On March 1, the Spatial Justice Community Collaborative class under the direction of UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy joined with the Promise Institute for Human Rightsto host the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Soledad García Muñoz, special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights. During a presentation that built on research by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, six presenters affiliated with the class talked about their lived experiences, including the time some had spent living in homeless encampments such as one at Echo Park Lake that had been forcibly cleared by law enforcement two years earlier. García Muñoz and her colleagues, Daniel Norona and Paul Mora, then asked questions and spoke about the importance of such interactions to their mission to investigate allegations of human rights throughout the Americas. García Muñoz also viewed an altar that was built by the class to honor the large number of preventable deaths of unhoused residents in Los Angeles. And she engaged in conversation with panelists such as Jennifer Blake, whose artwork focuses on uplifting people like herself who have experienced homelessness.
“But it dawned on me that a really important foundational piece of work that was published one-half century ago, 50 years ago, was Marty Wach’s paper on accessibility,” said Cervero during a Feb. 28 presentation in honor of his former urban planning mentor and colleague. “And why don’t I wrap my talk … around the theme of that paper and try to show how it really shaped my own research in this field and, I would suggest, generations of other people as well.”
Titled “Physical Accessibility as a Social Indicator,” the article by Wachs and T. Gordon Kumagai continues to influence planning policy, said Cervero, who earned his doctorate in urban planning at UCLA in 1980 and joined UC Berkeley’s city and regional planning faculty, where he remained until 2016.
“The article really highlights a number of different contexts of which accessibility should really be an overarching principle that guides what we do in this field of urban planning and transportation,” Cervero said.
During introductory remarks, UCLA Luskin Professor Brian Taylor mentioned that the lecture was the first in the series to be presented without Wachs himself in attendance. The longtime urban planning scholar taught at both UCLA and UC Berkeley before his death in 2021. Members of the Wachs family, including his wife, Helen, were in attendance.
Presented in conjunction with the Luskin Lecture Series, Cervero’s talk was titled, “Accessibility, Social Equity, and Contemporary Policy Debates,” and he spoke about how the concepts put forth 50 years before still have relevance today, especially in regard to how access to transportation contributes to the well-being of people living in cities.
“Marty made the point with his co-author that this sensibility happens at multiple scales. It’s regional access to jobs or medical facilities, but it’s also at the micro-scale of ‘Do you have access to, say, a bus?’” said Cervero, who said he built on this notion in his own research about socioeconomic matching in terms of the realities of transportation access. A person might live in a transit-rich area, for example, “but if you’re in a wheelchair, and the buses don’t have wheelchair ramps, then you don’t have great transit access.”
In the 1970s, few scholars prior to Wachs had written about these types of human components to transportation access. “To me, it was truly revolutionary,” Cervero said.
For example, Cervero found that people living in central city neighborhoods often bear disproportionately higher costs for transportation services. Because they make frequent off-peak trips for necessities like groceries, they end up paying a lot more than affluent suburbanites taking fewer trips over longer distances.
The disparity also was apparent when he and other researchers looked at why people who seemed to have public transit options readily available to them choose to rely primarily on their vehicles instead.
“A lot of these individuals were people like working moms who had very complex travel patterns,” Cervero said. “They have a child to drop off at the child care center and then go to their job. They were taking vocational courses at night and had to get there at a time when public transit service was bad. They had split-shift weekend jobs when transit services are notoriously lousy. So, they need a car.”
In looking at the concepts articulated by Wachs so many years before, Cervero also found lessons that can be applied to some of today’s planning and policy debates. One example is the idea of a “15-minute city,” a place designed by planners to ensure that most people have ready access not just to work but to the other necessities of daily life within 15 minutes of their homes.
The idea is laudable, but it has its critics.
“If you really insist on this, you potentially stifle economic competition. Companies don’t want to thinly distribute activities everywhere,” said Cervero, as some in the audience of UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni nodded their heads in agreement. “So, this idea of a 15-minute city really runs in the face of what economists have long argued are important economic drivers towards the economic growth and performance of a city.”
In his career, Cervero has consulted on transportation and urban planning projects worldwide, including recently in Singapore. “They’ve come up with this idea of the 20-minute town and the 45-minute city. You can reach a lot of things within 20 minutes. But when it comes to employment, when it comes to going to see a sporting event or buying a car or going to a regional hospital with specialized medical care, that’s a 45-minute city. So, I think we’re getting a lot better articulation and sensible policy.”
