Unhoused, Unseen: The (In)visibility of Homelessness in “Public” Space - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Recorded On: 10/10/2025

Codified spatial regulations criminalize one’s ability to live while unhoused. This research explores how social exclusion moves beyond the design of the physical realm to the design of data that determines policy. By exposing these invisible frameworks, we challenge who is recognized, receives support, and remains unseen in our landscapes.

Learning objectives:

Broaden perspectives of urban homelessness and gain understanding of how to incorporate empathetic approaches that center lived experiences into design practice.
Learn how codified spatial regulations, and the “public” spaces we design within them, disproportionately target and criminalize unhoused individuals.
Explore how designers can use their skillsets and agency to engage urban ecosystems beyond the built environment via policy discussions, resource networks, and data systems.
Discover methods for how multidisciplinary research and data analysis can be successfully incorporated to influence design practice and expand beyond traditional design work.

Jared Edgar McKnight, ASLA

Designer + Senior Associate

WRT

Jared Edgar McKnight is a Senior Associate + Designer at WRT (Wallace Roberts & Todd), a landscape architecture, planning, urban design, and architecture firm based in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Remote from Los Angeles, Jared works across WRT's disciplines, and conducts research through WRT and USC's Landscape Justice Initiative. Jared’s professional work, and research, focuses on projects that support both environmental and social resilience, through community engagement and design interventions that challenge the structures that isolate and exclude communities and ecosystems, with an empathic lens that considers those whose voices, and identities, are not often heard, or designed for.

Allison Nkwocha, ASLA

Landscape Designer

WRT

Allison Nkwocha is a Landscape Designer at WRT in Philadelphia. She is a National Olmsted Scholar Finalist with an academic background in both Landscape Architecture and Historic Preservation. Her professional work and research focus on how spatial experiences and memory overlap in cultural landscapes to create a sense of belonging.

Tanushri Dalmiya

Planner + Urban Designer

WRT

Tanushri is a graduate of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design program at Harvard University. With a profound commitment to designing an inclusive built environment, her work navigates the intersection of climate migration, systems thinking, civic engagement, and humanitarian innovation. As founder of a design practice in India, she brings an entrepreneurial mindset and critical thinking to her work, integrating capacity-building and participatory planning to empower marginalized communities at multiple scales. A storyteller at her core, Tanushri brings experience working across geographies from India, Chile, Uganda, and the U.S., using design to amplify voices and create resilient, community-driven spaces.