Dana Cuff: Architecture and spatial justice.

A is for Architecture

In Season 3, Episode 18 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ Dana Cuff speaks about her recent book, ⁠Architectures of Spatial Justice⁠, published by MIT Press last year. Dana is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and founding director of cityLAB, both at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Architectures of Spatial Justice ‘examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture's limits—and its potential.’ The book builds on Dana’s founding of cityLAB in 2006, ‘a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities’ and which ‘leverages design, research, policy, and education to create more just urban futures with real impacts for communities in Los Angeles and beyond’, including through coLAB, and in partnership with community organisations.

Dana also founded and runs UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative which offers students from ‘architecture, urban studies, and the humanities a radical platform for crossdisciplinary, impactful, urban scholarship and action’, and which she wrote about in Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020).

You can find some of Dana’s various books via the hyperlinks in the text above, all via the MIT Press website. Dana can be found here on the UCLA site, and here on X/ Twitter. cityLAB can be gotten on Instagram here. There’s a good piece by Dana – ‘Why would architects let themselves be so vitiated?’ on Dezeen, laying into The Line here.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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