The third and final quarter of the Urban Humanities core curriculum comprises design research-oriented capstone courses. We offered three distinct capstone courses focusing on spatial justice in the overarching themes of migration, erased Black histories, and Transportation Inequalities in Los Angeles.
Maite Zubiaurre and Gustavo Leclerc led the capstone El Muro que Migra/The Wall that Migrates led by Maite Zubiaurre and Gustavo leclerc, which focuses on immigration in the Westlake neighborhood in Los Angeles and the city of Tijuana.
Dana Cuff and Todd Presner’s capstone, Whitewashing the Beach: Reconstructing the Past to Claim Alternative Futures, explored how cities contain invisible, repressed, and inscribed palimpsest of their situated cultural, racial, and political histories and how the histories of Black and Indigenous people and people of color have been erased from collective view.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris taught Exposing Freeway Inequalities. The capstone looks at how the American freeway disproportionally negatively affected minority and working-class neighborhoods. The capstone project critically examines the history of freeways in minority neighborhoods to identify their physical, social, economic, environmental, and political impacts.
