Department: Urban Planning

tamika l. butler

tamika l. butler (she/her or they/them) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research employs a critical race, historical, legal, and policy-based approach to examine how transportation policy and infrastructure have been used to segregate, isolate, and prevent the mobility of Black and other historically oppressed groups of people.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, tamika consulted, wrote, and spoke as a national expert on issues related to public policy, the built environment, equity, anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, organizational behavior, and change management. She transitioned to policy work after litigating for three years as an employment lawyer at Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center. tamika has a diverse background in law, community organizing and nonprofit leadership.

tamika received her J.D. from Stanford Law School, and received her B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Sociology in her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. She lives in Los Angeles with her wife and kids.

tamika has also authored and co-authored several publications, including:

Butler, T. (2020, June 9). Why We Must Talk About Race When We Talk About Bikes. Bicycling. https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a32783551/cycling-talk-fight-racism/
Butler, T. (2020, November 13). I Love to Ride My Bike. But I Won’t Call Myself a ‘Cyclist.’ Bicycling. https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a34463062/cyclist-exclusionary/
Tamika Butler. (2017). Can Vision Zero Work in a Racist Society? Vision Zero Cities Journal, 2. https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/can-vision-zero-work-in-a-racist-society-43daad4a8561
Tamika Butler. (2020, May 27). Stop Killing Us: A Real Life Nightmare. Noteworthy – The Journal Blog. https://blog.usejournal.com/stop-killing-us-a-real-life-nightmare-dd47c576ec1b
Tamika L. Butler. (2020, September 14). To tackle pandemic racism, we need to take action, not just take to social media. The Kinder Institute for Urban Research Urban Edge Blog. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2020/09/14/transportation-transit-tackle-pandemic-racism-we-need-take-action-not-just-take-social-media
Tamika L. Butler, Veronica O. Davis, Anita Cozart, & L. Dara Baldwin. (2021). My Back is Still the Bridge: The White Problem in Planning. Carolina Planning Journal, 46. https://carolinaplanning.unc.edu/editors-note

Veronica Terriquez

August 4, 2021/in Urban Planning Immigrants, low-income residents of color, Youth civic engagement All Faculty, Ladder Faculty Faculty /by Melody Wang

Veronica Terriquez joins UCLA from UC Santa Cruz, where she was an associate professor of sociology. She received her doctorate in sociology from UCLA, a master’s in education from UC Berkeley, and her bachelor’s in sociology from Harvard University. Often taking an intersectional approach, her research focuses on social inequality, immigrant incorporation, and transitions to adulthood. She is interested in understanding how institutional policies and practices can be responsive to the needs of low-income immigrant, Black, and Indigenous communities. She has published widely in journals and disseminated research in collaboration with schools, unions, community organizers and local governments. Terriquez’s research is geared toward policy relevance. She has received major grants from the Irvine Foundation, the California Endowment, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Professor Terriquez’s publications include awarding-winning work recognized by the American Sociological Association. She is committed to active mentorship of students both as project collaborators and co-authors of published work.

Jessica Bremner

July 20, 2021/in Urban Planning Democracy, Gender, Housing, Participatory Practices, spatial justice PhD Students /by Melody Wang

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.

Andres F. Ramirez

April 17, 2021/in Urban Planning PhD, Students /by Luskin Staff

Andrés F. Ramirez is a writer, curator and cultural producer, working in the realm of architecture urban planning and design. He is the co-founder of PLANE–SITE, an agency devoted to the production and dissemination of original content for architecture and the built environment. Andrés also works as an independent consultant in architecture and urban planning projects, with an emphasis on social processes and public space.

Andrés is Director of the non-profit research platform Aerial Futures, an organization devoted to cultural exchange surrounding the architecture of flight. He was the curator of Garden City Mega City, Urban Ecosystems of WOHA, at the Museum of the City of Mexico (2017); curator of the first contribution of the Seychelles to the XV Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) Between Two Waters, Searching for Expression in the Seychelles, and co- curator for Medellín, Topography of Knowledge at the Aedes Architecture Forum (2015).

Marques Vestal

March 30, 2021/in Urban Planning Marques Vestal All Faculty, Ladder Faculty Faculty /by webteam

Marques Vestal is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Critical Black Urbanism. He serves as a Faculty Advisor for Million Dollar Hoods, a community-driven and multidisciplinary initiative documenting the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. He also serves as a historical consultant for the Luskin Center for History and Policy. Marques is a tenant of Los Angeles and a member of the South Central local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Marques is an urban historian studying the social history of residential property in Black Los Angeles during the rebellious twentieth century. His work links property conflict—the everyday contracts, solicitations, complaints, lawsuits, and murders over property—to broader transformations of real estate, urban development, and Black liberation. He argues that this space of incessant conflict is the unwritten housing policy of the United States.

