Introduction

While researching cityLAB for the OTH Urban Humanities Issue, there were so many projects, people, and concepts that caught my eye that I feel I could discuss with the director, Dana Cuff, for longer than thirty minutes. We kept it pretty high level, as she offered perspective on cityLAB’s evolution in the past ten years and the parallels in their work and the field with the public view of the urban humanities. Thank you to Dr. Cuff for taking time to chat and connect over shared interests and cityLAB’s exciting work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Chris 

Introduce yourself and cityLAB.

Dana 

Okay. So my name is Dana Cuff. I have a PhD in architecture, which is a humanities degree, because it’s primarily about architectural history, though the way I did my degree was also an anthropological kind of focus, and I have been teaching for 25 years at University of California, Los Angeles. And 16 years ago, I started cityLAB there, which was really a kind of design research center intended to bring architects, actually, to critical issues. Katrina had happened not long before that, speaking of New Orleans —

Chris 

–very familiar.*

*Chris is from South Louisiana and brought this up before the interview started.

Dana 

And we had no way of responding, so it seemed like we needed new formats. So cityLAB emerged out of that. We really took a proactive stance towards critical issues, not Katrina, but issues around Los Angeles, Southern California, and beyond. And then in 2012, I, along with my colleagues, got a big grant, a very generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to launch the Urban Humanities, which was really this experiment in integrative humanities between myself, a professor in planning, Anastasia Lukaitu-Saderas, and two humanities professors, Todd Presner, who works in digital humanities and is also a Germanic scholar and happen to pick up an extra PhD in art history while he was at it, literally just got two. And Maite Zubiaurre, who is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and a translator and writes a really wide array of studies…she’s now working on films about border deaths in the Southwest. So it’s a really great, amazing group of core faculty, and it’s led by, most importantly, the day-to-day operations and management of it is now led by Dr. Gustavo Leclerc, who has his PhD in architecture from UCLA. He was one of my former students, but he’s a senior scholar in Latinx urbanism, so he’s been a terrific addition to the team.

Chris 

So since 2012 and the grant from the Mellon Foundation, there’s definitely been a lot of different movement—scholarship, public understanding, etc., around the urban humanities, defining what that is both in practice and in the classroom. So, ten years later…how has that definition changed for you. 

Well, it’s interesting. I think the definition we gave it at the start still holds for me. It’s just way more meaningful and robust than it used to be. So we defined it, and probably the book we wrote together* would be a better source than my memory, but we define it as the integrative study among architecture, planning and the humanities into the past histories of cities, the contemporary interpretation of everyday life in cities. And this is really what distinguishes what I think is most important about urban humanities—projections about possible futures based on those first two analyses. And to me, it’s that idea of opening possible futures based on historic and contemporary analyses that distinguishes urban humanities from other humanities, where that kind of projective or generative role is less clearly a component. And essentially that turns it into an ethical practice, which is also something that the university has really only explicitly dealt with in philosophy in the past. And at the same time, I would say there’s a tacit ethical dimension in every department in the university. So we try to flesh that out and really think through what that might mean for urban activism from a scholarly engagement perspective.

*Urban Humanities New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press 2020)

Chris

That’s a really good segue—speaking about possible future—into what why “Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus” caught my attention on cityLAB’s recent publication list. Having previously worked in a freelance contract for a graduate program with the ultimate goal of improved primary school teacher retention rates, to see a more wholistic and dynamic approach to educators and the space in policy and in our cities we carve out was impressive.

Dana 

Thinking about cityLAB and Urban Humanities, they’re kind of braided together, dovetailed. But cityLAB is kind of the design/research arm which we fund. We initiate projects and we fund from whatever we can call together, frankly. Humanities is our curricular piece, and it evolved later because we realized that we should be training a new generation of people who have those kind of convictions. Like you’re talking about—how could we make the world we want to live in and why can’t we bring our scholarship to that? So if scholarship, particularly in fields like anthropology but also in architecture and in planning—have been an extractive practice, meaning we go in, we learn about you, and then we go back and we do whatever we want with that knowledge. We wanted to make it an engaged practice where it was clear we were partners in that knowledge production.

So education, workforce housing, came out of cityLAB, but it’s really completely colored by everything that has happened in urban humanities. We basically realized there was land that–a lot of land in California, at least. It’s an interesting history. Again, looking at the history made us understand why this was available and what would be some of the boundaries for it.

When they were laying out the township and section system of Jeffersonian Land Management, two sections were given over to public schools in every township. Crazy. So they had all this land and in the early years of this, so that’s in the late 18th century, in the early years, they sold off portions to fund different things and basically they gave away the family jewels in a way.

