Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is the Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, a former Associate Dean, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and a core faculty member of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative.
Professor Loukaitou-Sideris’ research focuses on the public environment of the city, its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on the urban resident. Her work seeks to integrate social and physical issues in urban planning and architecture. An underlying theme of her work is its “user focus”; that is, she seeks to analyze and understand the built environment from the perspective of those who live and work there. Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris’ research includes documentation and analysis of the social and physical changes that have occurred in the public realm; cultural determinants of design and planning and their implications for public policy; quality-of-life issues for inner city residents; transit security, urban design, land use, and transportation issues.
Recent and ongoing projects, funded in part by the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation, The California Department of Recreation and Parks, the Mellon Foundation, the Haynes Foundation, the Gilbert Foundation, and the Mineta Transportation Institute, include: documentation of varying patterns of use of neighborhood parks among different ethnic groups; proposals for the physical and economic retrofit of inner city commercial corridors, examination of gentrification and displacement in transit station neighborhoods, sexual harassment in transit environments, studies of transit security, and planning for parklets.
She has served as a consultant to the Transportation Research Board, Federal Highway Administration, Los Angeles Metro, Southern California Association of Governments, South Bay Cities Council of Government, Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, Project for Public Spaces, the Greek Government, and many municipal governments on issues of urban design, open space development, land use and transportation, and she has been commissioned to author research papers by the National Academies and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris is the author of numerous articles, the co-author of the books Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (University of California Press, 1998), Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (MIT Press, 2009), Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Divided? (MIT Press, 2019), and Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press 2020); and the co-editor of the books Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities (Temple University Press, 2006), Companion to Urban Design (Routledge, 2011), The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (MIT Press, 2014), New Companion to Urban Design (Routledge, 2019), and Transit Crime and Sexual Violence in Cities: International Evidence and Prevention .
