Dana Cuff
Professor, Architecture and Urban Design Department, Urban Humanities Initiative, and Urban Planning
Director, cityLab - UCLA
Dr. Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Urban Planning, and Director of cityLAB at UCLA. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Architecture from Berkeley, Cuff has published and lectured widely about design and inclusion, the architectural profession, and affordable housing. She is a prolific writer, including books such as The Provisional City about postwar housing in Los Angeles, a co-authored text called Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, and most recently, Architectures of Spatial Justice (2023). Cuff has had greater public impact than most academics through the co-authoring of successful state housing legislation grounded in cityLAB’s research (AB 2299, 2016; AB2295, 2022). For over a decade, Dr. Cuff has led the Mellon-funded Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA, one of the most innovative social justice curricula in the country. The significance of Cuff’s work is reflected in recent prestigious awards: Women in Architecture Activist of the Year (2019), Researcher of the Year (2020), Educator of the Year (2020), and Public Impact Research Award (2022).
"Architecture’s Promise: Designing Equitable Futures"
Architecture and urbanism are described as a continuous stream of historical crises, but this does not reduce the urgency of contemporary threats surrounding climate change and social justice. Sustainability is widely understood as a promise, unfulfilled, of a built environment that can made cooler, with less carbon, and more renewable materials. But legitimate promises about social justice are more suspect, particularly with the demise of utopian thinking and the increasingly legible racialized legacy inscribed in the urban landscape. To make buildings and cities that fulfill their potential to be more just does not require abandoning aesthetic goals, but rather the opposite: the democratization of good design. To do so requires excavating existing models as well as exploring new practices that transform design agency. Architecture’s ability to enable more equitable futures is evident in projects around the globe, as well as in current innovative design research at UCLA’s cityLAB and elsewhere. These experiments, largely emanating from academic institutions, demonstrate that small acts of research-based architecture create powerful new forms of buildings and cities with significant implications for designing more equitable futures.