Marques’ research interests are broad, but center on the twentieth-century experience of a few key political relations to land: property, housing insecurity, municipal incapacity, and racial capitalism. Having witnessed, archivally and firsthand, the violence of Los Angeles’ rental housing markets, he is dedicated to projects that advance social housing and horizontal tenant governance.

Publications

Marques Vestal and Andrew Klein, “What we should have learned from L.A.’s long history of homelessness,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2021. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-22/homelessness-encampments-shelter-los-angeles-history

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley et. al. “The Making of a Crisis: A History of Homelessness in Los Angeles,” UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. https://luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/66/2021/01/LCHP-The-Making-of-A-Crisis-Report.pdf. (February 2021)

Lytle Hernandez, Kelly and Marques Vestal. “Million Dollar Hoods: A Fully-Loaded Cost Accounting of Mass Incarceration in Los Angeles,” Radical History Review. http://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/

Katz, Alisa with Peter Chesney, Lindsay King, and Marques Vestal. “People Are Simply Unable to Pay Rent: What History Tells Us About Rent Control in Los Angeles,” White Paper. Luskin Center for History and Policy, University of California, Los Angeles. (October 2018)

Sarah Soakai

January 21, 2021/in Urban Planning PhD, Students /by Luskin Staff

Malo e lelei (Hello, in Tongan). Aloha (Hello, in Hawaiian). I originally hail from the Ko’olauloa Mountains and North Shores of Oahu, Hawai’i with ancestral ties to the South Pacific Islands of Tonga. I look at Community Development and Social Policy as it relates to communities on and in the margins. Current research efforts examine third sector community-based faith-based organizations and institutions and their role in social service delivery during and post COVID times. In particular, churches are central anchor institutions among Pacific Islander communities in diaspora. Research and planning with these indigenous communities means looking at their association and relationship with their faith-based organization and institution. Previous research efforts had looked at the effects of city ordinance policies concerning people experiencing homelessness that prohibit lying (sleeping) and sitting on public sidewalks, parks, beaches, and other public spaces. Third sector nonprofit community-based organizations are at the forefront of homelessness issues. And the work continues with improving trauma-informed care and alignment with state services to minimize bureaucracy and duplication.

In addition to research, I currently TA for the Urban Planning department and the Public Affairs Undergraduate program. Before my tenure as a doctoral student, I oversaw the Speech and Debate program, taught tenth grade English, eleventh and twelfth grade AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) college prep, and also did some college and career counseling at a Title 1 public high school for several years.

Given the current moment, I look forward to meeting you via email and/or Zoom, and hope to meet up soon in person.

Adam Millard-Ball

January 4, 2021/in Urban Planning autonomous vehicles, carbon trading, climate action planning, Street-network sprawl All Faculty, Ladder Faculty Faculty /by Les Dunseith

Adam Millard-Ball is Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. His research and teaching are about transportation, the environment, and urban data science. Trained as an economist, a geographer, and an urban planner, he analyzes the environmental consequences of transportation and land-use decisions, and the effectiveness of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His research uses large-scale geospatial data analysis as well as econometric and qualitative methods.

For more details about Dr. Millard-Ball’s teaching and research, please visit his website. Note that he is on sabbatical for the 2023-24 academic year.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez

December 3, 2020/in Urban Planning Immigration, Mass Incarceration, Race Kelly Lytle Hernandez All Faculty Faculty /by webteam

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Still Racist: U.S. Immigration Control since 1790, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2026. From 2017 to 2021, Professor Lytle Hernández served as the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. As director of the Bunche Center, she led an unprecedented fundraising campaign and launched the Bunche Fellows Program. Professor Lytle Hernandez was also the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She now serves as a principal advisor to MDH. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.

For speaking requests, please contact Rolisa Tutwyler at CCMNT Speakers Bureau at info@ccmntspeakers.com

For media requests, please contact Jessica Wolf (UCLA Media Relations) at jwolf@stratcomm.ucla.edu

Awards

2010 Clements Prize for Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol

Honorable Mention, 2011 Lora Romero First Book Prize, American Studies Association

Honorable Mention, 2011 John Hope Franklin Book Prize, American Studies Association

Finalist, 2011 First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

2007 Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article to appear in the Western Historical Quarterly.

