Los Angeles River, Dodger Stadium and Downtown LA. Photography © Iwan Baan 2020

How do we go about shaping a better city? How can land use and urbanism be explored to create solutions for pressing urban problems? Can multidisciplinary approaches to urban planning help create new ways of defining and shaping urban growth?

In Los Angeles, ubiquitous and challenging land development conditions have positioned the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design to unpack these topics and explore them like perhaps no other school of design can. An institution that focuses on collaborative research between its students and faculty, UCLA AUD strives to create learning environments fueled by experimentation and discovery. As a means to highlight the initiatives being focused on at the school, Archinect spoke with Associate Adjunct Professor, Jeffrey Inaba, and lecturers David Jimenez Iniesta and Gillian Shaffer of UCLA AUD's IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio. The studio is one of four research topics: Entertainment (studio previously covered on Archinect), Mobility, Technology, and Urban Strategy, offered as part of the one-year post-professional Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design (M.S.AUD) program available at the institution's IDEAS campus.

Together, we discussed common misconceptions students have when learning about urbanism and land use. Inaba stated, "We try to shift our students' frame of reference to understand the goal of urbanism as an effort to meet these really universal human needs in an inventive and radical way that uses the administrative systems that are in place."

The IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio digests this information, and we come up with urban design proposals that channel resources to respond to the most urgent challenges for cities like Los Angeles... — Jeffrey Inaba

Jeffrey, what is “urban strategy,” and how would you describe the IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio?

Urban strategy involves studying how contemporary cities evolve — the forces that affect their growth and decline. The IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio digests this information, and we come up with urban design proposals that channel resources to respond to the most urgent challenges for cities like Los Angeles, such as climate change. Our particular point of view is that these challenges are opportunities to envision a better city; a city with new kinds of urban spaces and types of buildings. We want to work with planners, the real estate community, architects, and communities to improve the quality of our urban environment. 

What excites me about UCLA and the city is that this is where the work and living types for today are fomenting, and the IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio will hopefully contribute something to them. — Jeffrey Inaba

You’ve had the opportunity to teach and work with several prominent architectural institutions. What excites you most about working within UCLA’s M.S.AUD program at the IDEAS campus?

In the 20th century, New York established and refined the American building types for working and living — the skyscraper and the apartment building. But today, who wants to work in an air conditioned open office or live in an overheated or underheated apartment?

In LA, there are great examples of work and residential architecture attempting to develop spaces for working and living. They design for people to be outdoors and not stuck in a HVAC envelope, to enjoy moving around and experiencing their neighborhood and not be bound to one place, and try to be creative with the zoning and real estate realities of big cities. What excites me about UCLA and the city is that this is where the work and living types for today are fomenting, and the IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio will hopefully contribute something to them.

If New York was great at creating a model of development based on building efficiency, what seems to be happening in California are experiments to understand basic human needs like interacting with people, enjoying the outdoors, and tranquility in super realistic economic ways.

In your opinion, what do you think is a common misconception students have when learning about land use and urbanism?

From the immediate and close up perspective, they seem impenetrably complex. We try to shift our students’ frame of reference to understand the goal of urbanism as an effort to meet these really universal human needs in an inventive and radical way that uses the administrative systems that are in place.

Our particular point of view is that these challenges are opportunities to envision a better city; a city with new kinds of urban spaces and types of buildings. We want to work with planners, the real estate community, architects, and communities to improve the quality of our urban environment. — Jeffrey Inaba

What should we expect to see at the upcoming symposium, LA-ND: The Future of Land Value in LA?

What we have found to be so amazing in LA is that making land — digging, terracing, channeling, leveling hills and forming new hills, moving earth around to create "landmarks" — is the first thing people did when building everywhere. This includes downtown, the hillside neighborhoods, the reservoirs, the 101, 5, 405, Hollywood Bowl, Dodger Stadium, Griffith Observatory, and the Getty, and most likely this is what people will do in the future. The event is a conversation about this under acknowledged propensity and for all of its positive and detrimental effects so far; to think about whether moving land will help us to design for climate change in an ingenious way.

Christopher Hawthorne will talk about why we need vision plans for the city, Francesca Ammon, the author of Bulldozer, will share the technology that has been instrumental to urban land transformations, and Debora Mesa of Ensamble Studio will discuss their approach to land and structure. Heather Roberge, Barbara Bestor, Jimenez Lai, and I will respond to their presentations. 

Define: "Urban Strategy"

To help further define the studio, David Jimenez Iniesta and Gillian Shaffer share their perspectives. Together they discuss their thoughts on "urban strategy" as the work toward shaping students who can become agents of change within the practice of urban planning. 

What does "urban strategy" mean to you? In your opinion, what do you think are common misconceptions students have when learning about land use and urbanism?

