Moving Cities

Spring 2017. UCLA Architecture & Urban Planning

ARCH UD 289.10 / URBN PL 298

Moving Cities: The Politics of the Commons

University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA)

* Interdisciplinary Graduate Course

* Studio Based

* 4 Units

* Co-taught with Dana Cuff

Course Description (Studio Brief)

In this final project of your year-long program in Urban Humanities, we will concentrate on Los Angeles as a collection of everyday places where we can meet nomads and residents, long-time Angelenos and newcomers, those with settler colonial and indigenous ancestors, recent immigrants and those of multi-generations. Our quest in these final weeks is to imagine and help create new possibilities for spaces of compassion, hospitality, welcome, acceptance, and generosity. We will call such spaces the hospitable commons.

The commons is particularly important and problematic now, given increasing inequalities within global society of income and environmental security, as well as access to jobs, drinking water, housing, and medical care, to name a few. At no point since the nineteenth century has global inequality been as great as today. Millions of refugees and immigrants create a world on the move, creating the greatest instabilities in cities though the politics is generally at the scale of nations. Cities around the United States, for example, are declaring themselves “sanctuary cities,” as a way to resist national efforts to deport undocumented residents. As urban humanists, we ask ourselves what more might a sanctuary city offer?

Our first efforts to respond to this question will be to better understand who seeks sanctuary, and who has been excluded from the commons. We define sanctuary more broadly than documentation alone, but include individuals and populations for whom hospitality has been withheld. In particular, we want to better understand situated or spatial circumstances of compassion.

Students' Work