Architecture & Urban Planning

To fend off lawsuits over its plans to build a new city in the rugged countryside northwest of Los Angeles, Tejon Ranch Co. made a landmark concession to environmentalists. It promised a decade ago to preserve 90% of its land — 240,000 acres — as an untouched ecological conservancy for public enjoyment through educational and research programs.

Editor's note: The Climate Science Alliance was founded and is led by Fellow Amber Pairis. The Switzer Foundation provided foundational funding to create CSA with a Leadership Grant.

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, Fellow Nathan McClintock proposes that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes.

How can we how can we learn from communities to understand risk and support resilience planning? Kristen Goodrich brings a social ecological approach to characterizing natural hazards when developing flood modeling by studying the human experience with and response to flooding.

If anyone knows where to find refuge from air pollution near Los Angeles freeways, it’s Suzanne Paulson. The UCLA atmospheric chemistry professor has spent years studying how invisible plumes of dirty air from car- and truck-choked roadways spread into surrounding neighborhoods — increasing residents’ risk of cancer, asthma, heart disease and other illnesses.

An effort to improve access to parks in Harris County Precinct 1 will begin by asking residents what kind of green spaces they want and need. "This project is going to yield many benefits for our residents, particularly our most vulnerable and under-served populations," said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said during the Monday kickoff of the Park-Smart Precinct One project, an effort to eliminate some of the park deserts in that portion of Harris County. ...

The School of Architecture continues to build its Race and Gender in the Built Environment Initiative with new faculty appointments. Edna Ledesma will join the school as a fellow for the 2017-18 academic year, and Miriam Solis will begin her appointment as an assistant professor in Fall 2018 after completing a Switzer Environmental Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.