Apply Now for 2024-25 UHI Program!
The Urban Humanities offers an innovative cross-disciplinary curriculum that bridges design, urban studies, and the humanities, leading to a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities to complement your primary degree program. Students explore research methodologies for critical urban analysis and representational techniques that foreground new forms and models of inquiry for imagining the city.
The program begins with the required Urban Humanities Summer Institute from September 9 to September 15, followed by a theory seminar in the Fall, a methods workshop in the Winter, and culminates with a Spring capstone research project selected from those offered by UH mentor faculty. The UH program’s core research agenda is spatial justice with all its ramifications in contexts that range from gentrification and environmental impact to public arts and open spaces. Through innovative methods workshops, students will be prepared for the advanced, multidisciplinary capstones that involve deep collaborations with faculty, community, and peers. Capstones will encompass a range of topics and geographies, undertaken by small groups with mentors from across the UCLA faculty.
Curriculum:
The curriculum is composed of two 4-unit courses, two 2-unit courses, and two elective courses for a total of 20 units.
Required Courses:
Summer: Summer Institute on Core Methods in Urban Humanities (2 units) (The Summer Institute is a 7-day course from September 9 to September 15)
Fall: Urban Humanities Theory Seminar: Critical Spatial Practice (4 units)
Winter: Methods Workshop (2 units)
Spring: A research-based Capstone Project (4 units)
Two 4-unit elective courses from the pre-approved list of courses related to urbanism in Los Angeles, and/or critical spatial practices. Courses pre-approved as electives are viewable on the UHI website. Students may petition for any course that is potentially applicable as an elective course by submitting a request to Gus Wendel at gus.wendel@aud.ucla.edu that includes a syllabus for the course.
Admission Requirements:
The Urban Humanities Graduate Certificate is open to all graduate students across campus, either currently enrolled or newly matriculating in a master's or doctorate program. Students formally apply to the certificate program by submitting a simple online application that includes:
Statement of interest in the Urban Humanities Graduate Certificate (300-600 words);
A resume or curriculum vitae;
A digital copy of academic transcripts for all post-secondary schools attended (unofficial transcript is sufficient);
Simple application form, available for download here.
All materials should be packaged as a single PDF and submitted via email to urbanhumanities@ucla.edu (copy: gus.wendel@aud.ucla.edu) with the subject line “UHI 2024-25 Application” by June 14, 2024. Inquiries about the application and admission process may be submitted to Gus Wendel, Associate Director, at gus.wendel@aud.ucla.edu.
What is Urban Humanities?
Urban Humanities Initiative
Founded in 2012 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Urban Humanities Initiative has established UCLA as an internationally recognized hub for collaborative study of urbanism that bridges design and the humanities. Our own megacity, Los Angeles, demonstrates the power of art, film, and fiction to create an urban imaginary, and serves as an anchor for investigation over all the years of Mellon funding. The UCLA faculty’s great depth as well as breadth of scholarship about our own region provides the foundation for comparative study of megacities on the Pacific Rim, examined in sequence: Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mexico City. In 2016, the Mellon Foundation awarded a new grant to the Urban Humanities Initiative, with the aim of strengthening the existing graduate program and laying the foundation for an undergraduate program. In 2020, with a well-established curriculum and graduate certificate program, a final grant from Mellon allowed us to return UHI's efforts to the world within Los Angeles, with a focus on spatial justice in our complex, multi-ethnic city.
Urban Humanities offers an emerging paradigm to explore the lived spaces of social justice and injustice, dynamic proximities, cultural hybridities, and networked interconnections. The complexity of such spaces calls for new intellectual and practical alliances between environmental design and the humanities. Urban Humanities integrates the interpretive, historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design, to document, elucidate, and transform the cultural object we call the city.
Visiting scholars and designers from across the globe continue to be part of the Initiative. Each year, seminars and studios are linked by a broad conceptual theme which demonstrates overlapping cultural and historical dynamics, including: borders and commons, identity, and urban memory. The Initiative supports new seminars, modification of existing courses, multi-disciplinary studios and research, some with travel to sister-cities, and all with an emphasis on fieldwork in L.A. To give this new design research geographic conviction, cityLAB develops pilot initiatives in the MacArthur Park / Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, an embedded, long term commitment of community partnership began and situated cityLAB’s continued impact.
Visit an archive of past UHI work here.
Graduate Certificate
The Urban Humanities offers an innovative cross-disciplinary curriculum that bridges design, urban studies, and the humanities, leading to a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities to complement your primary degree program. Students explore research methodologies for critical urban analysis and representational techniques that foreground new forms and models of inquiry for imagining the city.
Study begins with an intensive 2-unit Summer Institute that weds interpretive techniques with urban design, followed by one 4-unit theory seminar in the Fall, a 2-unit Winter methods workshop and field studio trip to Tijuana, and concludes with a 4-unit Spring research capstone. The Graduate Certificate also includes two electives that can be taken anytime.