Architecture + Advocacy in L.A.’s Sugar Hill

A group of architecture students at the University of Southern California wants to do more than just design buildings. They want to work with communities to “un-design” spatial injustice and leverage the power of residents in shaping their neighborhoods.

In this episode, producer Willa Seidenberg talks with students Reily Gibson and Kianna Armstrong about L.A.’s Sugar Hill, a very important neighborhood cut in half by construction of the I-10 Freeway. A nonprofit they co-founded, Architecture + Advocacy, worked with neighborhood partners on a community celebration and a design-build project.

Reily and Willa walk and talk about Sugar Hill’s history and legacy of activism, and Kianna shares how a new generation of architecture students is using heritage conservation (even if they don’t call it that) to help neighborhoods affected by structural racism and gentrification.