Faiza Moatasim, PhD
Director, OUR-Lab and Asst Prof of Urbanism and Urban Design
Email: moatasim@usc.edu Twitter: @FaizaMoatasim
Faiza’s work focuses on how underprivileged communities meet unfulfilled spatial needs in contemporary cities and how spaces of dispossession and inequity—often at the margins of architectural discourse and practice—are produced and sustained. Her teaching and research emphasize how the agency of individuals and communities in the shaping of their urban built environments—using their personal resources and political connections—is integral to our understanding of the planning, functioning, and everyday lived experiences of cities around the world.
Vicenta Martinez Govea
Research Assistant
B.A Architecture + Ethnic Studies, University of San Diego, San Diego M.Arch. Candidate, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Vicenta’s interests are in race and architecture, specifically how racial housing practices and policies have created exclusive and inclusive urban spaces within cities. Her work traces design’s role in mitigating the legacy of institutional and structural racialized housing segregation on marginalized low-income communities of color. Working with Faiza, Vicenta assists with multiple tasks- including interviewing street vendors who create informal market spaces within neighborhoods that have historically excluded them. She is interested in understanding how marginalized people respond today to the effects of racial housing segregation and make spaces at the hands of displacement.