Kian Goh
@kiangoh
Followers
14,474
Following
6,101
Media
1,097
Statuses
20,389
Architect & urban planning prof @UCLA . Urban change & climate justice. Assoc dir @ChallengeIneq . 2022-23 @the_IAS . Author Form & Flow (MIT 2021)
Los Angeles, CA 🏳️🌈
Joined March 2009
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
بايرن
• 518886 Tweets
موناكو
• 501072 Tweets
Wizkid
• 281920 Tweets
Davido
• 258507 Tweets
Supreme God Kabir
• 132451 Tweets
からくりサーカス
• 108777 Tweets
#BrightestStarBangChan
• 101129 Tweets
#우리의_찬란한_청춘_방찬에게
• 100161 Tweets
Universidad Pública
• 84276 Tweets
Doug Emhoff
• 58278 Tweets
青木選手
• 58001 Tweets
Shakira
• 49729 Tweets
SPILL THE FEELS TRACK LIST
• 43596 Tweets
CHAE X JESBIBLE
• 43157 Tweets
Shana Tova
• 36797 Tweets
Gago
• 32508 Tweets
Cassper
• 31316 Tweets
Rosh Hashanah
• 30239 Tweets
KARIME EN HOY
• 28042 Tweets
Centro Carter
• 27003 Tweets
GALA EN HOY
• 26756 Tweets
שנה טובה
• 24079 Tweets
Lille
• 22726 Tweets
センラさん
• 17027 Tweets
Channie
• 13409 Tweets
ITZY IS THE MOMENT
• 10999 Tweets
Girona
• 10773 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
Today is publication day!!!
Beyond thrilled that my book Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice is out, published by
@mitpress
.
Grateful to mentors, collaborators, informants, friends & comrades who helped make this.
43
86
892
The violence at UCLA tonight is entirely one sided, a vicious assault on students in the Palestine solidarity encampment. I am incensed.
163
576
2K
The now-famed N95 mask owes its function and design to a precursor mask invented by Penang-born Chinese-Malaysian doctor Wu Lien-teh to fight a pneumonic plague outbreak in Manchuria in 1911. Then too he confronted anti-Asian racism.
16
1K
2K
OMG I'm tenured!!!
Damn. Well, if I haven't caused enough of a ruckus, now is the time.
104
8
1K
Just silliness. The Yale Beinecke Museum speaks to the craft, technology, and culture of its time basically the way any cathedral did. Its granite-clad Vierendeel truss structure and translucent marble panels as meaningful as any fan vault and stained glass tracery.
The mantra of the 20th century was to say that ornamentation has no purpose, so get rid of it.
But ornaments assign ordinary things meaning. They speak to the tradition or craft that produced it...
71
402
14K
29
63
1K
The thing about windowless rooms is it's not a design issue - we can design cool windowless room for any floor plan. It's that we rely on code minimums to protect the health and welfare of the most marginalized in an unjust, unequal society.
21
110
1K
It’s here!!! 😮😮🤩🤩😭😭
I can’t quite believe I’m holding actual copies of my book in my hands. Feels amazing and surreal and overwhelming.
Thanks thanks thanks to so many people who helped make this happen. I have to go sit down a bit. 🌆🌊📙
45
47
961
"The city!" exclaimed the toddler, who is not yet damaged by critical urban theory.
4
60
957
The example is, like, the tiniest street in a protected world heritage site. There is nothing sustainable about this. It's a highly regulated museum space enabled by the political economy of the urban region and global travel.
This is what a walkable, sustainable, and productive place looks like. To build this in America, we need to ban minimum lot size mandates, parking mandates, and density restrictions, then legalize and incentivize the development of mixed-use, multifamily housing for everyone
251
1K
15K
40
67
920
Too much of what we think about urban planning is from just one book about Robert Moses and one book by Jane Jacobs.
24
74
856
I'm just a girl, standing in front of a colonial-era city square full of boy urbanists somewhere in Europe, imploring them to think about the political economy of place.
17
49
755
As far as I can tell Berkeley the land grant university preceded anything we might remotely understand to be Berkeley the city & everything we associate with Berkeley now only makes sense because of the university. Bonkers for anyone there to think they exist outside that sphere.
16
37
637
Want to "disrupt" housing and build community? Imagine if you gave $350M to organizers developing community land trusts.
25
74
510
Somehow there is this notion that if not for cars and zoning cities would be perfect.
