Derrick Behm Josa

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Derrick Behm Josa is an urban planner and a DeafSpace engagement and design consultant. He is currently a PhD student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs focusing his research on social infrastructures and community development, including how cities empower cultural production among Deaf communities through planning and design. He is also a recipient of the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship award.

In the last decade Derrick has done various community development work in Washington, DC. Previously, he worked at Gallaudet University Office of Campus Design and Planning as a project coordinator and taught the DeafSpace Design Methodologies course. In 2019, he received his Masters degree from the Urban and Regional Planning program at Georgetown University. Through his experience and work, Derrick believes that the “accessibility” framework needs to continue evolving, rethinking how people connect within places.

Chendi Zhang

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Chendi Zhang (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include age-friendly public space, participation and community engagement, urban design, smart city and technologies, and Urban China.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Chendi was a landscape designer at OLIN, Philadelphia, assisted in curating Penn-China Design Dialogue 2019, worked on Beautiful China – Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China as an assistant editor and book designer, and started to share tutorials about landscape architecture and her experience as an international student in design and planning major as a social media influencer.

Chendi studied and worked in the field of landscape architecture for ten years, holding her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and bachelor’s degree of Science in Landscape Architecture from Beijing Forestry University. With her research concentration, practice experience, and design background, Chendi studies urban issues from a perspective of how planning and design processes can collaborate more tightly and efficiently to better respond to the demands of overlooked and misrepresented vulnerable groups and reduce spatial inequality in the built environment.

Website: chendizest.com

Claire Nelischer

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I am a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning. My research investigates struggles over the production, design, and experience of urban parks and public spaces, with the goal to inform justice-oriented policy and design action. Linking urban design with other fields that speak to urban transformation, including urban political ecology and environmental justice, my work makes theoretical and practical contributions at the intersection of urban planning and design, environmental governance, and spatial justice.

My dissertation investigates the environmental justice outcomes of philanthropic participation in urban green space production, design, and governance, examining three high-profile urban infrastructure reuse parks in Toronto. This work is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In another line of community-engaged design research, as a Doctoral Fellow at cityLAB-UCLA, I lead participatory research with youth and older adults to understand and intervene in the urban public realm to support intergenerationality, mobility equity, and networks of care.

In my research and teaching, I use transdisciplinary approaches that blend the analytical, representational, and projective practices of the social sciences, design disciplines, and humanities. I am Associate Director of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary urban research and teaching effort, where I manage and teach in the Graduate Certificate Program. I am a founding member of the UnCommon Public Space Group, a collective that uses community-based events to connect public space scholarship with the city. Before doctoral studies, I worked for eight years as an urban planner focused on public realm design, policy, and advocacy in Toronto and New York City.

My research, often in collaboration with wonderful advisors, classmates, and colleagues, has been published in design and planning journals, including Moving, Mapping, Imagining: Youth-Centered Methods for Understanding and Envisioning Mobility (Journal of Planning Education and Research), The social life of the sidewalk: tracing the mobility experiences of youth in Westlake, Los Angeles (Mobilities), Turn of Events: Community Events as a Practice for Inquiry in Public Space Research (Planning Theory and Practice), Intergenerational public space design and policy: A review of the literature (Journal of Planning Literature), Caring public space: Advancing justice through intergenerational public space design and planning (Journal of Urban Affairs), Urban humanities as a framework for the study of public space during the pandemic (Journal of Urban Design), and The Road, Home: Challenges of and Responses to Homelessness in State Transportation Environments (Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives).

Jessica Bremner

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Jessica Bremner is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests lie at the intersections of spatial justice, gender, housing, participatory practices, and democracy. Her dissertation research examines the processes that shape the spatial inequality of water access in the Coachella Valley. Jessica was awarded the Babbitt Dissertation Fellowship from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to support this research.

Prior to entering the PhD program at UCLA, Jessica was the Planning Director of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a non-profit community development and design firm based in Los Angeles, USA and Nairobi, Kenya. Jessica has coordinated, supervised, and implemented community development programs aimed at empowering communities around the world. Her projects have ranged in scope and scale from a on online portal to identify water and sanitation connections in Kibera, Kenya to a Play Street pilot project for the City of Los Angeles to the development of a 5-acre park in the Eastern Coachella Valley. She has led dozens of participatory workshops to design, build, and implement public space projects that address social, economic, and physical needs of low-income communities. Her projects and processes have been featured in the New York Times and exhibited at the Louisiana Art Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt in New York, USA. Her dissertation builds from six years of working in the Coachella Valley with KDI.

Before joining KDI, she assisted management and evaluation of the Inter-American Foundation’s Brazil and Ecuador grant portfolios and worked for the Planning Department of the City of West Hollywood. Jessica holds a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and dual Master of Arts in Urban Planning and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Past research projects include examining informality and slum upgrading programs in Brazil and community-engaged research on unpermitted housing and displacement in Los Angeles.