Rebecca Choi

Rebecca Choi
Presented with the HTC Forum
Part of the MIT Spring 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. 

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.

By reconsidering the Watts Urban Workshop’s architectural proposals for funding from President Johnson’s Model Cities Program, part of his 1964 War on Poverty, this microhistory outlines feasible architectural visions of reparations in 1970s Watts, Los Angeles. While most histories of the War on Poverty consider Johnson’s concept of “maximum feasible participation” as a driving force of self-help programming for poor communities to be more of a gesture than a call, a consideration of the Watts Urban Workshop’s goals to teach self-determination and community participation shows how Black practitioners were thinking about reparative futures in ways that have not been registered by architecture, urban planning, or history.
HTC Forum is made possible with the generous support of Thomas Beicher (PhD, 2004)

Rebecca Choi is an Assistant Professor of architectural history at Tulane University. Her research considers how movements for racial justice have had a pivotal role in the making of urban America. By focusing on social activism and community organizing as they relate to housing rights, land ownership and the city, her work considers protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and rebellions to be insurgent “hacks” in the ever-changing codes of an anti-Black world.

She is currently working on two book projects. The first, Black Architectures: Race, Pedagogy and Practice, puts oral histories into conversation with architectural archives and brings underexamined Black architectural producers to the surface of 20th-century history. The second, Swamp Life, examines how Black women have challenged the rigid categorization of space as habitable or uninhabitable by reclaiming swamplands as non-binary sites of survival across the Black Atlantic.