Architecture & Urban Planning

Fellow Story

Kirk nominated for UCLA Pritzker Genius award

In California, the buildings people live in are among the state’s largest sources of climate pollution. Retrofitting them is a core part of the state’s climate plan — but until recently, there were few safeguards in place to protect the people inside. Chelsea Kirk, a policy strategist and housing advocate based in Los Angeles, is helping to change that.
August 28, 2025
Fellow Story

Linda Shi: flood-impacted communities need better buyout programs

What happens to floodplain buyout sites after demolition of structures? Does ecological restoration or reconciliation of the floodplain occur? By what criteria should we assess what is on the site? Under what conditions do government programs promote more ecologically dynamic land management?
August 28, 2025
Fellow Story

Kirk authors report advocating for renters’ right to cooling

A Renters’ Right to Cooling draws on the experiences of tenants in South L.A., an area disproportionately burdened by the effects of climate change and extreme heat, with less tree shade, green space, and other infrastructure investments than other parts of the city.
July 28, 2025
Fellow

Maria Lopez Vazquez

2025 Fellow
Maria Lopez Vazquez is a multicultural landscape designer from the border region of Tijuana-San Diego (MX-US). She has a Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. By pursuing her Master's in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, she hopes to inform her landscape design practice with sustainable efforts as an artist and maker.
Fellow Story

Nguyen takes role at Just Cities Institute

The Just Cities Institute advances racial justice in public policy and urban planning through transformative models of participatory and community-based design.
May 9, 2025
Fellow Story

Kirk launches Rent Brigade to track rent-gouging in the wake of the LA fires

Following the Los Angeles fires, Chelsea Kirk launched The Rent Brigade: “a collective of tenant organizers, advocates, web programmers, designers, researchers, and other Angelenos using data to fight back against predatory landlords”...
March 31, 2025
Fellow Story

Diezmartinez and Short publish on climate justice imaginaries as tools for evaluation

By offering new “possibilities of policy evaluation” that emerge from climate justice imaginaries in Boston, this paper showcases how visions of the just and unjust city can serve as governing devices to transform policy evaluation practices and advance more just climate futures.
January 30, 2025
Fellow Story

Monika Shankar: Unearthing the role of soils in urban climate resilience planning

Urban soils are often overlooked in climate resilience planning and policy. In their October 2024 Nature comment article, Shankar and co-authors advocate for a broader framing of urban soils within an equity-centred social ecological...
November 26, 2024
Fellow Story

Grove reviews how environmental justice and urban ecology interact

The review paper asks how environmental justice and urban ecology have influenced one another over the past 25 years in the context of the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) project.
August 26, 2024
Fellow

Sanjana Paul

2024 Fellow
Sanjana is an engineer, environmental justice researcher, and systems thinker working at the intersection of infrastructure, climate, and technology. She is a PhD student at MIT, where her research focuses on renewable energy, energy justice, and the electric grid. She is the co-founder of Rooted Futures Lab, a research and action collective advancing environmental justice in technology, and Earth Hacks, a nonprofit harnessing hackathons as a form of climate action. Her work has ranged from atmospheric science software engineering at NASA to passing decarbonization policy at the local level. She holds a BS in electrical engineering and physics, and a Master’s in City Planning from MIT.