During a Q&A session after his formal presentation, Cervero spoke with UCLA Professor Adam Millard-Ball and took questions from the audience. When asked to talk more about his global experience, he explained that much of the scholarly work to date has focused on urban life in the United States and Europe.
Some of today’s researchers focus on climate change impacts and how to find “a little more efficiency out of electric mobility or ridesharing or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, over the next 20 or 30 years, 80% to 90% of urbanization is not going to happen in the Global North. It’s going to be in south Asia and Africa, and whatever happens there is going to swamp any and everything we do here, particularly in the rates of carbon emissions and so forth.”
In the developed world, the focus is often on how to get people from the central cores to jobs in suburbia. That’s less true in places like Mexico, South America, Indonesia and other parts of Asia.
“It’s a totally different landscape. Most of the poor are not in cities but in far-flung suburbs or towns. When you’re talking about lack of access, it’s a two- to three-hour, one-way daily commute,” Cervero said. “The amount of time and resources you have to invest is enormous just getting to and from where you need to be in order to have the earnings to cover basic needs.”
He was also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting rise in remote work.
“Historically, we think of physical proximity,” said Cervero, noting that when workers have highly specialized skill sets they depend on interactions in teams of people with other specialized skills to thrive.
“The whole idea of access being tied to location is being somewhat thrown around by all these rapidly evolving, powerful kinds of technological advances,” he said. “Technology is transforming. The notion of physical proximity as we all know it has long driven the idea of cooperation. But maybe it happens less.”
Established by students, the Wachs Lecture Series features prominent and innovative scholars and policymakers in the field of transportation. The UCLA Luskin Lecture series brings together scholars with local and national leaders to discuss solutions to society’s most pressing problems. This event was organized by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and Institute of Transportation Studies, for which Taylor has served as the director and Millard-Ball the interim director. Cervero was the director of UC Berkeley’s counterpart to ITS for many years.
The UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge has launched an initiative called TRACtion — for Transformative Research and Collaboration — that will bring UCLA scholars together with community stakeholders to address key topics related to sustainability: transportation, energy, water and ecosystems. The program will begin with a two-year series of activities and funding opportunities that will tackle the region’s seemingly intractable transportation challenges. Called Transforming Transportation in Los Angeles, this track will tap the expertise of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), which will work with community-based organizations and advocacy groups to identify barriers to a more equitable transportation system, then fund research to fill some of these gaps. TRACtion organizers held a Jan. 26 kickoff meeting that included California Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin, UCLA faculty from several disciplines, and community organizations engaged with transportation and environmental justice. “These are voices that will disagree and push each other,” said Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and acting director of ITS. “If we don’t make some people uncomfortable, I don’t think we’ve pushed people far enough.” He said it is critical that the effort encompass expertise from across numerous disciplines. Involving political scientists, for example, might illuminate how elected officials determine transportation policy; historians could help explain how the car has come to dominate transportation discourse; artists and designers could help ensure that solutions are shared with the public in engaging and culturally relevant ways. “Transportation equity and sustainability are too important to be left to transportation scholars alone, and we need these sophisticated, multidisciplinary perspectives,” he said.
UCLA’s Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (HHIPP) has been awarded a $1.4 million grant to strengthen and support its efforts to unite sex workers and their advocates with academic investigators, health care providers and social services agencies. Over a four-year period, the grant will benefit research and community-based programming for Sex Work LEARN (Lived Experience Affirming Research Network), a multisector alliance that does not presume sex work is a problem to be solved. The project will focus on transgender women with sex work experience who identify as Black, indigenous or other persons of color. Principal investigator Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, an adjunct professor and co-director of HHIPP, said collaborators will include Social Welfare doctoral students Kimberly Fuentes and Vanessa Warri, and the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Miyashita Ochoa said she is “thrilled to be working with” co-principal investigators Sophia Zamudio-Haas of UC San Francisco and Bamby Salcedo, a leader in the transgender rights movement and president of TransLatin@ Coalition. Other community partners are the Unique Woman’s Coalition and Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA). “I couldn’t be more proud of our research group and am so appreciative that UCLA Luskin will now serve as a home for this powerful collective,” Miyashita Ochoa said. Funding is from the California HIV/AIDS Research Program, which is awarding similar grants this year to four other research projects in California that center the voices of people affected by HIV.