David Jimenez Iniesta (DJI): In general, urbanism has been traditionally taught as a problem solving-oriented practice that simplified questions to very specific and close up scales, isolating the answer from other agents equally important in urban development. We understand urban strategy as a set of tools to observe urban conditions from a myopic and hypermetropic perspective where students should switch lenses and research on multiple scales; from the territory and infrastructure to domestic urban planning. 

Despite a system based on the production of architectural objects as professional simulations, academia has a public mission of bringing awareness that architecture and urban design can be embedded in new forms of research and production as platforms that go across agents and fields... — David Jimenez Iniesta

The real challenge is to propose an exercise that takes into consideration all these different agents and partners that are involved (directly or indirectly) in urban design as an open collaborative process (architects, urban planners, landscapers, engineers, developers and real estate investors, politicians, sociologists, neighbors…) without giving up the possibility to propose radical vision plans for the future of LA. Fictions and speculations that let architecture go beyond simple storytelling, that establishes links and debates with contemporary milieus.

Gillian Shaffer (GS): I like to think in terms of Rem Koolhaas's urban operating systems. With this in mind, urban strategy involves first a close analysis of the different components and flows within a city, the forces that shape them and the challenges they face. Putting cities in a global context and making comparisons can also be valuable for testing how certain interventions might perform in relevant urban situations. This reading of cities then informs the construction of radical new narratives and visions, which aim to address its challenges and in turn produce new opportunities through the crystallization of ideas into form. Urban strategy is also inherently cross-disciplinary, involving research, theory and design, and collaborations with planners, developers, architects, and communities to create alternative future urban environments.

In both practice and academia, we need to think carefully about topics like how our physical cities will be shaped by new technologies, how our culture will be defined by these technologies, and how we as a discipline will address the changing environmental conditions of the Anthropocene through the mode of design.

As a practicing architect and academic, where do you see the future of architectural academia heading?

GS: In the twentieth century, urban design and architecture were often approached with a carte blanche mindset of holistic urban planning, involving the wholesale demolition and reconstruction of cities. Contemporary urban design and architectural discourse is now headed towards viewing cities as dynamic and integrated systems, as well as a lens through which to look at urgent questions of new technologies, increased globalization, environmental change, and the political dimensions of cities. In both practice and academia, we need to think carefully about topics like how our physical cities will be shaped by new technologies, how our culture will be defined by these technologies, and how we as a discipline will address the changing environmental conditions of the Anthropocene through the mode of design. 

Architectural discourse is also changing rapidly, to include alternative histories and precedents, and evolving to include a much broader spectrum of interdisciplinarity and design research. There’s a lot of room for creativity and redefinition here in terms of the questions we address, the tools we use, and collaborations across backgrounds and fields.

DJI: Despite a system based on the production of architectural objects as professional simulations, academia has a public mission of bringing awareness that architecture and urban design can be embedded in new forms of research and production as platforms that go across agents and fields opposite to an opaque disciplinary isolation; blurring pedagogy, research, and practice. This implies embodying a new pedagogical culture that considers technical and aesthetic questions in relation with politics, economics, sociology, sustainability... as part of these discussions. A multidisciplinary academia that produces architects as mediators dialoguing in a multimedia language for a broader audience.

Students often think urbanism is more deliberate than it actually is. [...] Even when projects are built, there’s the gap between what is realized and the scope of the architect’s vision. History and chance actually play large roles in shaping the fabric of cities, as much as careful top-down planning. — Gillian Shaffer

In your opinion, what are the difficulties students have when learning about land use and urbanism?

GS: Students often think urbanism is more deliberate than it actually is. When studying the projects in Never Built Los Angeles (2013), we established how circumstantial the built fabric of Los Angeles is — how its identity reflects the financing of projects, the available technologies, and how projects have historically moved through planning. Even when projects are built, there’s the gap between what is realized and the scope of the architect’s vision. History and chance actually play large roles in shaping the fabric of cities, as much as careful top-down planning. The city as we see it — as-built — is a collection of design impulses.

How is urban strategy being explored across UCLA AUD’s other programs?

In our three-year M.Arch. professional program, urban strategy is explored at all levels of the curriculum. In core studios, second year students develop underutilized urban sites, imagining the future of dense, multi-family housing in Los Angeles. These projects speculate on new typologies for both housing and public space. In courses like Theories of Architectural Programming, Dana Cuff has tested how affordable housing might occupy existing Los Angeles Unified School District properties. In Advanced Topics and Research Studios, faculty deploy a variety of urban strategies, exploring the roles of resilience, environmental performance, or capital in shaping urban organization here in Los Angeles and beyond. 

For example, Neil Denari’s recent Research Studio, Polytrophic Urbanism: Los Angeles Adapts, envisioned the political context of LA’s future development as scenario plans that altered their design proposals. Students examined the existing physical, social, and economic conditions and worked from the bottom up to project a newly zoned “self-sustaining city.”