnered with Los Angeles County to provide free rides to foster youth. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, foster youth were provided core protections for school stability, meaning that districts need to provide transportation to keep these students in their schools of origin. Many foster youth bounce from school to school, and they graduate at far lower rates than do their peers.
"We are not meant to replace school bus companies. We are designing our systems to ride alongside school buses and existing transportation systems. That way we can provide mobility opportunities and access for all kids," said Qiana Patterson, senior director of public partnerships.
In fact, finding innovative ways to partner with the private sector to tackle the biggest transportation issues of the day is something that Metro has been doing through its Office of Extraordinary Innovation.
Its unsolicited proposal process has yielded more than a dozen contract awards and proofs of concept for key projects, including the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, a gondola to Dodger Stadium, mobile tolling and bus electrification.
"The public sector is reluctant to admit they have a problem," said Nolan Borgman, Metro senior transportation planner. "You need to admit that there is a problem that you don't know how to solve."
In Santa Monica, the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, along with the rise of electric scooters, drove city officials to authorize a pilot program to offer more mobility choices and gain a better grasp on the use of shared public space.
Declining ridership has also forced many public agencies to adopt innovations to improve transit.
In Everett, Massachusetts, a pop-up bus lane is being utilized to improve mobility and connections to major nearby destinations like Boston. Instead of conducting traditional outreach, City Planner Jay Monty said a pilot project incorporated outreach and gleaned real-time public feedback. The part-time lanes only for buses went quickly from pilot project to a statewide model, and today more than a dozen similar Tactical Transit Lane projects have sprung up across the country as a means of improving mobility.
Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville said that neither new trains or lanes free up space on roads over time. What has worked — where it has been implemented — is congestion pricing.
Speaking to the fairness and equity concerns that come up when congestion pricing is discussed, Manville said that not only was the entire transportation system financed regressively through gas taxes, sales taxes and registration fees, but pricing access to roads could produce revenue to offset the costs for low-income individuals.
"Congestion harms people who live in low-income communities with disproportionate low vehicle ownership," Manville said. "They have to bear the higher health and pollution burdens of driving, which leads to higher rates of preterm births and other negative health outcomes — and thus inheriting poverty."
Earlier this year, Metro decided to move forward with a two-year study of congestion pricing, evaluating different pricing methods, including per-mile charges and tolls in specific areas.
Even though all the new mobility options may make it seem otherwise, we are not living through a particularly disruptive period of transportation, said Martin Wachs, emeritus professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin. People have long been using the same language to describe new mobility — from bicycles and jitneys in the 19th and 20th centuries to today's ridehailing companies like Lyft and Uber, as well as electric scooters.
Instead of reacting to technology, Wachs said, agencies should create policy that builds upon the capacity of innovation.
A paper by Michael Storper and Allen Scott of UCLA Luskin has been selected as the year's best by a scholarly journal.
Paper on Nature of Cities Earns Accolades UCLA Luskin scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott are recognized for their agenda-setting critical assessment of current urban theory
June 9, 2017 /0 Comments/in Development and Housing, For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, Global Public Affairs, School of Public Affairs, Urban Planning Allen J. Scott, Michael Storper /by Les Dunseith
The majority of the world's people live in cities, and numerous theoretical approaches from diverse fields have suggested frameworks for thinking about urbanization and the complexity of the urban form.
Now, two UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs scholars are being recognized for seeking to frame those approaches as a common language, or foundational concept, for the study of urbanization, an effort that has further enlivened and deepened an ongoing debate. It has also sparked a bit of controversy.
Michael Storper of the Department of Urban Planning and his longtime colleague and collaborator Allen J. Scott have been selected by the journal Urban Studies as recipients of the Best Article award for 2016's "Current Debates in Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment."
The journal's website explains that the Urban Studies Best Article designation is awarded by the editors and authors to the most innovative and agenda-setting article published in a given year. Mark Stephens is editor of the international journal, which was established in 1964 and is published by SAGE. The winning article was selected in a process that narrowed a field of 20 initial candidates to five before the final selection was made.
Storper is a distinguished professor of regional and international development at UCLA Luskin, and Scott is a distinguished professor emeritus of public policy and geography. Their article proposed an analytical framework for urban studies while strongly critiquing three existing and influential perspectives: postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theory and planetary urbanism.
Storper, who also holds academic appointments at the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris and the London School of Economics, noted that this was the second paper on this subject in collaboration with Scott. In the earlier paper, the two UCLA professors had argued for a different approach, generating vigorous debate that led proponents of competing theories to offer their own critiques in response.
The newest paper addresses those critiques and offers further explanation by Storper and Scott. In the journal article, they wrote: "We claim that there are fundamental common genetic factors underlying urban patterns, and a robust set of conceptual categories within which urbanisation processes and urban experiences can be analysed, wherever they may occur in the world."
Storper and Scott considered high levels of diversity and disagreement over the last century, writing "we asked if a coherent, stable theory of the city could be constructed." Such a theory would need to accomplish all of the following: "account for the genesis of cities in general, capture the essence of cities as concrete social phenomena, and make it possible to shed light on the observable empirical cities over time and space."
The authors identify and put forth five basic variables, or forces, that shape what they refer to as the "urban land nexus" at different times and places. These include:
the overall level and mode of economic development;
prevailing resource allocation rules;
forms of social stratification;
cultural norms and traditions;
and relations of political authority and power.
In refuting other theoretical formulations of what defines urban, Storper and Scott further conclude: "Not only does our analysis provide us with the tools for distinguishing between the general and the particular in urban outcomes, but also for separating out that which is distinctively and inherently urban from the rest of social reality.
"We must distinguish between phenomena that occur in cities but are not generated by urbanization processes as such, and phenomena that are legitimately elements of cities in the sense that they play an active role in defining the shape and logic of urban outcomes."
The full article and lists of other finalists and previous winners are available online, as is a video explanation by Storper.