Four professors associated with UCLA Luskin Social Welfare are among the top 100 contributors to social work scholarship, according to a recently released article in Research on Social Work Practice, a journal published by SAGE journals. Professor Laura Abrams, the current department chair, is listed as the 34th most-cited global contributor to social work scholarship in academic journals. Professors emeriti Duncan Lindsey (52), Robert F. Schilling (84) and Aurora P. Jackson (100) also made the list. “UCLA continues to be a hub for major contributions to the profession,” Abrams said. “I am honored to make the list, but even more importantly to move science toward actionable social change.” The top-cited scholar is Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University in Canada. The article, “Who are the Top 100 Contributors to Social Work Journal Scholarship? A Global Study on Career Impact in the Profession,” was written by David R. Hodge and Patricia R. Turner of Arizona State. They relied on a publicly available database of the world’s leading scientists and extracted all scholars in the social work category. Their ranking of researchers is based on a composite measure of scholarly impact that controls for self-citations and author order. In a summary of the study, the authors write, “Unfortunately, social work has relatively few mechanisms for recognizing major contributions to the profession. This study represents one step toward rectifying this concern within the domain of scholarship.”
In June 2022, UCLA Luskin announced the results of a groundbreaking analysis of the effectiveness of governments in more than 140 nations known as the Berggruen Governance Index, a collaborative project with the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute.
Four months later, an international who’s who of governance scholars came to UCLA or weighed in remotely to point out every possible flaw and shortcoming of the index they could find.
And that was exactly the point.
“The Berggruen Governance Index is an ambitious new approach that involves complex data structures and analyses,” said principal investigator Helmut Anheier, UCLA adjunct professor of social welfare and public policy, as well as the former president of the Hertie School in Germany, which also played a role in the report. “Therefore, it was important to invite leading experts on global data systems to come to the Luskin School to review and discuss the index.”
Joining other UCLA, Hertie School and Berggruen Institute representatives at the conference were scholars and data experts from global locations like Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Ghana and Great Britain, and U.S. institutions like Yale, Princeton, Notre Dame and Columbia. Over two days of presentations and panel discussions, they dissected the study methodology. They pondered whether a nation-level perspective is inherently superficial. And they discussed, sometimes in spirited language, whether the whole idea unfairly reflects a pro-democracy, pro-wealthy-nation Western bias.
“It was a very productive meeting that generated many important ideas,” Anheier said. “This was the first time that such a large and diverse groups of experts on global data and indicator systems met to explore how they can work together. The 2022 conference will certainly go down as a landmark event.”
The idea of measuring governance on a global scale is not new to academia, but the specific approach of the index is rooted in efforts at the Berggruen Institute that originated during a “chaotic and concerning time” for democracy in the U.S. and other parts of the world, said Dawn Nakagawa, executive vice president of the Berggruen Institute.
When the institute “began about a dozen years ago, it was with the idea that we will work on issues of governance, because governance matters,” said investor and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen during a Q&A with UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura during the conference.
“I grew up in Europe, then I came to America, and I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to travel the world,” Berggruen said. “One of the things that I learned is culture and governance really make a difference to how countries progress and how citizens fare within the countries.”
Berggruen, Nakagawa, Anheier and others directly involved in the project have come to realize that trusting the data can challenge preconceptions.
For example, one might presume the United States and other pro-democracy countries would do well in the analysis. And some do. But the index found a dramatic drop in the quality of government and quality of democracy in the United States over the past 20 years.
At the same time, some nations with less-democratic approaches showed measurable improvements in their provision of public goods like education, health care and environmental protection, particularly in Africa.
After reading the report and exploring the data in an online platform built expressly for that purpose, Berggruen saw that reality does not always match expectations.
“At the end of the day, we almost have to take our ideological hats off and say, ‘Let’s look at the reality of the data and whether governments deliver for citizens as a service.’ And you’ve seen that, in some countries, well, they’ve done better than we would suspect from simply an ideological standpoint.”