And it wasn’t always clear that it had a long-lasting impact on education. Still, there’s a lot of land left, but we now have to be more cautious that whatever we’re taking it for is going to benefit the future of the students who are getting educated there or the teachers.

Chris

Well, and that’s something I imagine in teaching over the past 16-18 years, that hopefully the students that you’re encountering today are a little more acutely aware of. There’s less of that land, for example (chuckling). And so the decisions that we make going forward with it now have to be a little more thoughtful. And they do have to be engaged from a pedagogical level about these issues at an early level and how they can implement them after school.

We have a broad humanities audience for this newsletter. A lot of these conversations are often just about the tangible value of the work that people in humanities spaces produce. And it seems like you guys, by pairing those to both the design and lab aspect of it with the pedagogical, answer some of those concerns.

Dana

Absolutely. Think about the historical evolution of school land, just taking the same example, and then spending two full years trying to figure out what actually happens if someone—it was legal to build on school land before our current legislative bill, but nobody could get it done. And once you started studying that, that’s the sort of contemporary analysis—you understand that the people who know most about this—say administrators, communities who were blocking it, teachers who didn’t want to live in what was nearby, blah, blah, all these people who were stakeholders could teach us what it would mean to open that possibility for future generations of teachers and Californians. So this is the second time in my career I’ve successfully converted research into policy. And we’re nearly at the end of California state policy enabling and entitling the ability to build housing, affordable housing, 50% affordable on school property.

Yeah, it’d be amazing. Our calculation is if it was maxed out–we did a GIS analysis of all the school property in the entire state with our partners from UC Berkeley, and there’s 150,000 acres of school and, and half of that is potentially developable, meaning it isn’t having current uses on it. It is available to people for housing, blah, blah, blah. You could build 2.3 million units of housing at three stories or less, which is what the bill would allow. So it would solve California’s housing problem–like that. That’s not going to happen. But if 10% of that were built, it would be a huge difference.

Chris

Well, and I think that’s something—it must be hard. I’m not an architect, but being around architects all the time, balancing the aspirational with the practical, but also with the policy making, knowing you could fix all of it like that pretty quick. But even 10% at least is a step in the right direction, right?

Dana

Yeah. And, you know, what we think of is that we basically make architecture possible in new situations. That cityLAB’s job is never to do the architecture, but to make it possible for architects to do new kinds of work. So that’s what this policy would do. And your firm would be the kind of firm that might be interested in this, because there should be a lot more districts and nonprofit builders trying to do that.

Urban humanities does not get to that policy level. That’s really a kind of much more in the weeds, deep dive research project. But the people that we hire at cityLAB are always urban humanities graduates because they’re the ones who understand the full spectrum of concerns and issues. And our most successful graduates from urban humanities really are–well, one form of successful graduate are the 50 or so PhDs who went through the program, who got jobs based on, in part, their urban humanities graduate certificates and experiences, which really distinguishes them from other candidates, from art history or literature or education.

Chris 

Well, I think that analytical and engagement pairing serves really well as far as being able to apply—whether they stay in something related to the urban humanities or test waters outside. I think that’s something unique in urban humanities field, which is an ever-evolving discipline.

Dana

But an engagement is key, so you’re raising that again is really fundamental. There’s a part of me that wonders if the students interested in engagement aren’t the ones who come to us automatically. And so they’re just much more dynamic in terms of their thinking about the potential social justice impacts of their scholarship. But urban humanities, the program that we run, puts a very fine point on that and gives them direct experience about how to think through social and spatial justice in terms of humanities kind of contexts. 

Chris

That interplay in the urban humanities with the work and research that you guys do between the spatial justice and environmental justice, and then at the end, the policy making, there must be an activism part somewhere in there too.

Dana

Really, I don’t separate activism out of it. I think scholars engaged in social justice questions have to be recognized. They are also activists and grapple with that. It’s interesting, you know–I just had this happen again in the spring with some of my students, You know, historians and other scholars are rightly uncomfortable in community engaged projects where they don’t affiliate in some way, a kind of membership there. So what we were investigating this spring was the anti-Chinese massacre in Los Angeles. 18 men were hung in 1871 in a race riot, basically. Not exactly part of Los Angeles’ well-known history. And there’s a real reckoning and reparations that has to happen, and history and solid historical scholarship is fundamental to the new sort of regimes or paradigms of reparation. So I had two classes going. The one that was in urban humanities was around black displacement along the California coastlines, southern California. Two of us, three of us, actually, worked on that with students and trying to unearth the historical records–

Chris

Yeah, talk about hard research…

Dana 

Yeah, very hard. I mean, it’s really a rigorous historical past, and it’s absolutely activism, and it matters. And trying to get students to—or, connecting with those students who want to do work that matters in some way, that has an impact, is what urban humanities is able to do. And it surely isn’t all the university students. Humanities is kind of a luxurious enterprise, in some ways. We read archives. We read books —

Chris

Can be a tad esoteric for some. 

