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About This Lecture

Dr. Dana Cuff, an educator, scholar, designer, and activist who explores how design can contribute to building more just and equitable cities, work on rebuilding after the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena and the housing crisis in Los Angeles.

In 2006, Cuff founded cityLAB, a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore more equitable metropolitan possibilities. Starting in 2019, cityLAB expanded its social and political engagement by creating long term partnerships with community organizations in the region, first in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and after the devastating fires of 2025, in Altadena. cityLAB has developed sustainable, high-performance, low-cost housing prototypes for infill sites ranging from backyards to schoolyards. Cuff will address the lab’s projects with a focus on its community-led, post-fire initiatives.

Speaker

Dr. Dana Cuff, a leader in urban innovation, is a Distinguished Professor at UCLA who engages spatial justice and cultural studies of architecture as a teacher, scholar, practitioner, and activist. In 2017, after a decade of research that included a full-scale demonstration house built on the UCLA campus, Cuff co-authored the first of her several pieces of California State legislation, opening 8.1M single-family lots for secondary rental units. In 2024, she launched “Small Lots, Big Impacts,” a design-development initiative to build a new generation of dense, compact starter homes on publicly-held land. Cuff has authored numerous books, including Architectures of Spatial Justice (MIT Press, 2023), Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020), Architects’ People (with W.R. Ellis; 1989), and Architecture: The Story of Practice (1989). 

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