UCLA AUD Fall 2025 Events: “Architecture and the Right to Housing in Los Angeles”: Julie Eizenberg and Ananya Roy, with Dana Cuff and Karen Kubey

October 20, 2025, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

This panel discussion will explore how the right to housing—in Los Angeles and globally—isn’t just a political, legal and economic issue, but also an architectural one. What does the right to housing mean in practice? And how can designers contribute? Moderators Dana Cuff (cityLAB UCLA) and Karen Kubey (University of Toronto) will be joined by architect Julie Eizenberg and Professor of Urban Planning Ananya Roy to discuss these urgent questions and examine promising housing models, laying the groundwork for ways forward.

"Architecture and the Right to Housing in Los Angeles" is convened by cityLAB UCLA, UCLA AUD, and Karen Kubey of the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab. This lecture is part of a Pan-American series funded by the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with additional programs in Mexico City, Toronto, New York, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. Generous support also comes from the Irving Grossman Fund in Affordable Housing, cityLAB UCLA, and Untapped.

Dana Cuff, Professor at UCLA AUD, engages spatial justice and cultural studies of architecture as a teacher, scholar, practitioner, and activist. Her leadership in urban innovation is widely recognized both in the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, Cuff founded cityLAB, a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities. In 2019, cityLAB expanded its social and political engagement by creating coLAB in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, in long-term partnership with community organizations. cityLAB represented the United States at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, was featured on CNN and in Newsweek magazine, and was named one of the top four urban think tanks in the country by Architect Magazine. The lab’s “housing first” research demonstrates that affordable, well-designed housing and neighborhoods are attainable foundations of equitable cities. cityLAB has developed sustainable, high-performance, low-cost housing prototypes for infill sites ranging from backyards to schoolyards. In 2017, after a decade of research that included a full-scale demonstration house built on the UCLA campus, Cuff co-authored California State legislation, effectively opening 8.1M single-family lots for secondary rental units.

Karen Kubey is a New York- and Toronto-based urbanist specializing in housing design and spatial justice. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Kubey co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity (now Open Architecture/New York) and co-founded and led the New Housing New York design competition. Holding degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Kubey began her career as a designer of below-market housing. She has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, MacDowell, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and has completed a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, Kubey has taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia GSAPP and was a 2019-20 Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon. She convenes the American Institute of Architects Right to Housing Working Group.

Julie Eizenberg, FAIA, LFRAIA, is Founding Partner of KoningEizenberg and brings design vision, leadership, and expertise to the firm’s people oriented design approach. She is an astute observer leading investigations that reshape the way we think about conventional building typologies. Her focus on the user experience whether it is an individual, underserved community or the public at large brings an empathetic perspective that translates seemingly mundane programs into places of ease and generosity. Julie teaches and lectures around the world, served on many boards including Public Architecture and From Youth Inside films. She was awarded the AIA | LA chapter Gold medal in 2012, Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2019 and the American Academy of Arts & Letters Architecture award in 2021. In 2020, Julie was honored as a Design Leader in Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Awards.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Roy is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Roy strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.