Berggruen told the 30 invited attendees to keep in mind that “governance is not just an idea, an ideology or a system of government. We’ve learned through the index how important it is not just to have principles of governance, but also the ability to translate that into reality. That means bringing the resources to a country to execute. That means administration. It means people. It means laws. And it means a culture
at the end.”
Berggruen thanked the assembled scholars for their diligence and their sometimes-blunt analysis. “Perfecting the index is a way we can, hopefully, help countries and governments better serve their citizens.”
Watch a video highlighting the conference and its purpose
Powerful experiences on some of the world’s great rivers deepened Jinglan Lin’s desire to shape the policies that affect the planet.
Two weeks rafting on the Colorado during high school led to summers volunteering on China’s Mekong. Now, she’s in the city on the Seine — Paris, where Lin is spending the year as part of the first group of students accepted to a unique dual-degree program pairing UCLA Luskin Urban Planning with the top European research university Sciences Po.
At the end of the two-year program, Lin will emerge with a master of regional and urban planning from UCLA and a master of governing the large metropolis from Sciences Po’s Urban School. Her concentration is environmental analysis and policy.
“The rafting trip was 14 days on the river without the internet, and it really changed me,” Lin recalled.
With her eyes opened to the beauty of the wild rivers and the environmental perils they face, she planned a course of study that led to the field of urban planning because, she said, “It’s the human activities in cities that are creating all these environmental problems.”
Lin is one of six students completing the dual-degree coursework in Paris after spending a year on the UCLA campus.
The selective program is just one of the study-abroad opportunities available at UCLA Luskin:
This year, public policy students can be found at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo.
Seven student fellows traveled to low- or middle-income countries or worked with international agencies in the summer of 2022 in association with Global Public Affairs, which is open to students from all of the School’s graduate programs. Founded in 2014, the Global Public Affairs program typically awards about 20 certificates to graduating master’s degree recipients each year. (Plans are in the works to expand the number of international-focused course offerings, with an associated increase in faculty who focus on global issues.)
And the Public Affairs undergraduate program encourages majors, pre-majors and minors to broaden their perspectives through the UCLA International Education Office. Over the summer, 15 UCLA Luskin undergrads completed internships in Argentina, Colombia, Great Britain, South Africa and Vietnam.
The new partnership between the Luskin School and Sciences Po — the UC system’s first graduate dual-degree program with a foreign university — grew out of a longstanding quarter-long exchange program that is still available to urban planning students.
“Students are able to experience two world-class programs, which are complementary and different, as well as two world cities, which are similar in their economic and world importance but totally different in terms of their ways of life,” said Michael Storper, a distinguished professor of urban planning who has appointments at both campuses.
“Over time, we will build deeper ties of teaching and research, and this will strengthen both of our universities.”
While Lin initially had qualms about joining the dual-degree program in its very first year, she could not pass up such a rare opportunity to immerse herself in two great metropolises.
Lin, whose hometown is Guangzhou, China, is no stranger to study abroad. She attended high school in Northern California and earned her bachelor’s in environmental analysis at Pitzer, one of the Claremont Colleges. As an undergrad, she completed an exchange program at Sciences Po and knew she wanted to return.
The Los Angeles and Paris experiences have been markedly different, Lin said. UCLA’s campus is largely self-contained, whereas attending Sciences Po’s Urban School takes her all around the city. The first-year course load is foundational and rigorous — students must satisfy MURP requirements in a single year. Her classes in Paris are emphatically global in scope, taught by professors with experience on several continents.
All instruction is conducted in English, but Lin is also studying French to fulfill a language requirement and better navigate the streets of Paris.
“I didn’t know what to expect coming into this program. But I did know that Sciences Po and UCLA already had robust planning programs,” Lin said. “I knew that, regardless, I would learn a lot.”