45
25
472
My partner is Japanese, and pregnant. We are too scared for her to walk the dog on her own right now. I am beyond incensed.
13
14
461
It's so telling that developers can leave a building unfinished and abandoned for years and it's only about "vandalism" and "neglect" when artists tag it. The real vandalism is unfettered and irresponsible private development.
34
105
445
This idea that cities used to be swell and happy places until someone invented zoning and public meetings is truly something.
24
36
436
This should make us think not only of the state of infrastructure but our ways of life dependent on excessive making and transporting of things. The Dali carries 2.5x the volume of 1980s Panamax ships, once a standard of globalized economies of scale. The biggest ships carry 5x.
12
106
441
NIMBY/YIMBY is a barren framing. Or at least at this point an uninteresting one.
40
36
405
I went into urban research partly because architectural practice didn't offer time & space to delve into the pressing questions I had about cities. Now, quite deep into this, I'm wondering whether urban research & practice pays enough attention to the possibilities of design.
15
30
373
Urban planning and policymaking aren't simply about what the market will bear. They're about - or ought to be about - what kind of cities we want.
7
67
360
I know folks love this kind of thing because it presumes there's a better way if only we had not strayed from a "natural" path. But humans don't naturally create anything. It's all socionatural. Things that seem like "nature" transformed in and through specific social conditions.
18
34
348
The devastation of California's fires and climate change should compel us to rethink our ideals of house and home. My article in
@thenation
is intended to broach necessary conversations about our obsession with ownership and property.
130
119
342
It is simply *rich* of Senator Feinstein to write this oped after dismissing the Green New Deal and the young activists who fight for it.
14
75
338
I'm miffed that anyone would think that architecture was ever simply explained in "plain" language or just about "the building." It's *always* been about the manipulation of power and meaning of society and space. And we need explanatory frameworks for these.
6
30
321
Public housing should be the best housing available (which is NOT, dare I say, the biggest, grandest, or most extravagant) and should be accessible to everyone except maybe the 15-20% wealthiest unless with a hefty tax premium.
2
39
312
Total travesty. Again the foreclosing of possibilities of urban life, again under some tortured guise of safety.
The motion to ban poor people from having bikes has passed with a 11-3 vote. Only
@mikebonin
@nithyavraman
@CurrenDPriceJr
voting no.
You can’t be poor in public in Los Angeles
51
494
1K
6
77
300
Urbanists: Young people want dense, walkable cities!
Voices of this generation, offered the chance to express their fantasies, desires, and self-reflections, sincerely, ironically, or otherwise: Actually... 📷🧵
Olivia Rodrigo, "Drivers License"
181
20
299
Love this place especially when it’s wet. LA River after the rain.
9
30
300
I told you NIMBY/YIMBY is a barren framing. Now we can’t have conversations about iconic, problematic urban thinkers without resorting to inadequate binary categorization and simplistic disses.
12
32
297
Hmm
#fullbyforty
? I started my PhD at 37, after 12 years working as an architect encountering questions on cities, ecology, and inequality I research now. Empowering women in academia is critical, but age or speed are not measures of academic achievement (or effective research).
3
16
292
A PhD student in class today, after reading and discussing some formative design works and texts by Howard, Corbusier, Wright, and McHarg: "So, designers really don't think about power, do they. I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad."
6
36
278
Just a month until my book comes out! Can't wait to have this, 8 years in the making, out in the world.
Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice
From
@mitpress
14
34
267
Honestly I think some urbanists are missing the point of the right wing anti-15-minute city uproar. It's not about not wanting to have your pain au chocolat a short walk away, it's about the utter fear and rejection of centralized planning.
17
24
267
One night after students in the UCLA Palestine solidarity encampment were attacked by a mob and left to fend for themselves, armed police are sent in, continuing the assault. Students fighting for freedom and justice are the moral core of a university. We have failed them. Shame.
2
71
263
Peeps! Thrilled to say that I'll be spending the next academic year at
@the_IAS
in Princeton NJ. I'll be working on a new research project on cities and global climate justice. Excited to have time and space to devote to ongoing and new preoccupations.
23
9
258
This should dismantle any notion that we have a *healthcare* system in the US. We have a medical product delivery and accounting system propped up by some great nurses, doctors, and researchers.
We need a universal public healthcare system and above-livable minimum wage.