Dan

Exactly. And I am all for that being supported by the university. I think it’s wonderful that there’s still room for someone to sit in the basement with a bunch of old Roman coins and go through them. It’s wonderful. It really is a luxury. But that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And we haven’t really allowed for other alternatives in the humanities as legitimate scholarship. And I think that’s one of the struggles that urban humanities–and I put urban humanities and public humanities together, though our focus on cities and space is more explicit. But there’s also other kinds of integrative humanities, like medical humanities–I think that those are all providing new ways for humanists to connect with impactful ideas about their research.

Chris

Definitely. I think what stands out to me is that comparison of the scholar in the basement going through the coins compared to kind of what some of the urban humanities has to offer. I cringe at it a little bit at first because I was an English major, I was a specifically an English literature and political science major. But then you come to realize that, at least for me, the stuff that I learned coming up in those schools was stuff that informs how I see my environment. And what the urban humanities are working towards is always kind of environmental. So it’s always a little bit bigger than the person poring through the old book or the old coin collection. And that’s what it feels to me, and that’s why it’s interesting to me. And that’s what makes it harder for, I think, me and a lot of people to sometimes grasp where does it start, where does it end? And that’s not always the right question to ask. I think it’s, you know, the activities that get you there.

Dana

It’s interesting you say that, where it starts and where it ends. The way that resonates with me and my experience in teaching graduate students. We’ve had now, ten years, 250 students moved through our urban humanities program. And the vast majority of them, I think 210 of those, have gotten their graduate certificate in urban humanities. Big numbers now. And over the years, I’ve seen various kinds of intellectual or ethical stumbles that we make or our students make, but together we discover them. And one of them is that you can’t do trans-disciplinary work, work that spans disciplines as well, before you know what your own discipline’s boundaries are, So, people say,

“Oh, if you mix disciplines, you get a camel instead of a horse or something like that.”

I mean, I don’t really believe that. I think that’s a ridiculous adage. But what has seemed true to me is that when you come to graduate school, especially, and you’re getting a PhD in some field, everyone comes with a kind of imposter syndrome, like how’d I get in–or all the decent people do. And as they go through that, one way of answering that question is–what is my discipline and how do I fit within it?

So they’re searching for the boundaries–so we can’t immediately go in and poke holes in that to say, Oh, look, here’s where we can leak out. This is where we can make a connection. Here’s where art history and planning might intersect in public arts or social practice arts. They’re just too busy trying to make sure they know where art history lives. And I really think that’s an important step in an individual’s understanding of their capacities to respect. So at the beginning, I was always talking about trans-disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and realized that really the first step is to discuss and acknowledge disciplinarity and the value that has.

So then you find what you’re able to—what porous parts of the boundary might make sense for you and your work.

Chris

Yes. Now that totally makes sense. You should know your own space first before you venture off too far I guess (chuckles).

Dana

Yeah. And that is something you learn all your life, but especially when you’re starting as an academic or an advanced graduate student–that’s a plague, almost seems to be a plague in an important rite of passage.

Chris 

Any last projects, news, or upcoming cityLAB happenings you want to plug?

Dana 

Sure. I’ll plug this. There are many things about cityLAB I’d like to plug, but one of the things we’ve done, particularly because of our work in urban humanities at City Lab, is to launch a second satellite cityLAB in the city, not on campus. So we call it cityLAB Westlake or CoLAB. I’m sitting in City Lab Westlake. Now, we formed deep partnerships with three or four community organizations here so that instead of each year engaging with, say, the history of Black Santa Monica and its advocates, we have here really long-term partners who are working, say with Latinx immigration issues, especially in the neighborhood we are.

Chris

Yeah. They’re integrated outside of your scope. They’re already existing there.

Dana

Yeah, that’s right. And really, they’re the experts here, and we’re their guests, and if we do well, become their partners. So that’s this new model of engaged scholarship that’s really taking partnerships and collaboration much more seriously and kind of living where we work. People here are super generous and don’t mind us always lurking around, but we then develop projects with them. We develop research proposals. We have one right now called Reflections, which is telling immigrant histories and the histories of this neighborhood, which is almost entirely Latinx but has waves of different national immigrant histories at the local public library. So we’re working with the library, with Ola which is a Heart of Los Angeles youth education group and our kind of historical background. And together we’re going to make this public project where this urban humanities gets integrated into the neighborhood through the public library.

Chris 

Nice. That’s really cool.

Dana

Yeah, the public library is being central to taking a kind of neutral and politically ethical stand in neighborhoods in general.