Professor Fernando Torres-Gil, director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging at UCLA Luskin, was elected as a 2023 fellow by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. The academy is dedicated to advancing social good through high-impact research, scholarship and practice, and its prestigious fellows program recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the field of social work and social welfare. Torres-Gil’s multifaceted career spans the academic, professional and policy arenas. He is a professor of social welfare and public policy whose research focuses on health and long-term care, disability, entitlement reform and the politics of aging. At the Center for Policy Research on Aging, established in 1997, Torres-Gil has directed studies into major policy issues surrounding Social Security, Medicare, long-term care, and the societal implications that accompany the aging of the baby boom generation and their children. His portfolio of public service includes presidential appointments in the Carter, Clinton and Obama administrations, several positions at the state and local level, and leadership posts at philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. A prolific writer, Torres-Gil has co-authored several op-eds, articles and books, including 2018’s “The Politics of a Majority-Minority Nation: Aging, Diversity, and Immigration.” Torres-Gil and 13 other fellows will be formally inducted at the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare’s annual conference in January. Previous fellows from the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty include Laura Abrams, Ron Avi Astor, Aurora Jackson, Stuart A. Kirk, James Lubben. Robert Schilling and the late Yeheskel “Zeke” Hasenfeld.
Professor Laura Abrams, chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, and Dean Jorge Delva of Boston University’s School of Social Work (BUSSW) are co-authors of a newly published journal article looking at the opportunities and obligations of social work research.
Published by the Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research, “Social Work Researchers: From Scientific Technicians to Changemakers” is a call to action for social work scholars to direct their efforts toward high-impact research that produces findings that can be applied in a timely manner to influence programs, policies or movements that improve the lives of the most marginalized and oppressed populations.
Abrams and Delva note that amid recent social tumult, global challenges and increased attention to racism and anti-Blackness, there has been an increase in demand for research that is both scientific and attentive to social, racial, economic and environmental justice.
They say, however, that an empirical push in social work research has resulted in “a focus on quantity over impact; undue emphasis on publishing in journals, often in non-social-work journals that have high impact factors but are separated from our practice community; engagement in ‘traditional’ modes of scholarship that do not necessarily challenge the status quo; and pursuit of NIH funding as an end in itself.”
The authors acknowledge the value of National Institutes of Health funding but write that the “narrow focus on NIH as an arbiter of a successful scholar … has also reinforced the top-down, parachuting type of research whereby researchers drop into a community, conduct their research and depart with little to no involvement by and impact on the community.”
Pushing toward evidence without a solid anchor to communities is a phenomenon that the authors attribute to pressures within academia to attain ever-greater funding, power and prestige — pressures fed by incomplete measures of success such as the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Delva and Abrams point to a paradigm shift, saying the next generation of social work scholars is ready for change. New momentum exists for the belief that current research practices function as tools of white supremacy, patriarchy and oppression, which is an idea advanced as early as 1968, when the National Association of Black Social Workers urged the National Conference on Social Welfare to publicly repudiate the welfare system.
Delva and Abrams say that social work must reach beyond the goal of implementing health research into practice and also wrestle with the root causes of social inequalities. In the same way that science alone could not have improved women’s lives without women’s rights movements, social science can only make an impact with communal support and momentum, the co-authors write.
Abrams, whose research centers on improving the well-being of youth and adults with histories of incarceration, joins Delva, the Paul Farmer professor and director of the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at BUSSW, in imploring academic leaders to make a more concerted effort to elevate and reward work based on public impact, community participatory research and social movements.
UCLA Social Welfare scholars from around the country returned to campus this week to recognize milestones in teaching and research over the past 75 years, as well as the work still ahead to advance justice in both academia and the broader society. The gathering of Social Welfare PhD students, doctoral alumni, faculty and staff, held at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center on the evening of Nov. 14, kicked off a yearlong commemoration of the Social Welfare program’s diamond anniversary. Professor Emeritus Rosina Becerra shared insights from her three decades in leadership positions at the university, including as dean of the School of Social Welfare in the 1980s and ’90s and later as vice provost of faculty diversity and development. Guests also heard from Karina L. Walters PhD ’95 MSW ’90 BA ’87, a professor of social work at the University of Washington and member of the Choctaw Nation, and Darcey H. Merritt PhD ’06 MSW ’03, associate professor at New York University and co-editor-in-chief of the research journal Children and Youth Services Review. Merritt will soon join the University of Chicago faculty as a full professor. Becerra, Walters and Merritt are distinguished scholars and also women of color, and they spoke of progress yet to be made to achieve full equity in the academy. The celebration of UCLA Social Welfare’s 75th anniversary will continue throughout the academic year, culminating on Saturday, May 6, with an alumni reunion and the annual presentation of the Joseph A. Nunn Alumnus of the Year award.