0
2
36
5
65
246
This is enraging and disappointing on so many levels. Architecture needs not to look for different genius stars but rather dismantle the notion that idolized individuals design and build anything at all on their own.
7
32
247
But unquestioned invocations of climate-friendliness to push for deregulation, market development, and economic growth is basically ideological, and could actually make things worse by amplifying the primary factors of higher carbon emissions.
30
31
241
If the Pritzker Prize turned exclusively to recognizing collaborative architecture practices that spent a career building interesting takes on social housing I think that would be okay.
5
13
245
Listened to an interview with Jane Goodall and she said, paraphrased, We need to address poverty because poor people destroy the environment.
This is why, even with esteemed scientists, we need activists for and theorists of climate justice.
7
20
239
Can architectural style ever be separated from social context? I don't think so.
2
17
225
For real?? Supertalls are not a form of housing. They're a form of exorbitant structural engineering, vertical circulation technology, facade materials innovation, and global capital.
11
14
228
I could not be more thrilled to join
@ChallengeIneq
, a research center committed to building change from movements up, as Associate Faculty Director! Looking forward to developing projects and programs around urban climate justice.
🔥Prof.
@kiangoh
joins
@ChallengeIneq
as Associate Faculty Director!🔥🔥
Goh has worked closely w/activists and organizers who struggle for social, economic, and environmental justice and will continue this line of research w/a focus on climate & power>>
2
10
82
27
7
226
Any serious discussion of climate change and the built environment needs critical planning and urban studies.
9
27
224
I got hassled for taking this photo at the supposedly "public" Privately Owned Public Space atrium at Park Avenue Plaza. Security guy, when I objected, said it was for the safety of the tenants. Guess who's a tenant here? Next post...
14
13
222
By and large a society that believes in worth and wealth through individual home ownership and rising property values doesn't believe in affordable housing.
4
40
214
Whatever happens in days to come, what is already too clear is that too many people simply do not mind mass dehumanization, mass wanton death, and selling off the future of the planet.
1
39
217
It would be a productive change if commentaries on the city would look more to urban studies - and those who actually study the city - rather than almost exclusively to economists and real estate professionals.
5
30
217
"Inmate" is the 9th most common household type in the US, which is quite fucked up. There are more "inmate" "households" than a parent and two kids ones.
There were 4,708 household types in the U.S., based on the 2021 American Community Survey. Here's the 40 most common.
12
66
261
2
79
212
I miss the times when architectural floor plans were discussed and debated not as singular, disembodied layouts meant to stretch and squeeze personal and institutional finances but as ideas about public and private life, society and family, collectives in the city.
5
23
214
This oft-cited study by Christopher Jones, Stephen Wheeler &
@dan_kammen
@CoolClimateNw
- also linked to in the Krugman piece - specifically says that *income* is the biggest driver of carbon footprints, far more than density.
17
31
202
Architects will tweet excitedly about their 3d printers making face shields but not about how their buildings and landscapes are sites of protest, brutality, incarceration.
Still nothing from
@SHoPArchitects
about the centrality that the urban space they designed seems to play in the Brooklyn iterations of protest and brutality.
7
7
93
1
48
210
If sam d 1995 were a phd student of mine I would ask why he thinks Berlin and Minneapolis are comparable.
left-NIMBY policies have caused rent prices to skyrocket in Berlin while YIMBY policies have been a massive success at keeping rents affordable in Minneapolis
at the end of the day, the only way to keep rents affordable is to fix zoning and allow housing to be built
28
229
2K
60
9
200
This is something
@aldatweets
has also been stressing. Density in itself is an inadequate factor. It's consumption, inequality, political economy.
6
31
202
Blocking students from graduating after four years of studies because they're protesting clear and ongoing atrocities is craven and small minded.
5
37
200
Taking down freeways won't change racist urban development systems. Racist systems informed the building of freeways, certainly, and they will dictate the building of anything in their place.
4
51
200
Smash the system. Or at the very, very least give poor people decent housing.
2
10
190
Just out: my article "Planning the
#GreenNewDeal
: Climate Justice & the Politics of Sites & Scales" cites
@AOC
& the woke state to explore how climate change & a political-environmental movement invite new concepts of urban justice. In JAPA
@APA_Planning
3
52
188
I'm so moved by this powerful letter by Jewish faculty and staff at UCLA. My colleagues affirm their support for a ceasefire in Gaza and full amnesty for the students who took part in the Palestine solidarity encampment protest.
