Hilary Malson is a planning and geography scholar whose research focuses on grassroots planning histories, Black life, housing justice, migration and displacement, suburban studies, and community building. For her dissertation, she is researching the ongoing displacement and dispersal of Black Angelenos to the Inland Empire, the Antelope Valley, and the High Desert, and is analyzing how placemaking and community development might be reframed through a regional-scale, diasporic lens. Since 2017, she has stewarded and supported numerous initiatives of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities (HJUC) research coordination network, an NSF-funded program of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. In keeping with her commitment to public scholarship, she co-edited and coordinated the publication of numerous HJUC open access publications, including Housing Justice in Unequal Cities and the Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide (English / Español).

Hilary holds more than a decade of experience working in public history (Smithsonian, National Trust, Monument Lab), community development (Mt. Airy CDC), and community organizing in D.C. and Los Angeles. She earned a BA from Haverford College in the Growth and Structure of Cities program at Bryn Mawr College, and studied geography at the London School of Economics, where she earned a MSc in Urbanization and Development (Distinction). She is presently a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, an editorial board member of Critical Planning Journal, and an advisory board member of the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action. Additionally, she has worked as a Teaching Associate in the Public Affairs (undergrad) and Urban Planning (graduate) programs, and is an affiliate of the Southern California Library, the UCLA Black Feminism Initiative, and the UCLA Urban Sociology Working Group.

Recent publications:

• Malson, Hilary (2021). “Book Review – Public Los Angeles: A Private City’s Activist Futures,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (3): 525-526. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.13020.
• Malson, Hilary and Gary Blasi (2020). For the Crisis Yet to Come: Temporary Settlements in the Era of Evictions. Los Angeles: UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tk6p1rk.
• Roy, Ananya, Hannah Appel, and Hilary Malson (2020). “Towards Justice: A Communique from Los Angeles,” Radical Housing Journal 2 (1): 163-172. https://radicalhousingjournal.org/2020/towards-justice/.
• Malson, Hilary (2020). “Black Study and Abolition,” in The Black Agenda Report. https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-black-study-and-abolition-5.