2024 Events

The Center for City Design hosts multiple events throughout the academic calendar. Please check back weekly to see the latest events.

Continuity & Conservation: Why Heritage Matters to Cities

JANUARY 23, 2024
1:00PM – 2:45PM
WAH B1 (WATT HALL BASEMENT)

Trudi Sandmeier in conversation with Karin Liljegren, JingboLou, and Susan Macdonald will discuss what counts as heritage in our cities and the role that continuity and conservation play in contemporary city-making.

Learn More | See Poster

Past Events

Housing: A Right or a Privilege

NOVEMBER 15, 2023
2:00PM – 3:30PM
ZOOM

The Center for City Design in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate Architecture Design Studios ARCH 302al + ARCH605a invites you to a two-part virtual discussion event.
Join professors Sascha Delz, Faiza Moatasim, Amy Murphy, and Hadrian Predock as they discuss the impact of economic, technological, and socio-cultural processes on the availability of comfortable and affordable urban housing.
They will explore questions like whose needs have been prioritized and overlooked in existing policies and paradigms of housing finance and development in the United States? How can we imagine affordable modes of housing based on innovative relationships between housing and finance, and new notions of work and life after the recent pandemic?
The second part of this event will be a student-led discussion, Housing: a Right or a Privilege?

See Poster

Beyond Property

NOVEMBER 2, 2023
2:00PM – 3:30PM
ZOOM

Sascha Delz in conversation with Kara Murray-Badal (Director of Housing Lab,Terner Center
for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley) and Kasey Ventura (Director of Organizing & Advocacy, Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust; Board Member, LA Co-op Lab, Los Angeles) will discuss innovative forms of property and tenancy that address housing insecurity in our cities onThursday, November 2, 2023, from 1:00-2:30pm

See Poster | Zoom Recording

Demystifying Housing

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023
2:00PM – 3:30PM
ZOOM

The Center for City Design in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate Architecture Design Studios ARCH 302al + ARCH605a invites you to a two-part virtual discussion event.
Join professors Sascha Delz, Faiza Moatasim, Amy Murphy, and Hadrian Predock as they discuss the impact of economic, technological, and socio-cultural processes on the availability of comfortable and affordable urban housing.
They will explore questions like whose needs have been prioritized and overlooked in existing policies and paradigms of housing finance and development in the United States? How can we imagine affordable modes of housing based on innovative relationships between housing and finance, and new notions of work and life after the recent pandemic?
The second part of this event will be a student-led discussion, Housing: a Right or a Privilege?

See Poster

Stories of Sugar Hill

MAY 6, 2023
10:00AM – 1:00PM
West Adams, Los Angeles, CA

Join Architecture + Advocacy, Street Poets Inc., Amazing Grace Conservatory, and USC Center for City Design for a day of food, art, and poetry to celebrate the past, present, and future of Sugar Hill. We will begin our neighborhood walk at 10:00am from Paul R. Williams’s designed First AME Church (2270 S Harvard Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90018).

Learn More | See Poster | Walk Route

Housing Justice

APRIL 18, 2023
1:00PM – 2:30PM
ZOOM

Erin McElroy (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) and Cynthia Strathmann (Strategic Actions For A Just Economy) will discuss what it means for housing to be just and share their experiences in resisting unjust evictions and forced displacement in Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. This teach-in will provide an opportunity to learn about institutional structures and extractive mechanisms that have turned housing into a commodity and how we can address housing injustices in our cities.  

Learn More | See PosterZOOM

Border Walk

NOVEMBER 18, 2022
12:00PM – 1:00PM
ZOOM

The second part of this event will be a (virtual) discussion on Friday, November 18, 2022, from 12:00-1:00pm. Please use the Zoom meeting link to join the discussion: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97173746008

Learn More | See Poster | ZOOM

The Center For City Design @ USC Architecture was founded in 2022 to advance research and design that address spatial precarity in our cities

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