0
59
190
In their "manifesto" for urban political ecology, Heynen, Kaika & Swyngedouw call for the radical democratic control & organization of socioenvironmental processes in cities. This is the opposite of that.
5
17
187
Serious question: has anyone who IDs as an urban planner here ever done a burnout or donut?
30
11
184
20 years after architecture school, steeped in highbrow architectural discourse, and now 8 years of moving "away" to urban research, I think more than ever that it is a political imperative for architects and urban designers to design and build cool shit.
5
10
188
Unbelievable. What does it mean when the most prominent cultural-historical institution, the biggest holder of artifacts stolen from Black and Brown people around the world across centuries, expresses solidarity like this? What does accountability even look like?
1/4 ‘The British Museum stands in solidarity with the Black community throughout the world. Black Lives Matter.’ – Director Hartwig Fischer
Read Hartwig’s thoughts and response here:
775
192
589
2
45
185
Today is a good day to celebrate Boston City Hall, one of the most beautiful and ardently civic buildings downtown.
6
12
183
Not gonna lie, I'm beyond excited to give the
@IJURResearch
lecture at
@theAAG
! My talk "Planet at the End of the City: How Climate Changes the Nature of Urban Theory" is shaping up in a way that's pretty eye-opening to me. Please come tell me what you think!
9
25
183
This thread is sheer disinformation. Errant on every level.
From the 1920s to 1960s, a highly individualistic philosophy took over the world, codified itself, and usurped millennia of built heritage. We live in the remnants of it today. This philosophy, Modernism viewed the historic city as chaotic, unwieldy, and something to be destroyed
8
14
182
20
12
176
Critical urban studies in US high school curricula, please. I'll write the textbook too, if necessary.
8
15
175
Continually surprised at how little productive engagement there is between urbanism as a field of inquiry and design among architects and urban studies as a social science. Let's do it.
6
14
175
I actually do want socialized healthcare. And socialized housing. And socialized mass transportation. And socialized environmental infrastructure and regulations. Public planning, please.
1
14
168
Brutalism is not a style it's a sociospatial way of thinking and doing.
1
10
167
Cross laminated timber or community land trust I’m here for both your CLTs.
3
15
168
Evergreen if tongue-in-check (or not) reminder that the ways we think about how we live are socially constructed, and that the housing problem is, alongside a problem of politics, a problem of imagination.
Highrise of Homes by James Wines/SITE, 1981, via MoMA
0
19
168
So, what would you want to read and/or look at in a course on Urban Design Justice?
34
21
166
I stand with more than 250 colleagues at UCLA - including eminent scholars of justice, law, racism, colonialism, geopolitics & health sciences - to affirm our commitment to academic freedom and the right to speak about and protest for Palestinian lives.
1
34
167
I gave a talk in a Rem Koolhaas building. 25-year-old me would be floored. Present-day me is a bit impressed.
4
4
166
I'll say it now. If World Cup commentators in 4 years aren't prepared to talk about racialized property regimes, privatized urban development, native treaties, plantation history, and the cultural significance of cowboy hats I'm going to be pretty disappointed.
2
18
161
No one wants to hear this - seemingly including architects, weirdly - but there's little possibility that the path to climate and housing justice in the US doesn't run through a mass design movement of architects and we all need to be way more attentive and proactive about this.
5
16
161
Some of you are counting on basic decency when it’s all about power.
2
25
156
Love this headline and story. More urban planners in urban governance, please. Excited for
@nithyavraman
and her team.
1
10
157
My essay "Architecture and Global Ethnographies," for Dimensions of Citizenship
@USPavilion18
and
@e_flux
Architecture, explores "insurgent citizenship" in a time of social exclusion and global climate change.
2
37
152
Density and green-ness is a kind of rudimentary association, maybe even a trope, of urban sustainability now. There are many reasons to want more dense urban regions, including as part of a broader, concerted plan that foregrounds more just socioecological relationships...
4
16
148
Kate Wagner, as astute a commentator of the built environment as anyone, questions some cherished beliefs on here and people predictably go apoplectic.
3
18
149
It's funny I'm being called anti-density. I - an architect trained and steeped in Rem Koolhaas' S,M,L,XL and MVRDV's FARMAX, a child of 1980s urban Southeast Asia, a sense of cool too much formed by William Gibson's Bridge trilogy - I actually ❤️ density.
13
3
144