Kevin Kudo-King explored strategies for immersive design at the intersections of site, craft, and collaboration.

London, an undisputed global city, is well known for having some of the world’s most expensive housing but also boasts a substantial amount of low-cost social and affordable housing. This talk sketches the historic roots of affordable housing in London, explains how it is currently built and operated, and explores current political and practical challenges—some of which are shared by Arizona cities despite their very different contexts.

The Western Planner organization has named CAPLA Associate Professor Ladd Keith its 2025 Planner of the Year, honoring his pioneering leadership in climate-responsive planning and community resilience across the American West.

A team of Master of Science in Urban Planning (MSUP) students at CAPLA received the Arizona APA’s Best Student Planning Project Award for their capstone, “Community Investment Strategy Toolkit for the City of South Tucson.”

Professor P. Bryan Heidorn is the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Information Science. This talk is a bird’s-eye view of the AI and machine learning landscape and its implications for academia.

Led by faculty member Brian Bidolli, the CAPLA Study Abroad program “Cities of the Future: Japan” combined classroom learning with site visits in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Students explored smart cities and sustainable urban development through lectures, professional meetings, cultural excursions, and visits to cutting-edge institutions. The program offered an immersive experience that connected theory with practice while deepening students’ global perspective on planning and design.

CAPLA Master of Landscape Architecture students Ashley Danforth and Xavier Fernandez are leading a $45,000 grant-funded project to advance sustainable stormwater solutions on campus. Through research, collaboration, and community outreach, their work will create a campus-wide database of green stormwater infrastructure to help address challenges like drought and extreme heat.

Ladd Keith, director of the University of Arizona’s Heat Resilience Initiative and a leading national expert on heat planning, has been appointed to Governor Katie Hobbs’ new Workplace Heat Safety Task Force. In this role, he will help develop science-based, equitable guidelines to protect Arizona’s workers from the growing risks of extreme heat.

CAPLA Associate Professor Philip Stoker is advancing research on heat resilience with a new study highlighting how residents of mobile and manufactured housing in Arizona’s urban areas face heightened vulnerability to extreme heat due to limited access to vegetation and land ownership.

Housing affordability continues to be a critical issue in the United States. Meagan Ehlenz's research explores the potential for scaling shared equity homeownership (SEH) as a strategy to address Arizona’s growing housing affordability crisis.

DUST architects explored how the American Southwest’s desert landscape inspires their work, shaping memory, creativity, and a deep sense of belonging. Its beauty and isolation offer space for reflection and connection to broader human experiences.

Heather Whiteman Runs Him is a citizen of the Apsaalooke/Crow Nation. She is the Director of the Tribal Justice Clinic and Associate Clinical Professor at University of Arizona Rogers College of Law where she also teaches courses on tribal water rights, tribal courts, and tribal law.