Informal City Speaker Series – The Informal as Praxis

Teddy Cruz obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border. Cruz has been recognized in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work […]

Informal City Speaker Series -The Garage Sale

Margaret Crawford teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and urban history as well as urban design and planning studios focusing on small-scale urbanity and postmodern urbanism.Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. Her book, Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns, examines the rise and […]

Informal City Speaker Series – Tending to Life and Plants in Los Angeles: Latino Immigrant Domestic Workers and Gardeners

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her primary research has focused on gender and migration, informal sector work, and religion and the immigrant rights social movement. Most of these studies focus on Mexican and Central American immigrant communities, but she has also researched Muslim American […]

Informal City Speaker Series – To Regulate or Not: Day Labor, Worker Centers, and Informality

Professor Valenzuela holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chicana/o Studies and Urban Planning. His research is primarily concerned with the issues faced by minorities and immigrants in the U.S. His work focuses on three key areas, which are interrelated: 1) immigration and labor markets, 2) poverty and inequality, and 3) immigrant settlement patterns […]

Informal City Speaker Series – Place as a Site of World-Making

Drawing from architecture, human geography, and urban planning, Michael Rios’ research focuses on the intersection between marginality, urbanism and public space. A theme emerging from this work is “placemaking” as an assemblage of different practices that involves negotiations of belonging, authorship, and power; a means for marginalized communities to produce different imaginations of space, action, […]

Informal City Speaker Series – America’s Playground: Informal Sociability among Atlantic City’s Street Homeless

Jacob Avery's primary research interests include urban poverty and inequality, social service provision, culture, social interaction, and fieldwork methods. Through an immersed ethnographic account of street life in Atlantic City, NJ, Avery examines how a network of chronically homeless and chemically addicted individuals experience their precarious condition on a daily basis, and how and why […]

Informal City Speaker Series – Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles Crystals, Mud, and Space: Street Vending Informality

After graduating from Yale Law School, Gregg Kettles held two judicial clerkships, first with the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then with the Honorable Irma E. Gonzales, United States District Court for the Southern District of California.  Kettles then practiced for six […]

Digital Cities: Smarter Transportation Forum

This forum will bring together thought leaders across an array of professions to explore the challenges of private and public managers of land use and transportation systems when faced with changing techonlogy.