2007 Bolton-Kinnaird Award for best article on the Spanish borderlands.

Selected Publications

“Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880 – 1910,” Pacific Historical Review v 83, n 3 (August 2014)

“Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” Boom: A Journal of California (Winter 2011).

MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010)

“An Introduction to el Archivo Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Migración,” co-authored with Pablo Yankelevich, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies v 34, n 1 (Spring 2009), 157-168.

“Persecuted Like Criminals”: The Politics of Labor Emigration and Mexican Migration Controls in the 1920s and 1930s,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies v 34, n 1 (Spring 2009), 219-239.

“The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943-1954,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2006), 421-444.

“Ni blancos ni negros: mexicanos y el papel de la patrulla fronteriza estadounidense en la definición de una nueva categoría racial, 1924-1940,” Cuicuilco v 11, n 31 (Mayo-Agosto 2004): 85-104.

Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1900 – 1999: A Sourcebook for Teachers, published by the National Center for History in the Schools (Fall 2002).

Bo Liu

November 12, 2020/in Urban Planning Climate Change, environmental planning, life cycle assessment, transportation planning, urban data science /by Luskin Staff

Bo Liu is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning, focusing on climate change mitigation and urban analytics. His research interests include regional understanding of environmental change and mitigation strategies, and integrated analysis of technology, infrastructure and public policy. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Luskin Center for Innovation and a Lecturer in the Public Affairs Undergraduate Program. Previously, he worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the New York State Assembly.

Selected publications:

Deepak Rajagopal, Bo Liu (2020). Waste to energy: The United States can generate up to 3.2 EJ of energy annually from waste. Nature Energy 5: 18-19.

Bo Liu, Deepak Rajagopal (2019). Life cycle energy and climate benefits of energy recovery from wastes and biomass residues in the United States. Nature Energy 4: 700–708.

Sha Yu, Jill Horing, Qiang Liu, Robert Dahowski, Casie Davidson, James Edmonds, Bo Liu, Haewon Mcjeon, Jeff McLeod, Pralit Patel, Leon Clarke (2019). CCUS in China’s mitigation strategy: insights from integrated assessment modeling. International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 84: 204-218.

Shweta Srinivasan, Nazar Kholod, Vaibhav Chaturvedi, Probal Pratap Ghosh, Ritu Mathur, Leon Clarke, Meredydd Evans, Mohamad Hejazi, Amit Kanudia, Poonam Nagar Koti, Bo Liu, Kirit S. Parikh, Mohd. Sahil Ali, Kabir Sharma (2017). Water and electricity in India: a multi-model study of future challenges and linkages to climate mitigation. Applied Energy 210: 673-684.

Bo Liu, Meredydd Evans, Sha Yu, Volha Roshchanka, Srihari Dukkipati, Ashok Sreenivas (2017). Effective energy data management for low-carbon growth planning: an analytical framework for assessment. Energy Policy 107: 32-42.

Lining Wang, Pralit L. Patel, Sha Yu, Bo Liu, Jeff McLeod, Leon E. Clarke, Wenying Chen (2016). Win-Win strategies to promote air pollutant control policies and non-fossil energy target regulation in China. Applied Energy 163: 244-253.

Samuel Speroni

November 2, 2020/in Urban Planning Education Policy, Emerging Technologies in Transportation, Transportation Equity, Transportation Planning and Policy, Transportation Politics and Finance, Travel Behavior PhD, Students /by Luskin Staff

Sam Speroni is a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and a researcher with the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. He completed his master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning, also at UCLA, in June 2020. Sam is advised by Dr. Evelyn Blumenberg and Dr. Brian D. Taylor.

Sam’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of transportation, education, and new mobility, where he looks for ways to improve equitable access to educational opportunities for vulnerable and disadvantaged student populations. His research extends to many other aspects of travel behavior and transportation systems, all with an emphasis on equity. Sam’s recent applied planning research project analyzing high school students’ ridehail trips to school for HopSkipDrive (full report | policy brief) received the national Neville A. Parker Award for outstanding master’s capstone in transportation policy and planning from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC).

Sam is a Future Leaders Development fellow of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C., and in 2020 he was named the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center (PSR UTC) outstanding student of the year. He is also the recipient of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Graduate Fellowship (2019 and 2020) and the Intelligent Transportation Systems California / California Transportation Foundation joint graduate scholarship (2020).

Prior to UCLA, Sam was a high school English teacher and school administrator in Charlotte, North Carolina, through Teach for America. Originally from New England, Sam grew up in Massachusetts and earned his bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies with honors from Brown University in 2011, where he was also captain of the varsity swimming & diving team.