She is also the founding Director of cityLAB, an award-winning think tank that explores design innovations in the emerging metropolis. In early 2017, cityLAB celebrated its tenth anniversary with a major exhibition at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles.

Since receiving her PhD in Architecture from University of California Berkeley, she has published and lectured widely about urban design, spatial justice, the architectural profession, affordable housing, and embedded computing. She is author of several books, including The Provisional City (MIT Press, 2002) about housing in Los Angeles, Architecture: The Story of Practice (MIT Press, 1992), and Fast-Forward Urbanism (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011).

She leads a major, multi-year program at UCLA called the Urban Humanities Initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The program focuses on design, urbanism, and humanist perspectives in Pacific Rim megacities and is the subject of a book she authored with her colleagues titled Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, (MIT Press, 2019).

At the request of California Congressman Richard Bloom, she co-authored a bill that became law in 2017 to permit “backyard homes” or granny flats on all single-family properties, virtually doubling the density of the suburbs throughout the entire state. Ten years of research as well as several design prototypes led to this policy innovation, which has deep implications for housing affordability and impacts over 8 million residential properties.