Ayala Levin earns Graham Foundation grant for research project, "How to be Rural"

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design's Ayala Levin has been honored by the Graham Foundation with a 2025 Grant to Individuals, announced in June. Levin earned the grant for her research project "How to be Rural? American Planning in Africa and the Global Project of Modern Rurality, 1960s–1970s." Levin's project is one of the 42 awardees in the Graham's Grants to Individuals this year, selected from over 600 submissions.

Levin's "How to be Rural" project reframes conventional accounts of Third World urbanization by directing attention to the entangled phenomenon of ruralization, or the modernization of the countryside. By analyzing the planning and design of villages, agricultural campuses, and capital cities sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations, and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Levin critically examines how US planners sought to curb urban migration in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania in the 1960s–70s. The reorganization of rural-urban relations entailed the physical transformation of fields, bodies, and the built environment, as well as a conceptual shift—the eradication of colonial precepts that associated modernity and social mobility exclusively with the city. By situating American expertise in a relational network that capitalized on Southern expertise, and included a range of African institutions and actors, this work recenters Africa in a global network of knowledge-production on rural modernity.

Here at UCLA AUD, Levin is an associate professor of architectural history. She is also a board member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. Levin’s work explores architecture and urban planning in postcolonial African states with a focus on the production of architectural knowledge as part of north-south and south-south exchange. She is the author of Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022); and coeditor of Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022); as well as the Journal of Architecture special issue on the Modern Village (2018).

Learn more via the Graham Foundation's announcement.