Landscape Justice: Spatial Politics of Homelessness with Jared McKnight

UCLAx SCASLA is proud to present this exclusive virtual talk with Jared McKnight, Senior Associate & Landscape Designer at WRT and Chair of the ASLA SoCal Emerging Professionals Committee. Jared will share insights from his ongoing research project, Criminalized for their very existence: The Spatial Politics of Homelessness, which began as his capstone project in USC's MLA program and has since earned national recognition.

This talk examines how landscape architects and urban designers can challenge systems of isolation and exclusion through thoughtful design interventions and policy analysis. Jared’s years of research provide a unique lens into this pressing issue, offering actionable insights for creating more inclusive public spaces.

There will be time for Q&A at the end of his presentation, making this a great opportunity to connect and learn from an inspiring leader in the field of landscape architecture.

Speaker and Talk Details:

Jared Edgar McKnight is a senior associate and designer at WRT (Wallace Roberts & Todd), a landscape architecture, planning, urban design, and architecture firm based in Philadelphia and San Francisco. He also serves as chair of the ASLA SoCal Emerging Professionals Committee. Based remotely in Los Angeles, Jared works across WRT's disciplines and conducts research within WRT and with USC's Landscape Justice Initiative. His professional work and research focus on projects that support both environmental and social resilience through community engagement and design interventions that challenge the structures isolating and excluding communities and ecosystems, with an empathic lens that considers those whose voices and identities are not often heard or designed for.

Jared’s research explores the explicit and implicit nature of policy in design, examining the systems of rules, codes, and ordinances that govern human behaviors in civic spaces in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Through a deep investigation into the Los Angeles Municipal Code and the complexity of regulations found across numerous chapters, articles, and sections of the code targeting individuals simply because they lack shelter, his work reorganized the categories of regulations to better understand their spatial implications, finding that almost every instance of one’s daily life and routine is punishable while unhoused.

This ongoing research project, Criminalized for Their Very Existence: The Spatial Politics of Homelessness, is a four-year research endeavor that began as Jared’s capstone project in USC's MLA program. The work received the ASLA National Student Award of Excellence in Research, and Jared was additionally recognized as a Landscape Architecture Foundation National Graduate Olmsted Scholar Finalist.

Since graduating from USC in 2021, Jared has continued the work through the USC Landscape Justice Initiative, thanks to grants from the Landscape Architecture Foundation, Pando Populus, and USC, and partnerships with the LA Mayor's Office of City Homeless Initiatives (MOCHI) and local organizations such as the LA LGBT Center, Downtown Women’s Center, Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Poverty Department, and LA Community Action Network, seeking to understand the experience of unhoused individuals in “public” space. More recent tracks of this research, supported by a research grant at WRT, have expanded to Philadelphia, where Jared and a team of researchers have been exploring federal data collection methods that form the baseline of the national understanding of the number of people experiencing homelessness.

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